RIP Subject Tests

What if College Board eliminated Subject Tests and nobody cared?

Last Tuesday, we were all anxiously preoccupied with the upcoming inauguration, so one could be forgiven for missing College Board’s landmark announcement, but what initially seemed to have the potential to be a bombshell appears to have landed with more like a dull thud. Good.

SAT originally stood for Scholastic Aptitude Test. When the idea of “aptitude” came under well-deserved scrutiny, College Board changed it to “Scholastic Assessment Test.” But educators know that a test is one type of assessment, and since “Scholastic Assessment Assessment” did not make much sense, College Board finally threw in the towel and said SAT was no longer an acronym. Basically an admission that the test does not measure anything in particular.

In fact, “assessment” is under continuous scrutiny in academic circles. How do we assess what a student knows or has learned? How should we? Yesterday, the New York State Association of Independent Schools sponsored a webinar, attended by more than 7,000 educators, featuring Ibram X. Kendi, author of How to be an Antiracist. Asked by a panelist about assessment, Kendi noted that in the traditional model of education, teachers poured content into students and then gave tests to measure how much of the content they retained. In this model, he noted that “intelligence” was defined in terms of the recollection of content. What if, he mused, “intelligence” were defined by a different metric? What if, for example, a student’s eagerness to learn was considered a mark of intelligence? Because, he said, isn’t that our goal as educators, to produce lifelong learners?

Two Browning mission statements in a row! Our previous Mission Statement noted a goal of Mr. Browning: “the pursuit of academic excellence and a lifelong love of learning,” and our current Mission Statement highlights “Curiosity” and “Purpose,” two motivators to learning. Even our school motto “Grytte,” an Anglicized spelling of the word “grit,” speaks to qualities of persistence, determination, resilience, and character, that we at Browning have always valued but that, nonetheless, defy quantification.

I am reminded of my senior year in college, when I was required to take one more social science credit. An intellectually pretentious physics major (a real science, mind you) I signed up for a freshman-level topics class in history entitled “Oliver Cromwell and the Puritan Revolution.” I could not think of a less appealing subject, but there were no alternatives. It would become one of the three most rewarding courses I took in college. The syllabus indicated that 20% of the grade would be a content-based quiz, which I promptly failed. The rest of the grade would be one research paper. (And I will point out here that as a physics major, I was not particularly adept at historical research papers.) The topic I chose was equally unappealing: “Education as a Cause of the Puritan Revolution.” Perhaps faced with the specter of explaining to my parents why I would not be graduating, I poured myself into the task at hand. Surrounded by stacks of library books, I tapped out the final draft on my electric typewriter (1975!) I hoped it would be worthy of a ‘B.’ It earned an ‘A-.’ But this was Kendi’s point: the quiz on facts and dates did not accurately capture any aspect of my engagement in the subject; the paper did.

And this is why the College Board finally took the revenue-draining Subject Tests out behind the proverbial woodshed and did away with them. And it’s why few will mourn their loss. In the short term, the void is likely to steer attention towards alternative (and, frankly, better) assessments like APs, (which also happen to be a prized College Board cash cow). But most colleges that went test-optional for the class of 2021 are likely to retain the policy, precisely because they are discovering that they can admit an equally talented, and perhaps even more interesting, class without relying on standardized test scores. So, in the long run, rote regurgitation of content is waning in importance. Which is why, at Browning and around the country, educators are searching for new and innovative ways to assess knowledge along with skills and enduring understanding—ways to measure “mastery.” A Grytte Quotient!