Word: testing
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...seventh Chinese atomic test since Peking joined the nuclear club three years ago, the flash of a fireball last week lit up the desert around Lop Nor in northwestern China. It was the first test since last spring, when a Maoist mushroom cloud proved to the world that the Chinese had succeeded in the summa of atomic arts-building a hydrogen bomb. Bang No. 7 was far, far smaller, probably in the Hiroshima-bomb range of 20 kilotons. But it was no less menacing for being a minibang. Unless it was a partial dud-as Peking's unaccustomed silence...
...most outspoken critics of the S.A.T.s is Social Critic Martin L. Gross, a lecturer at Manhattan's New School for Social Research, who began his crusade against testing in 1962 with a book called The Brain Watchers. He calls S.A.T.s "the nail in the coffin of American intellectualism," since their emphasis on "certainty and right answers" makes test-taking ability "the criterion for college performance, and measures it badly." Gross and other critics deplore the pressure on students to score well on the tests. Many schools prep their students on the kind of vocabulary and mathematical skills tested...
...Guarantee. Doubts about the S.A.T.s are shared by many university admissions officers. Yale's Admissions Dean R. Inslee Clark Jr. is not impressed by "multiple-choice, fill-in-the-blank tests" as indices of a student's capability. The test scores, agrees Amherst Admissions Dean Eugene Wilson, "do not guarantee the presence of those human qualities and intellectual abilities we value most." Yale's Clark, as well as many Negro educators, feels that the tests' subtle orientation toward white middle-class values loads them against Negroes and other culturally deprived youths...
Fair Yardstick. The charge of bias on the S.A.T.s is an old one. Since they were instituted in 1926, educators have variously accused E.T.S. of loading them against girls, rural youths, and most of the country outside the Northeast; the Testing Service, in fact, spends about $500,000 a year on research to improve the exams. Although Negro students do less well on the S.A.T.s, College Board Official W. H. Manning argues that this merely "reveals the extent to which the disadvantaged person is cheated in his education." Any cultural bias in the exams, the testers add, reflects the fact...
Several Harvard players have missed practice this week because of illness. This could force more changes for to-nights can test...