The same bad job?

SAT scores in New York fell again. The officials have said that more and more people are taking the test, so its' becoming more representative. It used to be that mostly college-bound, high achievers too the test and now it's a wider group of people.

So do we need to re-evaluate the test?

It's an interesting question to me. Are schools doing a bad job and we're just getting aware of it or is the population on averege not going to score well on the SAT. Combined with the note yesterday that 53% of Americans hadn't read a book in the last year, I'm not sure the school system is doing a horrible job. At least not compared to the general population.

It reminds me of the quizzes they do on Late Night or other shows sometimes where they ask what I'd consider basic questions to people on the street and get some amazing(ly dumb) answers. We don't know if they have to ask 20 people to get one dumb response, but we do know there are a lot of people out there that don't know much about the world. I've seen this with kids at times, where they think Jon Stewart or Stephen Cobert are reporting news. It's a little sad.

If we were to give everyone the SAT we'd have a better idea of how the test scores in the population, and then we could better evaluate the test. Maybe that's what we ought to do. Give the test to all seniors, and let them pay if they want the scores sent to a college. It should generate the same money, but we might then have a better idea of how the test scores the population.

However not everyone is smart enough to go to college. Not everyone wants to, and certainly at 17-19, not everyone is ready.

I don't know if there is a race issue here with the test, but I'd like to see it given to everyone. Then we might better be able to tell.