One big change is in the vocabulary questions, which will no longer include obscure words. Instead, the focus will be on what the College Board calls “high utility” words that appear in many contexts, in many disciplines — often with shifting meanings — and they will be tested in context. For example, a question based on a passage about an artist who “vacated” from a tradition of landscape painting, asks whether it would be better to substitute the word “evacuated,” “departed” or “retired,” or to leave the sentence unchanged. (The right answer is “departed.”)
And what I find disturbing about this kind of testing is that under the right set of circumstances-- or in the right
writing context, a surprising word choice which is still
correct in the technical sense serves a different purpose entirely, and that kind of metacognitive skill (or its capacity, even) is ignored by this kind of testing.
It's driven my DD nearly
mad over the years spent with people of this mindset (new SAT/SmarterBalanced, etc) writing assessment items.
There's a reason that she loved the ACT (well-- okay, but it was a relief because it seemed to make sense) and found the entire mindset behind the SAT to be a cipher. Ahem. And yes, that
is the word that I want there.
Questions like that don't HAVE actual "right/wrong" answers half the time-- they have "expected" answers. Shame on College Board for not understanding the difference. Such questions are not in fact very good candidates for multiple choice assessment in the first place, in my estimation.
As for colleges being "less rigorous" because they CAN'T expect more than the students have been exposed to, well, I seriously can't see how that is anything but inflammatory rhetoric at this point. Yes, they want students in seats, but administrators simply don't control what individual faculty do, nor what external accrediting agencies will tolerate. Ultimately, higher ed HAS mostly ignored the erosion of secondary education in terms of adjusting standards. Oh, they may offer more remedial coursework-- but think about it-- that remedial coursework is cheap to teach and brings in even MORE tuition $$. It's unclear who "they" is that would "prevent" colleges from establishing their own standards for coursework or majors. The vocabulary in primary sources and ground-breaking historical works isn't getting any easier to read just because we'd wish it so, and passing boards is still as difficult as it's ever been, ergo preparation in professional programs is not going to "adjust" for ill-prepared students-- it'll just chew them up and spit them out again after collecting some tuition money from them. Honestly, this is just more bad news for middle class families since it makes it (IMO) less likely that they
can successfully pursue the some fields.
