OK, class, let’s review…
1. Paying school kids to improve their standardized tests with everything from cell phone minutes to cold, hard cash is good.
2. Paying bonuses to teachers whose students do well on standardized tests is also good.
3. Paying college students to retake the SATs and improve the school’s rankings is very, very…bad?
Baylor University finds itself in the crosshairs over their decision to offer incoming freshmen a $300 credit at the campus bookstore to retake the SAT. Students who raised their scores by 50 points or more received $1,000 a year in merit scholarship aid. Faculty at the school are criticizing the policy as “academically dishonest.” Although no one is saying so directly, it’s widely assumed Baylor’s goal is to move up the annual U.S. News college rankings by having the frosh retake the test and report the higher scores.
I’m shocked, shocked! I’ve said many times in this space that I’m agnostic on the whole miasma of incentives. As a pragmatist, I’m willing to consider any legitimate means to improve student achievement, even I find the idea of bribing children to act in their own best interests a bit revolting. But let’s not delude ourselves that incentives, whether internal or external, do not subvert intrinsic motivation and invite widespread gaming of the system. Incentives are by definition gaming the system. What Baylor has done is at worst a few degrees lower down the inevitable slippery slope. I’ve seen plenty of elementary school students fail miserably on standardized tests, retake the test after a few desultory weeks in summer school and suddenly they’re on grade level. Now that’s shocking.
“I’m just astounded that rankings would drive policy to such an extent,” Philip A. Ballinger, the director of admissions at the University of Washington in Seattle tells the Times. “It’s just rotten all around. It’s just like all of a sudden people removed their brains and went to Mars.”
He was referring to the Baylor scandal.
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The solution to people gaming the system isn’t to outlaw the trickiness, it’s to change the system. That is, whatever you’re actually measuring is what people are going to focus on, so if you only measure the highest SAT scores without regard to when the test was taken (as seems to be the case here) then of course people are going to keep trying until they get a score they’re happy with.
In a way, I’m not really sure what the problem is. If a student is capable of getting a higher score, why not encourage the student to re-take? Doesn’t this process carry a double-benefit to the student?
Isn’t this just taking money away from advertising/marketing and turning it into scholarships? Isn’t that good? The alternative is probably the school spends at least $300 more per student on mailings, and that’s much more ridiculous.
And don’t we as educators, in general, find school rankings to be frustrating/silly already because they only measure select criteria? Isn’t this kind of U.S. News getting what they deserve for only measuring the highest SAT scores?
Even if you don’t agree with any of the above, realize that this isn’t a new practice. My high school paid for me to take PSAT prep classes because they identified me as a likely candidate to become a national merit scholar. My college gave me a huge scholarship because I was a national merit scholar. Both schools spent disproportionate amounts of money on me because they knew that they were judged by the number of NMScholars they’d have…they wanted to raise their numbers as much as they wanted to educate me.
I think it’s safe to say that the majority of schools do things like this to raise their U.S. News rankings. And, if Baylor is willing to be this innovative, then they’re probably already doing all the same things everyone else is doing.
Anyway, I agree that gaming the system is usually pretty disgusting, but yelling at Baylor isn’t going to solve anything. You’ve got to persuade U.S. News to change what they measure.
Is the thinking that kids will do significantly better on the SAT once they’ve actually gotten accepted to college because they don’t have all the anxiety about the application process hanging over their heads?
I took the PSAT twice, the SAT twice, and the GRE once. I did improve about 100 points between the very first PSAT I took in 10th grade and the 2nd PSAT in 11th. But all the rest were about the same. I don’t think taking it again as an incoming freshman would’ve resulted in a significantly different score, either.