Letters: SAT tweaking won’t be enough

Re “Major revamp coming to SAT format,” March 6

Tweaking the SAT or any other testing mechanism in use in schools today still will not provide colleges, communities or parents an accurate picture of a student’s probability of success in college and in life.

Testing mechanisms that reward memorization rather than problem-solving, collaborative abilities and creativity simply are testing the wrong things. Students today face a world economy that needs thinkers, not test-takers. The better colleges and universities are slowly realizing that their job is to produce a new cadre of divergent thinkers and problem-solvers, and they are adjusting their curriculums to meet the challenges of this new economy.

Public schools, society and the SAT must adjust the information their tests are providing to colleges and universities to provide data more meaningful toward these ends.

Bob Bruesch

Rosemead

The writer is president of the Garvey School District Board of Education.

Having been in admissions at the graduate and undergraduate levels (I’m now an educational consultant), I say with certainty that College Board President David Coleman has just provided the test-prep industry with an enormous new business opportunity. Families will flock to test-prep providers, as they will be the best providers of information on how to prepare for the new test.

I am a fan of the online Khan Academy, but the College Board is naive if it believes that families will move away from test-prep organizations in favor of College Board videos on the Khan site. What the College Board provides on its website now has never been nearly enough to satisfy families looking to help their children improve their scores.

The problem lies with standardized testing and not the particular test. As long as schools require standardized tests, there will be a huge industry around helping students improve their scores.

Jennifer Tabbush

Tarzana

After reading the article on the revisions to take place to the SAT, including dropping obscure and lesser-known words, I turned to other parts of the paper.

In the article about the House hearing on the IRS, The Times reported that one Democratic lawmaker “excoriated the committee’s investigative procedures.” Does The Times intend to instruct its writers not to use such language? Heaven forbid anyone should think they were being harshly criticized for writing above the sixth-grade level.

Oh yes, in case you were wondering, one definition of “excoriate” is “to harshly criticize.” Why use one word when you can use two or three?

I think anyone preparing to enter college should know at least a few obscure and lesser-known words.

John Snyder

Newbury Park

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