This reading is an excerpt of Stanley Kaplan’s own book where he explains how he was introduced to the SAT, a basic history of the SAT’s inception, how he developed a method to prepare students to take the SAT, and his opinions regarding the utility of the SAT as a part of the college admission process. Kaplan believes the SAT functions as a good indicator of academic success in college because the test gauges students’ critical thinking and deduction skills rather than their ability to recall factual knowledge. He supports this argument by giving examples of critical thinking from his own introduction to the concept, explaining how these skills are necessary for academic success, and outlining how critical thinking skills can be taught to students to improve their academic success for life. Kaplan also believes that the test functions as both a necessary and equalizing force in the college admission process because it will promote diversity within the college population. He believes the test will help colleges to assess and admit students based on academic merit instead of socioeconomic factors. He supports this argument by describing how the critical thinking skills tested by the SAT can be learned by a variety of students. He also talks about how this need to measure academic success in a reliable way occasioned the formation of the College Board, the organization responsible for the development of the SAT.
Mr. Kaplan believes the SAT is a very reliable and accurate tool for the measurement of academic success because he believes the cornerstone of academic success is rooted in critical thinking. He argues that students can prepare for the test, and thus prepare for college, by learning to think critically about basic concepts rather than just memorizing facts and figures. I agree with him to some extent: the test can be prepared for, but critical thinking is impossible if a student isn’t armed with a good base of general knowledge. Kaplan thinks students don’t necessarily need exposure to basic concepts in order to perform well on the test and I feel this is a narrow point of view. I agree with him that critical thinking is important, but I do not believe that persons lacking strong deduction skills should be denied admission to college. College is where a majority of students really learn to think critically about their world for the first time, so using a tool like the SAT that may select against these students seems a bit less than reliable a method than Kaplan would have me believe.
Additionally, Kaplan believes that the SAT will promote diversity in college populations because the test will help colleges admit students with differing socioeconomic and academic backgrounds who are united by their academic merit. With this, Kaplan assumes that mental competency is accurately and completely measured by a tool like the SAT and that academic merit can be measured by testing certain subjects. Math and verbal reasoning skills are the primary subjects tested on the SAT, and I believe limiting the SAT to these two subjects does keep the test from promoting a certain kind of diversity within the college population. For example, students with aptitudes in theater arts may perform well on stage, but not necessarily well on a standardized test, and they deserve a place in college just like the mathematicians.
I think Kaplan also assumes a direct correlation between test-taking ability and academic competency. A great number of intelligent people have documented difficulty taking standardized tests and testing ability or the lack thereof is not something to be ignored. If the SAT is the tool used to measure all students, it would seem that students that test well have an advantage over those that don’t. In this way, I believe that the SAT and other standardized tests may actually inhibit a certain kind of diversity within the college population. For this reason, I am very glad to see that some more progressive colleges are making the SAT optional and many more are giving greater weight to other indicators of success like writing portfolios and work experience.
I do not believe the SAT to be as important and valuable measuring tool as does Kaplan, nor do I believe it to be a great equalizer. I’d like to ask Kaplan what he thinks of the test preparation industry today and how the need to prepare for the SAT has managed to draw class lines between students. If the need for SAT testing preparation is so high, then how fair is it really to test students lacking test prep material right alongside those students whose socioeconomic status gave them a wealth of test preparation, even access to special courses like those Kaplan pioneered?
I’m also of the opinion that the SAT is a limited tool for measuring academic success in school because it doesn’t accurately measure students’ aptitude in specific fields of study. It seems the College Board also recognized the limitations of the SAT and saw the need to develop additional tests to gauge students’ knowledge of certain subjects in college. As a result, they recently created a set of SAT II Subject Tests. By taking these tests, students can demonstrate their aptitude in subjects like History or Chemistry in addition to critical thinking skills, giving colleges even more information on which to base their admissions decision. I wonder what Kaplan would have to say about these Subject tests, whether or not he would think them worthwhile. I have mixed feelings myself; I am not sure that having more test scores to be considered is a good thing because not all students will have the ability or resources to take them, giving yet another possible advantage to the more privileged class of students.
While I do not completely agree with Stanley Kaplan’s opinions of the SAT, I do think that reading the excerpt of his book made me think about my opinions of school. I think a lot of what Kaplan said about critical thinking is true, that it is essential to success in school to learn to think about “how and why” and synthesize all types of knowledge together. I also think that in the current educational environment where students are constantly being measured with standardized tests, Kaplan’s test preparation methods have never been more essential for every student to learn. The popularity of tests like the SAT has helped standardized testing become the primary way students are assessed for competency. I believe standardized testing to be a necessary evil, but it is here to stay, and students would do well to take a lesson from Kaplan and “think out” the best way to use his test prep methods to their advantage.
I think the line that stood out for me the most was where Kaplan says that he thinks he might have been admitted to medical school if a test like the SAT had been in existence. As someone who has taken the both the SAT and the MCAT before, I can attest to the fact that success on a standardized test is largely dependent on one’s ability to think quickly and critically about the material presented; Kaplan clearly has that ability in spades. It seems to me that Kaplan feels that he didn’t get into medical school not because of other factors, likely because he wasn’t well-heeled or well-connected. This is still an unfortunate reality in medical school admissions. No matter what the admissions committees say, even now, some decisions are based on who and not just what a candidate knows, and more than one qualified applicant has been passed over for one with a physician for a relative or a social connection. I am glad to see this doesn’t happen as often as it must have in Kaplan’s day, and tools like the SAT and MCAT must have helped in a small way to help eliminate such preferential treatment and equalize admissions. The system isn’t perfect, but tools like standardized tests do give admissions committees more information on which to base their decisions, something that Kaplan believed would help “democratize American education”. Even so, I feel that it may have worked out better for both Kaplan and me that he didn’t go to medical school. It seems to me that his true passion was teaching, and without the test prep resources he developed and championed, I would have been just one more student among the many baffled by the SAT. For that alone, I am much obliged to Mr. Stanley Kaplan for his life’s work, even if that work wasn’t in the field of medicine.
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