What is on the SAT?
A direct descendant of the racist anti-immigrant Army Mental Tests of the 1920s, the SAT was first administered in 1926 but did not become a fully multiple-choice exam until after World War II. From the beginning the test was designed to be independent of high school curricula (unlike the SAT’s main competitor, the ACT). It now consists of analogies, sentence completions, reading comprehension, standard math and quantitative comparisons. The SAT does not include advanced mathematics topics nor does it attempt to assess higher-order thinking or reasoning skills. Though a “Verbal” score is provided, test takers do not write a single word. http://www.fairtest.org/facts/satfact.htm • ETS’s version of testing: Too Much Testing of the Wrong Kind; Too Little of the Right Kind in K-12 Education • PBS: Secrets of the SAT • • National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) • Texas Education Agency (TEA) • TEA – Remediation for TAAS: What Works – interesting list (but where’s “teach math”) • T
