The Case for SAT Words

James Murphy, via Carrie Zellmer:

On several occasions in the past year, David Coleman, the president of the College Board, which administers the SAT, has suggested that changes need to be made to the vocabulary tested on the exam. In a talk he gave at the Brookings Institution a year ago, Coleman remarked, "I think when you think about vocabulary on exams, you know, how SAT words are famous as the words you will never use again? You know, you study them in high school and you're like, gosh, I've never seen this before, and I probably never shall." Coleman co-opted an old criticism of the SAT, that it forced students to learn difficult vocabulary that is useless for much of anything other than scoring well on the exam. He went on, "Why wouldn't it be the opposite? Why wouldn't you have a body of language on the SAT that's the words you most need to know and be ready to use again and again? Words like transform, deliberate, hypothesis, right?"

Jim Montoya, the College Board's Vice President of Higher Education, in an interview on NPR, reiterated Coleman's criticism of "SAT words." Asked why the SAT is "always [testing] the word 'unscrupulous'," Montoya replied, "Yes, you're right. It's one of those words people identify as an SAT word. All I can say is that as we move forward, one of the things we want to make absolutely certain of is that the vocabulary that students are expected to know will be vocabulary that they will be able to use as college students, and which will be valuable to them."

Coleman's comments on vocabulary provoked little response at the time, although one commentator accused him of "sending a message that devalues language." The notion that some words are not worth knowing is bound to raise the hackles not only of people who love the wealth and power of all kinds of words, including fancy ones, but also of people who know just how much importance educational experts attribute to what they call "lexical richness," or a large and diverse vocabulary. Coleman just so happens to be both of those kinds of people, and he understands that the question is less what vocabulary students should learn vocabulary than how they should learn it.

Posted by Jim Zellmer at December 12, 2013 12:18 AM
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