Why The SAT Matters: Towards Developing Competitive 21st Century Thinking

This past year of teaching, I have become interested in thinking about how we can prepare high school students to take the SAT. Whereas critics of the SAT describe the SAT as putting certain students at a disadvantage, I have come to realize that the problem with the SAT test prep industry is that it has typically been geared towards already proficient students scoring style points for admissions into more selective universities. There seems to be little to no work in the space of the "non-Ivy League Market," a market that includes students that are preparing to be college and career ready who may not yet be college/career ready. Quite simply, some of the skills that are on the SAT are very important and are a difference maker in being successful after high school.

The New SAT was created from a group of employers and college professors that gave insight into what they were looking for in future students and employees. If you are one of these people, I invite you to think about what you look for. I can imagine that many employers and professors are looking for their future students/employees to be: "independent, self driven and efficient." I can imagine that there are some expectations of some reasoning skills like being able to reason with numbers, compute percentages, read graphs/establish relationships or understand the main idea of an argument.

1. SAT builds concise and efficient thinking: Yesterday, I attended a workshop on the SAT done by a college prep company out of the Chicago area. We were practicing questions on the verbal section. At first, it looked intimidating even for me. All sorts of dense text. But then our coach had us read one paragraph at a time. He gave the simple advice of writing a #Hashtag for each #paragraph. This strategy was powerful because it invited us to read purposefully, concisely and efficiently. I remember back in the days of college reading dense philosophy articles. A strategy like #reading might have come quite in handy. To pull one's weight in academia or even a meeting in a job, people just want to hear a quick summary of the main ideas presented.

Consider the example below of an SAT passage:

The student who spends their time reading the entire passage in sequence has underlined practically everything. They spend their time buried deep into the details without taking a birds eye view of what the main idea of the passage is. Looking at a passage without taking it a paragraph at a time is inefficient and invites one to get a headache.

With #Reading, a student is able to look at a paragraph at a time and develop a hashtag for a paragraph. Even abstract content becomes more inviting and students can explore main ideas more efficiently and concisely.

One could then summarize and write #TinToCasserite to establish the relationship between Tin and Casserite.

In the real world, employees that are able to zoom into a single task and methodically execute the single task are able to work much more efficiently than someone that is struggling to sort through a list of many tasks.

1. Good SAT Test Takers Develop a Good Understanding of Their Limits: I often have found that a lot of our students that are not college or career ready fall under a sort of faulty logic that goes in as follows: "This problem is hard and I am not going to get it. Therefore, every problem after this problem is hard and I am not going to get it." Consequently, many of these students are quick to give up and engage in work avoidance type of behaviors. Meanwhile, effective SAT test takers might not know every problem in the book but they have a handle of what each question's difficulty is.

To often we train our students to be correct too often. Students push the panic button when they aren't getting things correct 70 percent of the time. This spring, I asked some of my high school juniors what percent of questions they need to get correct to get a 500 on the SAT math section. The median student said 35/58 and some even said that one needed to get 80 percent of the questions correct.

Suppose that a hypothetical 500 level math student comes into the SAT thinking that he needs to get 80 percent of the questions correct and is getting around 40 percent of the questions correct. The student would perceive that he is doing poorly and may be more likely to engage in behaviors such as giving up or careless guessing. However, if this student understands that he only needs to get around 50 percent of the questions correct to get a 500, he will likely feel better as he is taking the SAT and consequently perform higher.

Effective employees often have a good idea of what their strengths and weaknesses are. They are able to establish what their limits are. Therefore, many of these employees are able to be reflective in their work and not give up the moment work gets tough.

3. SAT Encourages Students to Develop Basic Numeracy Skills: I have been embarking on a project recently called 5Steps to a 500+ on the Math SAT where I lay out 5 manageable steps to get a 500 or better on the SAT Math section. The steps that are created as follows:

STEP 1: Know what a solution means

STEP 2: Know how to interpret y=mx+b in real life

STEP 3: Think proportionally

STEP 4: Know what "average means"

STEP 5: Break Problems Down Into Smaller more manageable problems

Read this list! Have you used these 5 steps in your career or in your everyday life? Thought so!

Anyone listening to the news or the weather needs to know what average means when they use terms like "median household income" or "average high temperature"

Anyone in a finance office at a bank or a car dealership needs to be able to think proportionally and in terms of percentages when they are taking out an auto loan or a credit card.

Anyone who wants to understand the relationship between something (i.e. whether their diet will lead to them becoming diabetic) will need to be able to interpret a y=mx+b equation.

For those interested in learning more about how I view the math SAT, check out my site: tinyurl.com/5Steps500

The SAT does not have to be a punitive test that makes high school students miserable. It can be presented in a way that prepares students to become concise, efficient thinkers. Some of the strategies and the discipline that can be gained from preparing for the SAT can teach students valuable life lessons on how to think/work efficiently and use logic/reasoning in their everyday world as they come out into the 21st Century.