Feb. 20--For an achievement test that's been around for 90 years, the SAT has been making a lot of news lately.
Earlier this month, the Illinois State Board of Education finalized its decision to enter into a three-year contract to administer the famed college aptitude exam -- free to all public high school juniors in Illinois -- marking a shift away from the ACT.
Next month, students nationwide will begin taking a redesigned, reconceptualized SAT that, among other changes, will no longer emphasize recondite, sesquipedalian vocabulary words such as "recondite" and "sesquipedalian."
And, finally, College Board, the private not-for-profit organization that administers the SAT, entered into a partnership with Khan Academy to provide free online SAT prep materials.
I mourn a bit over the diminished focus on rare, exotic vocabulary. "SAT words" were a thing in my youth, and I still have, at arm's reach on my desk at home, the handwritten list from which my best friend in high school and I quizzed one another as we prepared to do battle with those knotty analogy problems.
There's value in memorizing unusual words. They often contain roots that help you better understand the nuances of more common words, and knowing them can make you a better reader and more exact thinker.
Ben Zimmer, executive editor of Vocabulary.com and my go-to word nerd, is on board with the change. "It's best pedagogical practice to learn words in context, not on flash cards," he said in a recent interview. "So it's better to test students on more common words that can have multiple meanings depending on how they're used."
Zimmer sent along this new sample question from the free SAT-prep drills on his site:
" 'Investors clearly have faith that Super Mario's plan will work better.' In this sentence, 'faith' means:
A. Confidence
B. Piety
C. Fidelity
D. Ideology."
The answer is "A," though all four choices offer definitions found under the word "faith."
The animating idea is that a student who has read enough to recognize such distinctions is better prepared for college than a student who has memorized the meaning of, say, "temerarious" -- a $20 synonym for reckless that appears on my old study list but that, in the ensuing 40 years, I haven't (until just now) used or even encountered.
And I'm grudgingly OK with that.
I'm more enthusiastic, though, about the idea of free online test preparation programs and apps designed to give all students access to the kind of special help once available only to better-off students.
The history of the relationship between testmakers and the test-prep industry is "long and a bit tortured," said Aaron Lemon-Strauss, executive director of assessment preparation programs for College Board.
Students able to take special courses and buy practice books tended to score better, he said, "but for a long time we said that achievement gaps weren't our responsibility. Our responsibility was simply to make a fair test."
But with the decision two years ago to overhaul the SAT came College Board's decision to collaborate in the creation of an free program similar to the offerings of commercial test prep services.
The natural partner was Khan Academy, an educational nonprofit founded in 2006 on the idea that short, well-produced tutorial videos available at no cost could be an important supplement for students, particularly those in poorer circumstances.
"College Board came to us and said they wanted to do what they could to level the playing field," said Elizabeth Slavitt, Khan Academy's vice president of learner strategy and operations. "Trying to create an end-to-end digital solution for the problem of educational inequality was a first for us."
Slavitt said that Khan's prep program for the new SAT has logged more than 750,000 separate users since launching last year. One feature: Those who take the preliminary SAT -- the PSAT, generally taken the school year before the SAT -- can share their test papers with Khan Academy and get back a personalized program of study that focuses on their particular academic weaknesses.
Because targeted low-income students are less likely to have online access at home, College Board has simultaneously partnered with Boys and Girls Clubs of America to provide dedicated computers for test prep during non-school hours.
A spokesman for ACT Inc., which lost the bidding war for the Illinois public school contract, told me the company has no similar partnerships, though it recently launched ACT Online Prep, "free to low-income students who register for the ACT with a fee waiver."
Despite the obvious potential for such initiatives to disrupt their revenue model, two major commercial test prep companies I contacted did not sound concerned.
"We applaud College Board for realizing that test prep should be part of the equation," said Lee Weiss, vice president of college admissions programs for Kaplan Test Prep, in an interview last week. "But we've found that our families and students value live instruction, both face to face and online. The free services haven't cut into our business at all, and we're seeing triple-digit growth in the sale of our books."
Robert Franek, publisher of The Princeton Review, responded to my query with a statement that noted a recent uptick in enrollment related to "uncertainty and confusion" about the new SAT format. "Khan is an excellent resource for motivated students struggling with content," he said. "But for students to reach their best, competitive score, they need to learn strategy, too."
There are any number of words to describe any and all efforts to close the testing gap by providing extra help to disadvantaged students. Laudable. Meritorious. Creditable. Transcendent. Estimable. But in the spirit of the new SAT, I'll just go with great.
Re:Tweets
Why do I let readers choose the Tweet of the Week in an online poll? Because my sense of humor is evidently unreliable.
For example, this week, the finalist I liked best was this mini drama by @vineyille:
"I call this 'the ol' down and up.' "
My yo-yo hits the floor.
"Oh no. No. No---"
I'm shaken awake.
"Honey, you're having the yo-yo dream again."
What's funny about that? To me, it's the lunacy of someone having a nightmare about a minor mishap with a child's toy that would be so upsetting and recur so frequently that his or her spouse would be aware of it.
But yo-yo dream finished last out of 17 finalists with less than 1 percent of nearly 1,400 votes cast. The winner, the people's choice, was "Most household injuries are caused by saying 'whatever' during an argument," by @Underchilde.
Defensible. Amusing. But no yo-yo dream.
Laugh about it, shout about it starting each Wednesday afternoon at chicagotribune.com/zorn.
