Word: testing
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...JANUARY, 1970, Bowdoin College announced that it no longer required Scholastic Aptitude Test and Achievement Test scores from applicants for admission. The decision was widely understood to be one college's reaction against the dangerously heavy emphasis placed upon standardized tests in admissions offices throughout the country and few other colleges saw fit to follow suit. In the subsequent floor of correspondence from students, parents, teachers and administrators who had heard the news, Richard Moll, then director of Bowdoin admissions, received a note from an admissions colleague in New York: "Bowdoin will never amount to anything anyway, because your...
...currently involved in testing teachers, foreign service officers, CIA candidates, gynecologists, hospital finance managers, podiatrists, furniture warehousemen, stock brokers, architects and Peace Corps volunteers, to mention just a few. Not long ago ETS developed a "racially unbiased" test for people applying to the Philadelphia police force. The ever-broadening sphere of ETS influence, and the importance of ETS test scores in determining who does what in this country, is mind-boggling...
...spite of nagging questions about the reliability of ETS's three-figure quantifications of people's "aptitude," over-worked, understaffed admissions boards and personnel managers continue to rely upon test scores for an easy, quick, "objective" standard. In some parts of the country, state law now sets specific SAT and LSAT cut-off scores for admission to state universities. In the 1971 Federal court case of Baker et al. v. Columbus (Miss.) Municipal Separate School District et al., the court established that the Columbus school authorities' use of the National Teacher Exam (an ETS test) cut-off score...
...lesser scale, cheating and coaching call into question the validity of test scores as a reliable standard of measurement of "aptitude." For $150, the College Skills Center in New York offers a thirty hour course in vocabulary and reading comprehension and claims to improve students' scores by an average of 50 to 100 points. And rumor has it that for something upwards of $200 you can rent a Harvard Law student to take your law boards for you. ETS itself acknowledges about 2,000 cases of cheating each year--that it knows about...
...points between the median scores of black and white males on Law Boards. Some, including the folks at ETS, argue that the lower mean scores simply reflect inequalities in the educational system--differences in previous training. Executive Vice President Solomon insisted to Brill that the tests "have actually opened doors" to minorities and poor people. "With a national test you can compare the rich and the poor. If you do well, your score will show it, whether you're white or black or brown." And in a moment of candor, ETS President William Turnbull told Brill that criticizing...