Fat Elephant

Fat Elephant

Study Exposes the Shocking Dumbing Down of the SAT

M Dowling

I remember when the Regents started to dumb down reading, telling children to read without comprehension. I knew it was insane, so I didn’t follow through. Some ideas don’t make sense. Take the dumbing down of the SAT for example.

St. Thomas Aquinas College was concerned that the SAT has become a less reliable measure of student preparedness for a rigorous college curriculum.

So, they commissioned a study from Johns Hopkins University. What does this study tell us about the state of higher education?

The results are shocking.

The makers of the SAT seem to believe that the ability to tackle long and complex literary works isn’t an important skill for college students anymore,” says Dr. Goyette.

“Sadly, given the state of modern higher education, they’re probably right.”

The TAC-sponsored report — The SAT Reading Section: A Comparative Analysis of the 1980, 1987, and 2026 Practice Tests — compares SAT forms from 1980 and 1987 with a current College Board practice test. The authors document extensive modifications to the SAT reading section over the past four decades, most of which diminish the emphasis on students’ ability to read and analyze difficult texts.

These include:

  • Shorter passages, less than a third of their former length
  • A sharp drop in the number of vocabulary questions requiring independent word knowledge, from 60 per test to 10
  • The near elimination of argumentative and persuasive readings from the test, replaced by expository texts
  • Replacing reading passages that assumed prior knowledge and understanding on the part of the reader with texts that reveal their meanings through contextual clues

“This shift is significant because reading, vocabulary, and comprehension are mutually reinforcing,” the study’s authors observe. “As students read more, both the breadth (number of words known) and the depth (quality of word understanding) of their vocabulary increase, which in turn supports stronger reading comprehension.”

The moral of the story is not to rely on the dumbed-down SATs.

Gab