From: SteveSlr Date: Sun, 24 Oct 1999 14:55:29 EDT To: h-bd@egroups.com MIME-Version: 1.0 X-Mailer: AOL 4.0 for Windows 95 sub 14 Subject: [h-bd] Re: An achievement test to get _rid_ of SES favoritism? Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-MIME-Autoconverted: from quoted-printable to 8bit by mail3.halcyon.com id LAA23529 Status: chasmurray << If you want to make absolutely sure that family wealth has the maximum contribution in deciding who gets the goodies, then by all means replace the SAT with an achievement test based on a nationally standardized curriculum.>> Steve Sailer here: Charles Murray is exactly right. Furthermore, Nicholas Lemann's utopia where national achievement tests are used instead of aptitude tests is already in operation, but, oddly enough, the effects aren't exactly what he assumes they would be. I'm, of course, speaking of Japan. Lemann implies that replacing the SAT with a national achievement test based on a national curriculum would: 1. Make high school students and their parents less obsessed with testing and getting into the right college. 2. Reduce the importance of private coaching. 3. Create a more flexible society where how you did on a test at age 17 influences your life less. 4. Reduce racial inequalities. Lemann's long-time colleague at The Atlantic and fellow H-Bd member James Fallows wrote a fine book, "More Like Us," that has some good material on testing in Japan (where Fallows lived for some time). In Japan, a national college admissions test is given to all high school students. This is universally considered to be less of an aptitude test and more of a test of rote memorization than the SAT. Let's investigate its effects. 1. Are Japanese students and their parents less crazed by Lemann's system than they are by our aptitude test? By all accounts, this achievement testing system makes the high school years a living hell for Japanese teens as they cram for the test. Slogans like "Pass on four hours of sleep, fail on five," give some flavor of what it's like. The notorious syndrome of student suicides is only the most extreme manifestation of the pressure on Japanese kids. 2. The private coaching industry is vastly larger in Japan than America. A huge number of students spend several hours every day after school for years in extra-cost private academies prepping for the Really Big Test. Poorer people who can't afford the academies and/or need their kids to work after school to bring in some money are at a major bind. It's also worth noting that the Japanese achievement test works against women's lib in Japan -- since mothers are also expected to coach their kids, they can't be off gallivanting around in jobs. 3. Does the use of achievement tests make for a more flexible, entrepreneurial society in Japan than in America? Yeah, right. The way it works is that the top X number of scorers on the test are admitted to Tokyo University. The next highest scorers go to the #2 college and so on down the academic food chain. A fascinating effect of this testing system is that Japanese kids tend to screw off royally in college. Both because they practically killed themselves getting to college, and because their path in life is already set in stone, they study surprisingly little in college. After four years of heavy drinking, Tokyo U. students then get the most prestigious jobs, the next most exclusive college's grads get the next most prestigious jobs, etc. Later, on the job, promotions tend to be given to all members of a graduating class at the same time -- you rise up the ladder with the rest of your age cohort. This system is of course slowly breaking down these days under the increased competition Japan is facing. 4. Does this system reduce racial inequalities? That's hard to say because Japan is so monoracial that they had to invent their own minority, the Burakamen, to have somebody to discriminate against. Nonetheless, I would guess that in America this system would only increase racial inequalities in college admissions. That's because not just academic aptitutde but also academic effort is also distributed unevenly by race. Achievement tests measure both aptitude (all tests are to one degree or another IQ tests), effort, and the interaction of the two. Lemann's system would lead to even fewer African-Americans qualifying and even more Asian-Americans. This is not to say that all the effects of the Lemann System are bad. It definitely inculcates a stronger work ethic in high school students than the SAT. It provides a more consistent base of knowledge across the entire society. It hammers down individualism and nonconformity, which certainly helps industrial productivity. Nonetheless, I have to subscribe to Fallows' conclusions: that what's best for America is not to slavishly imitate the Japanese system (he wrote this a decade ago when the Japanese system appeared to be all-conquering), but to emphasize our own competitive advantages in individualism, to be "more like us." Certainly the last ten years have borne out the wisdom of this line of thinking. Steve Sailer www.iSteve.com chasmurray@earthlink.net writes: << I haven't seen anyone else address this, so let me make an obvious point: If you want to make absolutely sure that family wealth has the maximum contribution in deciding who gets the goodies, then by all means replace the SAT with an achievement test based on a nationally standardized curriculum. First, you're replacing a test that is surprisingly resistant to coaching with one that is tailor-made for coaching. Frontline's cherry-picking anecdotes notwithstanding, the technical literature on coaching for the SAT is extensive (see TBC pp. 400-402 & cites), and it demonstrates that coaching does help modestly but that the curve flattens out very quickly. Mastering a set curriculum is highly susceptible to coaching. Drill it in, memorize it. Second, you're replacing a test that does indeed, not perfectly but to an admirable extent, capture aptitude independently of preparation, with a test for which teaching trumps ability. You can go to a rotten school and get a high score in the SAT verbal if you have a high IQ. It will be much more difficult to attend a rotten school and get a high score on an achievement test. The best schools—private and suburban ones—will do far and away the best job of teaching the set curriculum. Let's make the world even safer for Scarsdale kids. Charles Murray >> ------------------------------------------------------------------------ How to contribute to H-Bd: 1. To reply privately to just the sender of this message, click the "Reply" button on your email package. 2. To reply publicly to the entire H-Bd list, click the "Reply All" (or equivalent) button on your email package. 3. To start a thread, email your message to h-bd@egroups.com . Arthur Hu This is an excellent one I'll add to my web site. Taiwan and Korea are much the same - in fact this is the source of the mistaken impression by ed reformers that other nations have a "Certificate of Mastery" that proves that ALL 16 year olds have been educated to world class standards. Germany as 4 different levels of high schools, each with their own diploma. The worst diplomas basically state, like the oft-criticized US diploma that you've warmed the seats for so many years, not that you've mastered ANY particular skills. Japan also has varying levels of high schools, with the worst being plagued by monthly stories about school girl prostitution - talk about school to work. There is NO national passing standard for all students in any of these nations, you get your scores and are rank-ordered for competition in the next level. The US school to work model forces ALL students onto a vocational track with mandantory months or weeks spent in "job-based learning" at a time when the majority of German students have abandoned apprenticeships in favor of the university track which requires wasting no time on a job site. Fortunately, it is not too late to kill this thing before it become widely adopted. Like I said, Outcome Based Education (now referred to as "standards based" education) is the biggest threat to education in the 21st century, and we need to really the intellectual troops against this monster. The idea of using an exit test to force all students and all schools to one high standard has infected most states, and districts, the resulting being 80% failure rates among whites , 95% failure rates among blacks in WA state, 98% of high schools failing in Virginia. The plague of "performance based tests" is even worse that SAT or IQ tests since they deliberately test for what has not been taught, require written essays rather than simpler multiple choice, are subjectively graded at 10 times the cost, takes months to prep and take vs. hours, they have a racial gap as big as the hardest IQ tests, bloat state education bureauacracies, you name it.