Well, the new SAT has arrived, and just as I predicted, the pressure to gut it has already begun. Saturday’s Los Angeles Times featured an op-ed piece by Kevin Zhou arguing that we need to move to a two track testing system–one for well off students and one for poor students. (Kevin Zhou is a high school junior, but this sort of thing doesn’t make it into The Los Angeles Times without being pushed by adults.) Under this proposal, well off students would take the new SAT, which is now an achievement test rather than an aptitude test. But poor students would take an old fashioned SAT-type aptitude test. So let me see if I’ve got this right. The old SAT aptitude test was eliminated because poor and minority students didn’t do well enough on it. But now that the SAT has been turned into a challenging achievement test, poor students ought to be allowed to go back to the old aptitude test. That’s absurd. A two-track testing system takes the double standard of affirmative action to a whole new level of insanity. And how will we decide which students take which test? I’d like to see the school board meeting where that little problem gets resolved. I predicted this sort of thing in “Seeing Our Future.” What we’re seeing now is only the beginning of a whole series of pressures to gut the new test. And the new test will be vastly more susceptible to these pressure than the old one was. The fact that we’re getting this outrageous a proposal before the new test is even off the ground is a sign of just how messy this “reform” of the SAT is going to be. (For a history of my criticisms of the new SAT, find the link inside “Seeing Our Future” to my previous piece and keep following links backwards.)