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October 7, 2002 10:00 a.m. The SAT Asterisk Another testing concession. By Peter Wood

n the back of my Massachusetts driver's license is the notation "Restrict. B: Corrective lenses." In the event that a state trooper were to stop me and to notice that I am not wearing my glasses, I would be in trouble. Rightly so: Without my glasses, I would pose a hazard to other drivers. Massachusetts knows this because I wore glasses when I took the eye exam for my driver's license. In effect, I took the exam under "nonstandard conditions" and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts prudently took notice.

The principle in this case would seem to be a fairly general one. If you use the equivalent of corrective lenses to pass a test, people who depend on the test as an accurate measure of your ability should be aware of that circumstance. In mid-July, however, the College Board decided otherwise.

For years, the College Board had added an asterisk to its official transcripts of the scores of students who take the SAT under "non-standard conditions." The asterisk provided far less information than would have been desirable, but at least it was something. A college-admissions office couldn't tell from the asterisk alone whether the "non-standard conditions" meant the test taker had been allowed extra time, a room by himself, or some other kind of help, but at least it flagged the scores as off the standard scale.

In July, however, the College Board announced that it was eliminating the asterisk, effective September 2003. One result is that college-admissions offices henceforth will be unable to distinguish students who receive extra time to complete the test because they have been diagnosed as "disabled," from students who take the test within the normally allotted time.

The disability-rights crowd, of course, cheered. The stigma of the asterisk was gone. The fight to wipe it away began in 1998, when Mr. Mark Breimhorst took a different test administered by the Educational Testing Service. Mr. Breimhorst, who wanted to enroll in an MBA program, took the Graduate Management Admission Test, (GMAT) and because of his disability — he has no hands and had to take the test on a computer using a tracking ball — he was granted 25 percent extra time. His test transcript received the asterisk, and after Mr. Breimhorst's application was turned down by two schools, he sued the testing service for violating his rights under the Americans With Disabilities Act.

The Educational Testing Service settled the suit in February 2001, agreeing to eliminate the asterisk for the GMAT and some other tests. Independently, the College Board decided to review its use of the asterisk on the SATs, the tests taken by some two million high-school students each year as a step toward admission to undergraduate college. Of that two million, about 40,000 — two percent — have received accommodations and an asterisk in recent years.

It appears likely, however, that the percentage of test takers receiving accommodations is about to jump. The New York Times recently ran a front-page story about the boom in business for the folks who diagnosis learning disabilities. It turns out that, since the College Board's decision in July to ditch the asterisk, parents of college-bound high-school seniors have been flocking with their sons and daughters to psychologists and M.D.s in hopes of obtaining the kind of diagnosis that translates into time-and-a-half or double time on the SAT.

The services of the edu-shrinks aren't cheap, but dollar for dollar, they probably deliver better results than the companies that merely prep students for the college boards. After all, for most students the hardest part of the SATs is working under the pressure of the clock.

So the immediate effect of the College Board's decision to excise the asterisk has been to set off a gold rush for learning disability diagnoses. This was entirely predictable; the College Board surely knew it would happen, and must have concluded that it was an acceptable cost. But is it?

We won't know the full results for a while, but it appears that the College Board has taken yet another step toward destroying the credibility of the SAT. College-admissions officers not only will be unable to distinguish between students who took the SAT under standard conditions and those who received extra time, but they will also be faced with a growing percentage of students who won their extra time through phony or very doubtful diagnoses. The decision badly compromises the value of the SAT as a standard yardstick.

The College Board's decision about the asterisk, however, is not an isolated error in judgment. Rather, it is one more step in a descent that began in April 1995, when the College Board "re-centered" the SATs. That move inflated test scores of most students by hundreds of points, and essentially destroyed the test's usefulness for intergenerational comparisons. Is the class of 2002 as well prepared for college as the class of 1962 or the class of 1992? Don't look to the SAT for evidence. We have eliminated that bit of embarrassing data.

Re-centering of the SATs had some other effects too. It ended the value of the SAT as a useful measure of differences among the best students, who were suddenly promoted to an indistinguishable cluster at the top of the scale. In exchange for losing the ability to draw distinctions among highly talented students, we received a system of scoring that provided much more detail about the differences among not-so-talented and mediocre students. The change may have been helpful to colleges and universities that concentrate on mediocrity but it certainly didn't serve the institutions that set high admissions standards.

The College Board's war on academic excellence took two other big steps forward this year: elimination of the verbal analogies section and the addition of a writing test. Stanley Kurtz has covered these pusillanimous decisions well in his NRO articles (see "Testing Debate" and "Dumbing Down the SAT" and "Seeing Our Future").

Critics of the verbal analogies section of the SAT said it was diverting students from more valuable kinds of learning. But as Kurtz points out, the real reason it was jettisoned had to with identity politics. On average, African-American and Hispanic students performed poorly on the verbal analogies. Much of the criticism of the test was aimed at erasing this evidence of disparate performance — never mind that it is some of the strongest evidence of racial and ethnic disparities in the quality of public education.

The addition of an SAT writing test looks on the surface like a reassertion of academic rigor, but it is not really. The test will be graded on a simple scale that allows a great deal of room for subjective judgments. Add that some students will have twice as long as others to compose their little essays and that, under the anti-asterisk rule, there is no way to tell the difference, and the SAT writing test looks like pretty thin gruel.

Thus the College Board's decision to cave in to the disability advocates is just another concession in a string of concessions to pressure groups that dislike the concept of a single, objective, and neutral measure of academic ability. Once upon a time, the College Board was an institution that higher education could count on to support academic standards, but no more. It has become dominated, like so much of higher education, by people unable to see and stand up for the principles they are entrusted to uphold. The lure of playing identity politics proved too strong; the gratification of winning praise from the advocacy groups too irresistible.

The case of the purloined asterisk really turns on the political power of disability groups that are indifferent to the educational damage that they are inflicting. If they cared, they would have linked their campaign to get rid of the asterisk with strong steps to ensure that "learning disability" diagnoses are restricted to those who have genuine disabilities, not just kids seeking an edge on the SATs. The problem, however, lies deep in the disability movement, which is as eager as an interest group to build its base.

Some learning disabilities are patently over-diagnosed and some look like little more than pseudo-scientific figments. Such fugitive disorders have been conjured up as a way of medicalizing ordinary intellectual weaknesses and in-aptitudes. In our culture of complaint, many Americans confronted with the fact that we are not good at some academic subject, would rather postulate a hidden brain dysfunction and demand accommodations from schools and colleges than attempt to overcome the difficulty by dint of repeated tries and hard work.

In that sense, the "learning disability" movement has already shown itself an irresponsible force in our society. In its excesses, it undermines educational standards.

Unfortunately, the College Board, by easing the way for diagnostic fakery, has just compounded the problem.