In Defense of the SAT Exam

The SAT exam administered by the College board is much maligned. Some parents groups are up in arms and most students are anxious about the weight the exam plays in college admissions. Some colleges have made the SAT and ACT “optional” while some schools have abandoned the standardized test requirement altogether. Organizations such as fairtest.org claim the tests are flawed and misused.  

While no test is perfect, I truly believe that proper preparation for the SAT has many advantages. The SAT is a reasoning test, and as such, it  forces students to develop problem solving and logic skills which are necessary for college and in life. Unfortunately, many High Schools provide students with the opportunity to memorize formulas and facts without any guidance on how to draw inferences and think “outside the box”. Our schools have produced a plethora of regurgitating automatons. There are too many students with 99 averages who score less than the 50th percentile on the SAT. Why? Not because the test is flawed, but because students have not been taught how  to reason and think for themselves.  

In the past five years, the SAT has been modified to include an essay. Students are required to express their thoughts on paper, in their own hand, without the use of word processing programs with grammar and spell checks.  The ability to write a clear, organized essay is an essential skill.   

The essay is just one component of the new SAT Writing Section. Besides the essay, students must use their knowledge of the rules of grammar to identify errors in a sentence, to correct sentences and to correct paragraphs. For whatever reason, the rules of grammar seem to have been ignored by the U.S. school system. Students therefore,are reintroduced to “proper” English by preparing for the SAT. In fact, a 2008 study concluded that a student’s performance on the SAT Writing section has the highest correlation with how that student will perform in his or her freshmen year of college.  

The SAT also helps students improve their vocabulary, not by memorizing words but by learning to use unfamiliar words in their correct context. There is absolutely no point in learning words for the sake of adding them up. This will not increase a student’s word power. Sentence completions and vocabulary in context reading questions force students to learn proper word usage.  

The Critical Reading section teaches students to read critically, that is, to learn how to read a passage with a deeper understanding. Mindless reading is fine for the beach. Critical reading is much different. The skill to analyze why an author writes, or the skill to determine why the author uses certain phrases or metaphors is important in many disciplines. The ability to feel the author’s tone and to understand the main idea of a passage is essential to critical reading.  

Most math problems on the SAT are easy to calculate. That’s not the hard part. The key to solving an SAT math problem is its set up. Students must first determine what is being asked. If the question is misread, the answer will be wrong! Hence, many incorrect math responses are the result of poor critical reading skills.  

Once the question is understood, students must use all of the given information to piece together a string of steps to finally get to the answer. This process once mastered, teaches problem solving skills by employing a logical progression of thinking from start to finish.  

If a student has properly prepared for the SAT, he or she will have obtained the following skills: the ability to write clearly; the ability to use new words; the ability to read with deeper understanding; and the ability to problem solve, given a particular set of facts. There is no downside to the accumulation of these skills. Unfortunately our school systems have failed to provide these skills. Fortunately, SAT prep fills this void.  

In Defense of the SAT Exam