[CLOCK TICKING]
In the States, we have standardized tests,
called the SAT and the ACT.
Most high school juniors take them
at around the time they're applying for colleges.
In this episode, we're going to be talking about the SAT
specifically.
Test scores are a huge deal.
A majority of colleges require them when applying,
and a low score is bad news.
The SAT is thought to illustrate generally
how smart a student is and specifically
how well they're going to do during their first year
of college.
Except, maybe it doesn't.
Intelligence can be considered many things, and much
of it incredibly difficult to quantify.
Studies have shown that there are more accurate predictors
of success besides SAT scores, and those scores
seem to correlate just as much, if not more,
with things other than smarts.
Like, my SAT score was awful, but now my alma mater
invites me back to give advice to graduating seniors
because I have a YouTube show.
What's up now, mediocre prediction of success?
So if the SAT isn't just measuring intelligence,
what else is it measuring?
To answer this, we gotta do history.
The SAT became a test for students in 1926,
but it was based on an IQ test given to the army.
The army test was used to determine
who was fit to rise in the ranks, who
had the necessary mental machinery to become an officer.
But it was also a test of the test itself.
Would people take it?
Would it work?
What would the results be?
And wouldn't you know it, it's results,
according to Nicholas Lemann's book, The Big Test,
perfectly reproduced the pre-existing social order.
At the time, it was popularly thought
that Nordics were the most intelligent stock,
alpines next, and Mediterraneans, dumbest.
Said test confirmed this.
In other words, the test didn't describe individuals
so much as it justified attitudes towards people.
He would later recant on his beliefs.
But at the time, Carl Brigham, the man who wrote the test,
was a passionate eugenicist, someone
who believed that the future of humanity
could be improved through selective breeding.
Many early 20th century American academics, social reformers,
and scientists supported eugenics,
and they considered these tests an objective measure
of a biological fact.
Really, eugenics was just a pseudo-scientific justification
for racism and the exclusion of people considered inferior.
In 1926, the army IQ test became the SAT,
slightly more difficult and aimed at,
though not yet widely given, to college-aged students.
That wouldn't happen for awhile, but an important first step
in that direction was in the 1940s with Harvard President
James Conant's dedication to the idea
that education could make the country a better place.
It's a newer idea than you might think.
He thought anyone, which at the time
was a much more restrictive word than it is now,
should be able to get a serious education
and that this would establish an intellectual elite that could
lead the country to greatness.
And I mean, here we are back at a really weird relationship
between tests and social order.
But it still meant, no matter how much someone didn't
fit the old ideas of who should possess intelligence,
if they passed the test, they passed the test.
This is the ideal of the SAT and tests like it
and one of the reasons it managed to become so ubiquitous
in the States.
In the words of Mark Bauerlein, the chance
to compete against the sons of privilege
was necessary to fulfill the promise of democracy.
In America, anyone can make it, and the SAT
is one way to prove that no matter where you came from,
you can make it.
And to a certain degree, that is still true.
But the more we study it, the more
we realize that the SAT never fully escaped
it's not-awesome origins.
Originally, SAT stood for Scholastic Aptitude Test.
It was then change to Scholastic Assessment Test, SAT Reasoning
Test.
And as of 1997, those letters stand for nothing.
Like KFC, AT&T, BP, and the S in Harry S. Truman,
those letters front for no word.
In some sense, the SAT has always
been running from itself, and that's still true today.
The College Board knows that they have problems
and is trying to fix them.
We must confront the inequalities
that now surround assessment.
A bunch of studies, links in the doobly doo,
have shown that there is a significant difference
in the SAT scores of wealthy versus lower income students.
Male students tend to have higher scores
than female students, even though female students have
higher college matriculation and graduation rates.
Depending upon which study you read,
either white or Asian American students
tend to score better than any other race group.
The reasons for this are many, complicated to nail down
at the very least.
One thought is that the test-- the format,
language, references, the expected set of knowledge--
is simply more familiar, more culturally ingrained
for certain people.
Another factor is that wealthy families can afford test prep,
tutoring, and other extracurricular academic
training, sometimes collectively referred to
as shadow education, even though it's not
used to train their kids to be super villains.
The resources at particular schools matter,
as do the accomplishments of parents and friends, test
costs, and of course time spent learning on your own.
SAT results tend to align, still today,
with common expectations of the types of people
that possess intelligence.
Many people who have studied the tests
have shown it to be just as much a test of wealth and resource
as it is of knowledge and aptitude,
maybe no more than academic achievement in general, though.
Just as when it started, the problem
isn't the SAT alone but the broader context
in which it's written and given, which
raises an even bigger question.
If it's potentially broken, why do so many colleges
continue to use or require it?
Well, a small but growing number don't.
And for those that still do, it's
about habit, the importance of selectivity ratings--
which don't even get me started.
But it's also about ease.
Standardized tests wouldn't be popular
if they weren't easy to grade.
In a way, the history of standardized tests
is also kind of the history of electronic computation.
Ideally, there is little to no human effort required
to score the sea of Scantrons scribbled upon every year.
But there are limits to what computation
is capable of scoring, grading, ranking, quantifying.
Ideally, our metrics for success are personalized and holistic,
and that would be reflected in our evaluation and assessment
processes.
But in reality, frequently success and high test score
are synonymous.
What standardized tests measure is considered success
because standardized tests can measure it.
There is a weird light at the end of this testing tunnel.
There is a growing SAT optional movement among colleges.
There's a huge SAT overhaul coming in 2016,
and some testing orgs want to test for things like creativity
or collaboration in the future.
But I wonder if this is educational feature creep,
fixing tests with more tests because that's
how we think and live, especially in education,
by the numbers.
It's easy, and there are business models in place
to do it the way we've been doing it.
And so I wonder what's going to be
the technological advancement, the change in attitude
or even educational policy that eventually encourages
us to stop trying to standardize that which seemingly resists
standardization.
What do you guys think?
Will we ever move beyond standardized testing?
And if we do, what, ideally, would come next?
Let us know in the comments.
And Hansel and Gretel are to sweets
as Idea Channel is to-- A, records; B, T-shirts; C,
subscribers; D, all of the above.
Turns out the plural of Amiibo is actually Amiibo,
though as some people pointed out on Twitter,
it could be empty wallet.
Let's see what you guys had to say about collecting.
First thing's first, next week's episode
is going to be about the new Thor comic book written
by Jason Aaron.
We're not going to be spoiling a whole lot.
We're just going to be talking about the first couple books.
But if you want to be completely spoiler free,
that's a thing that you can read over the next week.
It should be pretty easy to get ahold of.
And also, I am going to be at the Phoenix Comic Con
at the end of May.
So if you are planning on going to that, I will be there.
We're going to be doing a panel, and I
think we're also going to be doing
office hours on that Friday night
at a place called The Deuce.
We don't have a specific time picked out quite yet,
so keep an eye out here and also on Twitter.
And I'll let you know when you can come
and hang out and say hi if you live in and around the Phoenix,
which I'm very excited to go back to.
OK, so Jedibob 5 on the subreddit and a bunch of other
people saw connection between last week's episode
and collectible card games, like Magic the Gathering
and Yu-Gi-Oh!.
And we're going to talk a little bit about this
when we eventually get to the tweet of the week, which
is related.
But, yeah, I mean, I totally agree with this,
and this is something that's definitely
part of the conversation, that these are objects that
have a collectibility to them but then can also
be very highly consumed.
And there's an economy that exists around them.
And, yeah, I would say that the difference maybe
comes down to how the object is used,
and I think that's one of the things that's really
interesting about card games.
But, yeah, this is a great point.
Lonerstuck talks about how gaming itself is also
a kind of collecting, and this is a thing
that I've been thinking about over the last week.
And I think I agree, and I think that's one
of the other things that makes Amiibo so interesting
is that they allow you to create these instances of these really
great and nice little objects that reference CDs
or cartridges or things that aren't just nice to behold.
It's not nice.
I don't have a great time looking at all of my old Super
Nintendo cartridges.
And so having an Amiibo to represent
that collection or those objects in some way
is a good, I don't know, stand-in.
I don't know if that's the right word,
but, yeah, I totally agree.
And I've been sort of chewing on this idea for a long time.
theMoporter suggests that the missing component
of this conversation is aesthetics,
and that that is an important part
of the process of collecting.
And I think that this is a really interesting question
because it asks what the aesthetic experience is.
Like, is the aesthetic experience
a kind of consumption?
When you are collecting things that you
have an aesthetic experience of, are you
attempting to associate yourself with the beauty
that you perceive in them?
Because I might argue that you can't actually
have a purely aesthetic experience of a collection
that you have invested time and money into.
And I think that this is also related to something
that Ilmari Thornton wrote about Nintendo using
the Amiibo to cash in, as it were, on nostalgia, which
I see as another possibly aesthetic experience.
So, yeah, I think these are really
great point and things that are very much, I see,
being related to another.
Voiced mentions another interesting way
to view Amiibo, which is as DLC.
And I think this brings up the idea again
of kind of coerced consumerism through collection.
And if you view it as DLC and you want the full game
when a game comes out, you know, how do Amiibo
relate to this desire for completionism
when you're playing video games?
And this is something actually that Francis,
who we showed in the last video, said some interesting things
about in one of his videos.
And actually, on the subject of Francis,
there were a couple people letting
us know that we should make it clear that Francis
is an ironic character that someone plays.
I didn't know that there is a misunderstanding about the fact
that Francis is a character and that that is something
we should make explicit.
So for clarity's sake, I will make that explicit.
Francis, the guy who was shouting
very loudly in last week's video,
he's not actually like that.
He's a character.
Turns out I might have actually been the weird kid who
didn't really play with their toys the way
that they were played with in the commercials
because there were a lot of people
saying that they definitely play with their toys.
There were some people who had the same experience that I did,
but they seem to be few and far between.
So we'll put a link to the people describing
their relationships to their toys
when they were younger in the doobly doo,
along with every other comment.
Ignoramus, let's just say, you ain't seen nothing yet.
Also, Ilmari, look.
It's your record.
This week's episode was brought to you
by the hard work of these nonstandard individuals.
We have a Facebook, an IRC, and a subreddit links
in the doobly doo.
And the tweet of the week comes from Kiyote,
who points us towards an NPR show about magic cards
and how Wizards of the Coast saw collectors
as hindering gameplay, and so they sought
to burst the collector bubble.
It's a really great lesson.
And, hey, in case you were wondering,
this episode of Idea Channel was brought to by Squarespace.
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