Quote:
Originally Posted by anamardoll
... I would wonder what effort is being made to keep the tests (and the material on them) relevant to students. If the test scores are slipping not because the students have crappy reading abilities but because the test material is written in a version of English that is becoming increasingly out-of-date, then the tests need to be revised to reflect this.
Assuming that we want the tests to reflect comprehension overall (yay) and not their grasp of obscure words (boo).
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The use of ethnic-based questions and wording has been blamed for the poor results by ESL (English as a Second Language) students for some time now, and often these are the same students who outperform their peers in academic classes - a clear triumph of comprehension over vocabulary. It is also a major concern when testing minorities among whom common street language holds sway against "the king's English" as taught in grammar classes. In short, there are too many variables to make a case, statistically or otherwise, over a period of a year of two, especially with an increase in minorities and people returning to school from the workforce in times of a poor economy. So perhaps the point slip in one year is not significant. It's the trend that should matter.
Which brings me back to the case for reading. It pains me daily to hear adults and their offspring using erroneous conjugation of the common English verbs 'to do,' 'to see,' 'to be.' (I done my homework and we was headed to the movie where we seen the new Batman flick.) Perhaps this Ozark, colloquial slang numbs the senses when heard constantly, though I have yet to succumb, having surrounded myself with reading material written in 'proper' grammatical style for the most part . Does it indicate intelligence? Probably not, but it can affect test scores in grading an SAT essay. Is proper grammar 'out of date?' I don't think so. Many people still prefer the King James Version of the bible and many of us still read Edgar Allen Poe's works, or
Corelli's Mandolin with a little help from our dictionaries.
One function of education is to teach students to adapt to situational variations and upgrade their vocabularies. While we may not use terminology referring to horse and buggy accoutrements on a daily basis, we still, on occasion of reading a Sherlock Holmes adventure or Dumas novel, upgrade our own knowledge of 'obsolete' terminology in order to add to our understanding. I doubt that the SAT tests intentionally dip into obscurity for their testing material.
So, are we seeing a disturbing trend? I hope not, but the abandonment of intellectual pursuits such as reading in favor of zombie zapping on the computer can't help but result in reduced verbal skills among our youth and the perhaps inevitable decline in test scores as written by educators locked into accepted standards of yesterday and today. It is impossible to evaluate student potential fairly with the relative simplicity of an SAT test, but it's the best we have, it's a fairly stable benchmark, and it's better than guessing.