David Z. Hambrick and Christopher Chabris:

The College Board—the standardized testing behemoth that develops and administers the SAT and other tests—has redesigned its flagship product again. Beginning in spring 2016, the writing section will be optional, the reading section will no longer test “obscure” vocabulary words, and the math section will put more emphasis on solving problems with real-world relevance. Overall, as the College Board explains on its website, “The redesigned SAT will more closely reflect the real work of college and career, where a flexible command of evidence—whether found in text or graphic [sic]—is more important than ever.”
 
 A number of pressures may be behind this redesign. Perhaps it’s competition from the ACT, or fear that unless the SAT is made to seem more relevant, more colleges will go the way of Wake Forest, Brandeis, and Sarah Lawrence and join the “test optional admissions movement,” which already boasts several hundred members. Or maybe it’s the wave of bad press that standardized testing, in general, has received over the past few years.
 
 Critics of standardized testing are grabbing this opportunity to take their best shot at the SAT. They make two main arguments. The first is simply that a person’s SAT score is essentially meaningless—that it says nothing about whether that person will go on to succeed in college. Leon Botstein, president of Bard College and longtime standardized testing critic, wrote in Time that the SAT “needs to be abandoned and replaced,” and added:

Richard Adams:

White university students at English universities receive significantly higher degree grades than their peers from minority ethnic backgrounds with the same entry qualifications, research from the Higher Education Funding Council for England has revealed.
 
 The report found that 72% of white students who have grades BBB at A-level went on to gain a first or upper second-class degree, compared with only 56% of Asian students and 53% of black students. The figures – from the most comprehensive study of its kind – raise concerns that universities in England are failing to support black and Asian undergraduates during their student career, despite improved efforts to recruit them.

Richard Perez-Pena:

As the anthropology instructor engaged her class, a fault line quickly developed. American students answered and asked questions, even offered opinions, but the foreigners — half the class, most from China — sat in silence.
 
 It became clear that some had understood little of the lecture here at Oregon State University and were not ready to be enrolled. In fact, they are not, at least not yet.
 
 Instead, those students fit into a fast-growing and lucrative niche in higher education, of efforts to increase enrollment of foreigners with transitional programs to bridge the cultural divide — often a chasm — between what it means to be a college student in their own countries and in the United States. Oregon State’s program, a joint venture with a private company, Into University Partnerships, prepares students to move into the university’s mainstream after a year, as Oregon State sophomores.

Richard Russell:

One reform measure — which no doubt is not in the docket — would be easy to propose, extremely beneficial to PME’s quality, and of lasting intellectual benefit to graduates as future military leaders: banning PowerPoint on campus. PowerPoint has become so acculturated and institutionalized in the military writ large that it retards the quality of research, analysis, planning, operations, strategy, and decision making at all levels of command. The banning of PowerPoint in PME for use by students, faculty, administrators, and guest speakers, however, would be horrifically difficult to implement given its powerful hold over the minds and practices of today’s military.
 
 Numerous serious strategists, practitioners, and soldier-scholars over the years have bemoaned and warned of the dangers of the military’s PowerPoint obsession. These warnings from the lips and pens of serious strategic thinkers should squash any belittling dismissals that PowerPoint’s use is not an issue for serious curriculum reform. Marine General James Mattis, former combatant commander of Central Command and no one to mess with on the battlefield, publicly commented, “PowerPoint makes us stupid.” Accomplished conventional and unconventional warfighter, best-selling author, and soon-to-be three-star general H. R. McMaster observed, “It’s dangerous because it can create the illusion of understanding and the illusion of control.”

Claudio Sanchez (NPR)
The College Board, sponsor of the SAT, says that roughly six out of 10 college-bound high school students who took the test were so lacking in their reading, writing and math skills, they were unprepared for college level work.
The College Board is calling for big changes to better prepare students for college and career.
Stagnant Scores
The average SAT score this year was 1498 out of a possible 2400. It’s been roughly the same for the last five years.
“And we at the College Board are concerned,” says David Coleman, the board’s president.
In a conference call with reporters, Coleman said his biggest concern is the widening gap in scores along racial and ethnic lines. This year Asian students had the highest overall average scores in reading, writing and math, followed by whites, and then Latinos. Black students had the lowest average scores. Coleman said it’s time to do something about it, not just sit back and report how poorly prepared students are for college and career.
“Simply put, the College Board will go beyond simply delivering assessments to actually transforming the daily work that students are doing,” Coleman says.
Coleman wants to work with schools to make coursework tougher and make sure students have access to more demanding honors and advanced placement courses, because right now, most students don’t. Most worrisome of all, Coleman says, “minority students, underrepresented students, have less access.” more