Scholastic Asinine Test

 

Back in the early 80's, I was getting ready to apply to colleges. I played a sport, logged some community service and, of course, I got good grades. Every college bound hopeful soldiered through the Scholastic Aptitude Test or SAT for short. An important metric even today, the exam is taken by students as a practice test in ninth grade often followed by two additional attempts at the real thing.

Back then, there were no prep classes offered in high school. As the youngest baby boomer, the generation millennials often accuse of stealing their jobs and opportunities, I had to take the SAT straight up in a not so safe space without extra time allotted for an inability to sit still. I might not have had to walk to school barefoot in the snow, but when it came to college admissions, I was on my own.
 
One math problem I had on the SAT puzzled me for years until I recently looked up the answer. It was as follows. Given the angle, what is the value of theta?


Bullshit Math Problem

 The four possible answers were,
 
          A) 150°
          B) 30°
          C) 135°
          D) 90°

The issue here is that the 90° in the graph is clearly wrong. It looks more like 45°. Faced with this on the test, I wasn't sure what to do. I threw out "A" and "B" as they didn't make any sense, but do you ignore the data in favor of the plot or do you take the given number as gospel? I finally settled on this approach,

Go with what it really is.

This meant that I would ignore the 90° on the graph and pick the supplement to 45°, that is, C) 135°. The correct answer is D) 90°. According to the authors of the Scholastic Aptitude Test, one should ignore reality in favor of bogus data. Back when I took the test, word analogies in the English section were commonplace. Those were questions that read like this,

Planet is to ball as _______ is to _______.

The answer is something like "dice : box" except the actual test questions weren't that easy, and there were a lot of them too. The test was more like this,

ABSTRUSE : ALLOGAMY ::

A) alysm : crepuscular
B) lucubration : zeugma
C) persiflage : panglossian
D) levament : mytacism

I didn't know what the first two words meant, let alone any of the answers. Unless you read a lot of books or Latin was your first language, you hadn't a prayer of answering these questions. This all changed in 2005 when it was determined that word analogies were biased towards certain socioeconomic groups. The question identified as advantageous to coastal elites was,

RUNNER : MARATHON ::

A) envoy : embassy
B) martyr : massacre
C) oarsman : regatta
D) referee : tournament
E) horse : stable

The correct answer is "C" but unless you wear oxfords, salmon shorts and Jesus sandals, it looks like it will be Two Rivers Community college for you. I didn't do well on the verbal reasoning section that was later renamed "critical reading." You had to read several paragraphs about volcanoes or something, then answer questions like,

Which choice best defines the main purpose of this article?

All four possible answers would appear in the text. Not knowing how to approach these problems, I would number the answers in the order that they appeared in the passage, then I would discard the middle two, and select either the first or last whichever seemed best. I later learned that this was completely wrong. A complicated technique described to me by a college admissions advisor involved looking at each paragraph for synonyms used in the answers to narrow it down without reading the entire passage. She explained that doing well on the SAT is about time management so you have to arrive at the answer quickly by skimming for clues.

Today, there are many guides that students may purchase which will teach them how to improve their SAT scores. Additionally, if you come from money, you can hire a tutor who specializes in SAT preparedness. Even though a stellar score will help get you into an elite academic institution, it's widely accepted that it isn't a measure of how well you will do in college. How much effort you are willing to put into something is not determined by an aptitude test, the score for which today seems more connected to your parent's income than a student's ability. Then again, if your parents are rich, you could always have them stroke a check to a real estate holding company after which a coach will put you on the roster of the lacrosse team to justify the athletic scholarship the exclusive school will offer you. You won't even have to go to any practices or play in any games. That seems way easier and certainly less work on your part.

In 2011, I saw the movie Moneyball which was about the Oakland Athletics baseball team and how the general manger, Billy Beane, assembled a bunch of undervalued players. Beane hired a Harvard educated computer analyst, Paul DePodesta, who had no baseball analysis experience but theorized that the existing method of evaluating athletes which included factoring in the number of seasonal errors for each player was inadequate and misleading. DePodesta argued that the way to win at baseball was to get on base and not by worrying about how many times a player dropped the ball. So to in academics, optimizing on a student's performance on a standardized test is the wrong metric to assess suitability for higher education and as such is not a predictor of performance.

Now, if I had read the book by Michael Lewis on which Moneyball was based, I would've known that "mytacism" means an excessive or incorrect use of the sound of the letter "m" and that "persiflage" is light and slightly contemptuous mockery or banter.

I should have read more as a kid.