The SAT and the Assault on Literature

Abstract

Why, Mr. Ruenzel wonders, did a boy who used to love reading E. B. White and Tolkien stop reading for pleasure when he was in high school? WHEN HE was president of the University of California system, Richard Atkinson offered many good reasons for killing the SAT. But he failed to mention what I take to be the most important reason of all: namely, the test has been slaughtering literature, butchering poems and novels to bits. As a young English teacher at a suburban high school, I myself was an accomplice in the assault, though it began so tepidly I did not foresee the harm. This was in 1980, and, at the casual request of my department chair, I spent only one class period preparing my juniors for the SAT. I had them work through a few analogies, pluck out a few words like esoteric and aphorism to fill in sentence blanks, and that was about it. It was a not too unpleasant way to fritter away an hour, like playing hangman in the back seat of the car on a very long trip. After that day, I forgot about the SAT. I didn't care about my students' scores, and, while they certainly cared, they didn't share their concern with me. What they did share, as they lingered in my classroom at the end of the school day, were their own poems and stories and the names of science fiction writers they thought I should read. By 1992, I was teaching at another suburban high school, and I was spending an entire week on the SAT. Again, this was at the request of the department chair, who was handing off a request from the principal that had filtered down from the parents. The students worked through test-prep booklets; I watched the clock so I would know when to say Stop. The room was so quiet that you could close your eyes and imagine yourself back in the college library, surrounded by students steeping themselves in Dostoevski and Jane Austen. But these students were only filling in bubbles. After a few days of playing traffic cop, issuing orders of stop and go, I wondered if I were becoming less a teacher and more a proctor of these very important tests. Then, in 2001, I was no longer a teacher but the parent of a sophomore who had already begun preparing for the SAT. I would get on him about the fact that he no longer read anything unrelated to schoolwork. He assured me that his friends didn't read anything else either. Some of them, however, were planning to attend a summer camp dedicated to preparing for the SAT, a camp that claims in its brochure to raise scores by an average of 100 points. It was during the early 1990s that I began to suspect that teenagers were reading less -- and less deeply -- than they had been 10 and certainly 20 years ago. I found this paradoxical, because it was during the 1990s that SAT scores seemed to soar along with the economy. Students talked about them constantly, like securities traders in a bull market, and I was astonished to hear them routinely report scores of 650 and up. Had the scores become inflated, like grade-point averages? Or was I teaching whole batches of future laureates? Score inflation was supposedly impossible: the creators of the SAT in Princeton, New Jersey, have always claimed that their test has absolute constancy, like the laws of physics. …