Keith, this was a great article for those of us catching up on the issue. Thanks for posting it. I'm sending it to relatives with children "of a certain age".
I found a listing via Google dated today at Tufts University (http://www.tuftsdaily.com/articleDisplay.jsp?a_id=66), referring to the changes made "last spring" (which don't go into effect until March, 2005) and incidentally mentions the practice of "flagging" applications by learning-disabled students, but admitting that colleges will not do anything to threaten their college rankings: Excerpt: "While the scores are not a deciding factor in the admissions process, Tufts will not be dropping them from the application requirements any time soon. The University must use the SAT for the purpose of national ranking, Brunk said. If Tufts were to exclude SAT scores from the admissions process, its US News and World Report magazine ranking might fall. The changes to the testing procedure were partly sparked by University of California (UC) President Richard Atkinson, who last year proposed dropping the SAT requirement from all UC applications because the current test measures only "undefined notions of aptitude or intelligence." He wanted a test to replace the SAT on the application _one that would better evaluate specific subject mastery. The College Board receives 15 percent of its revenue from the state of California and the UC system, which consists of nine campuses and 130,000 undergraduates _the largest university system in the country. Atkinson is pleased by the proposed SAT changes. "There is no perfect test, but this is a move in the right direction," he said in a recent press release. Prospective Tufts student Quill Teal-Sullivan thought the SAT was just a hassle, no matter what the changes. "I don't really think they measure anything of importance," she said. "Just whether your family put you through a [SAT score improvement] course or not. I wouldn't want to take them again." A second move that the College Board made recently was to discontinue the "flagging" of tests taken by disabled students. Students with learning disabilities, such as dyslexia or ADD, can request to be given more time on the SAT. In the past, however, the disabled students' SAT scores were marked to inform colleges that time was added. The argument in favor of this change is that notification could discourage students from requesting extra time, for fear of admission's discrimination. Currently at Tufts, disabilities flagging is noted in the application process, "but it is not used in the evaluation process," Brunk said I have trouble reading long articles like this one in email format and off websites crowded with pop ads, so I regularly save longer pieces. Therefore, if anyone else would like a reformatted copy of the Barnes article, The SAT Revolution, in Word format, please contact me. I'm still looking for the source and date, however, to give it the proper validation for the people I know who are interested. - Karen Watters Cole PS In following links from FW posts yesterday (and previously on other subjects) I learned just how important it is to save the source for news-breaking articles as soon as they appear, since we have discovered some things disappear or are altered for various reasons. The Wellstone crash is a good example, as were references to developments in the Middle East. I was tracing down something from counterpunch that referred to "buried news" and again ran into subscriber roadblocks, although it's easy to see that 'Mike Lloyd' writing for the Moscow News is an Americanization of a name, due to the author's very Russian English. He referred to a piece in the LA Times 10.27.02 by Wm. Arkin, who normally writes military commentary under 'Dot.mil' for the WP but the LA Times provides the two-week old piece for a fee only. Outgoing Mail Scanned by NAV 2002
