Three decades ago, the College Board “recentered” the SAT. Now, it’s “recalibrating” Advanced Placement. Though both adjustments in these enormously influential testing programs can be justified by psychometricians, both are also probable examples of what the late Senator Daniel P. Moynihan famously termed “defining deviancy down.”
Citing Durkheim, Moynihan was referring mostly to crime that was rising across much of the country when he wrote in 1993, but his seminal essay addressed education, too. He observed that America was growing accustomed to low achievement and failing schools—this just ten years after A Nation at Risk—as educators rationalized and justified shoddy performance rather than resolving to rectify it. Sometimes they excused faltering scores by blaming parents, home situations, and poverty. Rarely did they mention the extra funding that often followed weak achievement. (“There is good money to be made out of bad schools,” Moynihan noted.) Whatever the rationale, the key point was acceptance of mediocrity, not resolution to alter the situation.
One year later, the College Board set about to deal with SAT scores, which had been slipping since the mid-1960’s. Here, too, many explanations were given for the slippage, some of them based on actual evidence, such as the fact that many more students from more diverse backgrounds were taking the test. Yet all those explanations also radiated acceptance of the depressing status quo.
Yes, one can certainly contend that the College Board and ETS, which administers, scores, and analyzes the tests, are psychometric organizations charged with accurate measurement of what is, not zealous ed-reformers or wishful thinkers about what should be. But it didn’t smell quite right when they said all they were doing was making sure that the center of the score distribution returned to 500 (on the 200-800 scale) rather than the 424 it had fallen to. The reason the center had slipped was that overall student performance on the SAT had been declining for thirty years.
Here’s how Michael Winerip wrote about recentering in the New York Times in June 1994 in a piece titled “S.A.T. Increases the Average Score, by Fiat”:
The S.A.T. score of the average American high school student will soon be going up 100 points. However, that doesn’t mean that anyone is getting smarter. . . . The bottom score will still be 200 and the top 800, but it will be easier for everyone to get higher scores.
A 430 score on the verbal section of the S.A.T. will suddenly become a 510 under the new scoring method. A 730 verbal score will become an 800.
College Board officials know they are inviting potshots on this one. They know they are going to be accused of instantly turning a generation of Roger Marises into Babe Ruths.
He was surely right about potshots. Newsweek’s editorial about the SAT recentering was headlined “Merchants of Mediocrity.”
Fast forward to 2024, and the College Board is revising the scoring process for a gradually increasing portion of its principal revenue source, the Advanced Placement Program.
I’ve long been an ardent fan of AP, dating back to the days when it enabled me to skip my freshman year of college by obtaining credit for college-level work done in high school. (Thousands of others did likewise.) With Andrew Scanlan, I wrote a book lauding the AP program. Its “gold star” designation coming from many places, including my Fordham colleagues, makes it the gold standard for demonstrating academic excellence. It’s the best thing going for high school students who are capable of high-powered learning and acceleration. (IB is great, too, as are some “honors” and “dual credit” courses, but the latter categories have nothing akin to the uniform standards and external quality control of AP.) That’s why Andrew’s and my book is titled Learning in the Fast Lane.
Though College Board insiders and attendees at the AP program’s big annual confab have known about “recalibration” for several years, to date there’s been no public announcement or explanation for the changes. (I understand they’re working on one.) It fell to test-prep superstar John Moscatiello to break the news. Here’s a bit of his lengthy revelation:
The Advanced Placement program is undergoing a radical transformation. Over the last three years, the College Board has “recalibrated” seven of its most popular AP Exams so that approximately 500,000 more AP exams will earn a 3+ score this year than they would have without recalibration. If this process continues in other exams in the coming years (as we expect it will), approximately 1,000,000 more AP Exams every year will earn a 3+ score. The end result will be a win for AP students everywhere: millions of high school students will save millions of dollars in college credits in the coming years.
Note that he calls the change “a win” for students. That’s because high scores on AP exams do bring tangible benefits in college—and in getting into college: skipping introductory courses, getting into smaller seminar-type classes, often earning actual credit toward diplomas and thus potentially speeding up graduation, and saving some tuition dollars, not to mention wowing admissions committees with what one has accomplished during high school. Thus the more 3+ scores earned by more students, the bigger the “win.”
By contrast, Ira Stoll of The Editors sees the “recalibration”
. . . as part of an overall trend of confusing mediocrity with excellence, and of trying to address persistent racial and economic inequality by eliminating standardized testing and merit-based distinctions rather than by improving education and expanding opportunity. It’s less complicated to just give a student a higher grade on a test than it is to do the hard work needed to make sure the student can master the material. But at some point, when tasks that really matter are on the line—a patient on an operating table, an airplane being engineered, a presidential vote being cast in a swing state—the person doing the job needs to really know how to do it.