Verbal Aptitude

I had heard every single SAT joke ever invented by mid-July. Several times. I had heard that Jesus Christ didn't get into an Ivy League college because he got nailed on the Boards. Also that the Educational Testing Service (ETS) scores the tests by kicking them downstairs or by flipping coins. At the College Board, they collect jokes like this and tape them to the outside of their office doors. It helps them feel they're in touch with the outside world.

The folks at the College Board, most of whom hadn't seen a real live student since 1950, were more amused than anything else at the kinds of questions I told them my friends kept asking me, like, "Oh, you're working for the ETS. Wanna touch up my transcript?" Or, "Oh, you're making up the SATs. My sister's going into her senior year..."

As a lowly intern who spent most of the summer writing about developed' verbal and mathematical abilities and the Standard Error of Measurement, I soon stopped trying to explain that I wasn't anywhere near the tests, and that I didn't work for ETS at all. "You see, the College Board, which is in New York, owns the tests, and it has a contract with the guys in Princeton, who own the questions on the tests..."

Once I got two "business" calls in one day: one from a former high school acquaintance and one from a former close friend with a sister. On another, slightly more interesting afternoon, I convinced my boss to order my parents' SAT scores from the ETS archives and mail them home. My parents were all for the idea. When they went to high school, before the first enlightenment of the test-taking industry, nobody ever found out his or her own scores. The folks did, though, stipulate that the scores be retrieved separately and sent home in different envelopes. As far as I know, neither of them has divulged their secret yet to the other.

The College Board, like most centers of power, can be a very comfortable place to work. The lunch spreads are excellent (though not as good as at the notoriously plush ETS plantation in Princeton, N.J.), and quality doughnuts give staff meetings--to which, as a bright-eyed youngster, I was kindly invited--an air of more optimism than the subject matter demands.

"If we want to reform American education," one administrator proclaimed at the July conclave, "we have to do this properly." The nods around the room were not so much enthusiastic as pleasantly accepting. One officer who has kids here stopped listening altogether and leaned over to ask me what House I was going to live in next year.

Life is not, of course, always so easy at the College Board. The SAT got in trouble about three years ago, when Ralph Nader and some colleagues accused the Board and ETS of using biased test questions, loading them with arbitrary or down-right incorrect answers, and keeping too tight a stranglehold on college admissions and education in general with the statistics they spewed out. Under pressure from Nader and others, New York State passed a "truth-in-testing" law requiring that the tests be gradually "demystified."

By fall of 1980, New York State students could order their SAT questions and answers after the test and check them over. A few months later, the PSAT joined the ranks of the demystified; since the shorter test was made up of old SAT questions, the vice presidents figured, why not? Fewer than 5 percent of the first wave of students took the opportunity, but it was enough to give the folks at the Board some sleepless nights. From two zealous post-test takers came successful challenges--one straightforward and stupid mistake concerning positive and negative integers, and one conundrum in three-dimensional geometry, which threw the entire Department of Access Services into a tizzy. "Pyramids," my supervisor was still groaning last summer, months after the third and fourth possible solutions to the question had hit the national press. "Do these people know what they've done to me? I have nightmares about pyramids. I'll never go to Egypt." P>Somewhere in the hullabaloo, the Board's various executive directors and Program Services Officers--the ones dealing with the fluctuating legislation and sparring with reporters over nuances in PSAT answer sheets--discovered a new concerned group: students. Ordinarily the Board shapes policies around input from ETS, which as distributor deals with high school and college administrators and guidance counselors, who deal with kids. Most of the relevant top brass also take the SAT every few years to see how the land lies.

But all of a sudden students seemed interested, so the Board underwent "outreach." It formed a student panel with a fanciful name--the Advisory Panel on Student Concerns--by asking friendly high school guidance counselors to spread the word and find some eligible, intelligent teenagers. The Board placed a couple more on their membership councils which convene periodically on subjects like Entrance Service or Minority Affairs. Somewhere along the line, they also hired me for the summer.

My rather whimsical, and unsolicited, job application had run sort of perpendicular to the Board's vague inquiries as to whether anyone knew anyone who'd like to be an intern. I wasn't related to anybody in particular, and no one's guidance counselor had any prior reports on me. All these qualities made me the ideal conveyer of the collective "student viewpoint" on anything they happened to ask me about.

So I settled down in an office previously occupied by air-conditioning equipment and started reading about predictive validity studies and regional college-bound averages. My assignment: to revise a group of publications sent to every high school senior since the beginning of time, or of the SAT. Be sure to identify the precise relationship between the two words before applying it to the second pair. It is unlikely that random guessing will change your score significantly, and it does take time. If the question is too difficult for you, go on to the rest of the section. Come back to the difficult questions later if you have time. And so on through August.