\doc\web\99\14\newets.txt Date forwarded: Sat, 11 Sep 1999 14:17:47 -0400 (EDT) From: "George K. Cunningham" To: "edconsumer" , "upstream" , "Math" Date sent: Sat, 11 Sep 1999 14:17:39 -0400 Subject: [Upstream] Wackiness at ETS Forwarded by: upstream-list@cycad.com Send reply to: upstream-list@cycad.com There have been three expressions of testing philosophy released recently by ETS that seem to contradict their corporate purpose. First there was the article written by Paul Barton, the Director of the ETS Policy Information Center, made available on Jimmy Kilpatrick's Education News Service. T he article was titled "Too much testing of the wrong kind; too little of the right kind in K-12 Eduation." This is the sort of anti-testing screed that one expects to see in left of center educational publications, but seems more than a little out of place coming from ETS. Don't worry about re ading the article, there is nothing much that is noteworthy in it. What is surprising about it is the source. ETS is the Papacy of testing, which begs the question: Why is ETS publishing opinion pieces criticizing the use of tests, which are after all, their bread and butter. It is sort of li ke r If the Barton article was isolated we might chalk it up to one individual going off message. But, then we have the LA Times publishing an article by Marie Pearlman, Vice President of Teaching and Learning for the Educational Testing Service, titled "Cheating in School Reflects Basic Confusion in Society." The title of the article suggests that it is about cheating on tests, but most of the article is devoted to extolling the virtues of constructivism. Normally, constructivists and testing companies are natural enemies. Constructivists generally view ETS as an evil empire, willing to harm our children to fill their their corporate coffers. They would love to see all testing banned. Now they have a new ally, an ETS Vice President who not only defends constructivism, but asserts that the current tests are unfair and who believes that children should be encouraged to cooperate and Then there are the series of news articles about an ETS scheme to use race norming with the SAT. ETS is all set to start providingstudents with excuses for why they don't do well on tests. If a student has a good excuse, they get points added to their score. It doesn't matter what their ac tual aptitude is, only the quality of the reasons for the low scores. With a good enough excuses, students with low academic aptitude are to be treated the same as if they had earned a higher score. This is a blatant attempt by ETS to help universities get around laws and court cases forbiding racial preferences in admissions. There are two factors that have led to these strange behaviors on the part of ETS. The first reason concerns legislative changes, referendums, and court decisions, that have whittled away at legal basis for race preferences. This has caused panic among the leaders of elite universities as well as ETS. In the past, elite universities had the best of all possilbe worlds. They could be highly selective and admit only students with the highest SAT or ACT scores. At the same time, they could admit a handful of non-Asian minorities, without concern about their low scores. The African A merican males admitted were mostly athletes and the remaining quota was filled with the children of prominent mon-Asian minority acadmics and political leaders. The parents of these privileged few could be counted on to strongly endorse the open-mindedness and committment to diversity of these e lite As the legal basis for race preferences becomes increasing shaky, presidents of the effected elite universities are wailing and moaning about their committment to diversity and how they are no longer allowed to promote it. University of Michigan President Lee Bollinger recently declared diversi ty to be "as vital as teaching Shakespeare or mathematics," He is afraid that if the courts do what they seemed likely to do and ban race preferences at Michigan, diversity will suffer. This is hypocrisy in its purest form. If the problem is SAT test scores, there is an easy solution. Stop u sing them at the University of Michigan and at other effected elite universities. They have chosen to use the tests and if they are so committed to diversity, they can choose not to use them. Any school that is truely worried about losing African American Students because restrictions on the use What is stopping them is their desire to keep their job. Classic hypocrisy. They are really not as worried about diversity as they are about their lofty ratings in the U.S. News Report rankings of top universities. They are also worried about their alumni and faculty who are unwilling to sacri fice academic standards for diversity. They prefer to continue to use the tests and spend millions to fight in court to be allowed to use race preferences. All of this apparently has ETS scared. What if a state or some schools quit using their tests?. The second event that has scared ETS are the guidlines on testing recently published by the Office of Civil Rights. There has been much controversy about these guidlelines and some say they represent a misinterpretation of the relevant laws. Interpreted literally, they could put ETS out of bus iness. ETS is now trying to make themselves seem socially responsible about testing, which in our politically correct world means that they seem to want the public to believe they are opposed to the use of standardized tests. ETS is begining to have the hollow sound of tobacco companies that cl aim that their greatest concern is the prevention of teen smoking and beer producers who seem to only care about over indulgence. One wonders whether the strange article about ETS and the SAT that appeared in NewsWeek is part of this corporate spin. Jan Mercer in California tried to promote a race norming strivers-type program at the other end of the intelligence scale using the System Of Multicultural Pluralistic Assessment (SOMPA). She asserted that the IQ of African Americans should be computed using their own norms when decisions about special education placements were made. Children who needed the benefits of special education ended up being denied access to the services through test score manipulations. Belatedly it was discovered that mental retardation could not be cured by manipulating test norms. The SOMPA is now jus t one more forgotten educational fad. One can only hope for the same fate for the "strivers" program. The purpose of academic aptitude is to help colleges and universities decide which students can benefit the most from their educational programs. These tests are not intended to answer questions about the relative intellectual capacities of different ethnic groups in this country. That they are an unfair tool for making such comparisons should not lead to distortions of the scores to correct for the percieved unfairness of the results. A student with a combined score of 1200 on the SAT is going to do much better academically than a student with a combined score of 1000. It really doe sn't matter why the student obtained the score of 1000. Recognition of the unfairness of the world in placing many impediments in front of a student will not increase his or her aptitude. The exact same factors (poverty, lack of parental education, poor nutrition) that supposedly suppress perfo rman George K. Cunningham University of Louisville