Ms. Cornelius has an interesting post on testing fatigue and the SAT that has me thinking. The comments to the post are well worth reading as well and helped to crystallize my thinking on this score.
Ms. Cornelius asked, is the new SAT too much of a Brainnumbing exercise? Well, in many ways, yes, but that is not the topic of this post. The New SAT lasts for 3 hours and 45 minutes, and I will admit that such a time is significant and may be difficult to concentrate for such a long period of time,if one were forced to do so for the entire time frame in one sitting. One way to look at a solution is the one being offered by Ms. Cornelius and the commenters, that of breaking the time down, allowing for onger breaks or spanning the test over two days. I will concede that giving more and longer breaks may help somewhat to ease the tension. Instead of one or two 15 minuted breaks or a series of 5 minute breaks, why not have longer--say 20-30 breaks between each major section.
However, longer breaks may actually prolong the agony. But still, time managment during the test administration is a minor issue and one that can, quite frankly, be solved by the College Board.
But what if we look at the problem from a different angle. Instead of changing the test environment, why not change the test taker?
One of the accusations implicit in the arguments for changing the test environment and time is that students are incapable of concentrating for such lengthy periods of time. This is utter hogwash. I have routinely seen 18 and 19 year old men and women concentrate for 10-12 hours or more in an extremely hazardous environment, that of an aircraft flight deck, where a break in concentration can mean you life--literally!!. I have seen kids concentrate on everything from sporting events to enjoyable books for the necessary length of time, all the people making arguments stating the concentrating on a book, movie or video game is different than concentrating on a test, clearly have not spent much time around modern video games.
Thus the issue is not capacity to conentrate for three or four hours. The issue is that we don't teach kids to operate on that level. Even with what I have seen called "block scheduling," we rarely, if ever, ask our high school students to concentrate for more than an hour an half at a time. We routinely parse class days, and therefore exams, into one or two hour chunks at most, thus robbing them of an important skill, that of long-term concentrated tasks.
While I realize that the comparison is nearly the same, I can say that, having just sat for the Maryland bar exam, taking a test over two days in four test sessions is brutal. But the test preparation includes simulated exams, right down to the time frames involved, so that no one walking into a bar exam is unfamiliar with the strain.
Preparing for the SAT is no different. I would imagine that if a study were done to examine those students to take a test prep class and those that don't, those without the test prep do much worse. Not only do those students without a test prep class under their belt have little foreknowledge of the exam structure, they have not been exposed to even a simulated test environment. Whereas, if we regularly structure some testing in high school with the same intensity, the mystery and stress of the SAT would be diminished.
Furthermore, I don't buy the assertion, made by one commenter, who stated that kids taking the SAT don't understand the life implications as say LSAT, GMAT or GRE test takers do. Once again, we are assuming that high school students are idiots, incapable of understanding the implications of the test. What I do agree with is that adults often make the implications seem much bigger than they are, but not that kids don't understand the importance of the test.
In summation, rather than completely altering the test environment, why don't we actually prepare kids for such an arduous task. Kids take tests in school all the time, why not use that time to simulate SAT test taking?
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