The days of needing flashcards to study SAT vocabulary words to get into college are over — but not just because more and more schools have decided to jettison standardized testing entirely. Today’s SAT is a shadow of its former self, having been dumbed down and manipulated over the past several decades to serve political ends. In its current form, the test has outlived its usefulness.
In fact, Florida lawmakers have affirmed as much in a recent education bill that passed the Florida House unanimously Wednesday. The broad bill includes provisions that would allow an alternative standardized test, the Classic Learning Test (CLT), to compete with the SAT and ACT.
It wasn’t always this way. The first SAT offered by the College Board nearly a century ago consisted of difficult questions that evaluated mathematical reasoning skills and probed a student’s ability not only to remember the general meaning of a word but also to apply the subtle shades of meaning that enrich the English language. The famous SAT analogy questions used an eclectic selection of “SAT words” that rewarded students who spent more time reading books and less time playing the latest Xbox games.
Analogy questions are now gone, and with more recent changes, the test rewards those who never crack open a book or daydream during math class. Now you can just use a calculator to solve a narrower and easier set of math problems. Taken together, the math and verbal will be cut down by a third
