Belmont High School Library: Sitting? Satting? Your Exams

I had to take the GREs to get into graduate school to become a librarian. That was a grueling prcoess that is a long, odd story on its own, involving a dislocated rib, painkiller-induced drowsiness, and Windows 98. That was in 2003 (a year some of you may have but scant memory of), and in 2008, during a convoluted chapter of employment paranoia, the BHS administration encouraged me to take the PRAXIS to possibly get certified as an English teacher. But aside from that, I have't had to hunker down in a chilly, rigorous environment to fill out ovals (depending on how you feel about your polling station and local elections) for quite some time. Meaning it's been a while since I have been leveraged by circumstance or necessity to take any form of standardized test, and even longer since I had to take the SAT.

I worry about this every so often when SAT season comes around, because my experience is so distant that I literally no longer remember what my scores were, and the SAT has changed so much since I took it, that those numbers are no longer relevant. But more importantly, I don't feel like a good resource to be able to assist students with test-taking strategy or with interpreting their scores. I have guest-administrated the SAT once it replaced the Smarter Balanced test as the standardized source for math and English scores to indicate how NH students were living up to the No Child Left Behind requirements, but all that meant was that I read out the required standardized paragraphs and kept time in tight little intervals. I haven't sat an exam in what seems like forever.

Which reminded me of an old episode of the sitcom NewsRadio, where a high-achieving character on the show in her 30s retakes the exam to find out if her brain is deteriorating with age and she's actually stupider than she was in high school. Mr. Harrison told me that there had been an incentive scheme for schools in some districts in Florida where teachers were paid a bonus based on their highest SAT score. This was ostensibly to attract the most intelligent teachers to work there, but ended up with teachers duking it out with students over test-taking slots, SAT tutors, and resources in order to pocket a greasy buck (the system has since changed, outraging teachers who had designed their financial status around that significant annual bonus). So he has taken them quite recently, perhaps as recently as some of our youngest teachers.

Taking a masked exam

A New York Times reporter was asked to retake the exam to investigate what SATs were like in the midst of the Corona debacle. Tests in the Spring had been canceled, and there were concerns both about the number of slots and seats available and the safety considerations in the testing environment. Despite that fact that a recent survey of NH colleges indicated that only one (Dartmouth) still requires the SAT for admission, part of a larger trend of schools moving away from having it as an application prerequisite, the stress around taking the exam remains real, and students report feeling like it is both a personal metric for success and almost a cultural rubicon to be crossed.

As the state of NH dabbles with it's own homegrown standardized test that's "more tailored to New Hampshire" students, the SAT may become sufficiently irrelevant, even as a 90-year old tradition that feels to some, culturally, like the apotheosis of high school knowledge. Even in 1996, a teen tried to comfort Lisa, the NewsRadio character, by telling her the SAT wasn't such a big deal. But Lisa replied, "Well, maybe not, but you better pretend it is, or else you won't get a good score, which means you can't get into a good college and then you won't get a good job and then your life will be ruined."

Shoot, maybe I should sign up for the SATs. Good thing we have a couple SAT prep books in the library. Free (like all library materials) to a good home!

# posted by Mr. Russell @ 9:44 AM

Monday, October 05, 2020

Sitting? Satting? Your Exams