Back in December, Governor Markell and Secretary of Education Dr. Steven Godowsky announced the Smarter Balanced Assessment was going away for high school juniors. Because the College Board aligned the SAT with Common Core, why take both tests? Today is the annual SAT day for the juniors. The state pays for all of them to take the test. I am very curious how the scores will be this year with the realignment. I haven’t heard a peep about any parent wanting to opt their kid out of the SAT. Or as I like to call it, Smarter Balanced Junior.
I actually heard one district gave all the 9th and 10th graders off tomorrow. Did others do this as well and why? Does the testing environment have to be in the right alignment as well for the juniors? And why not give the seniors off as well? Only in Delaware! We are a state that is obsessed from the top down with testing. We can’t escape from it because our Governor, legislators, and the DOE believe it is essential. But our hubris comes at a price. We don’t look at the quality, only the results.
The Season Of Myths 
It would not be a good idea for anyone to opt out of the SAT because most colleges still require it. That being said, I hope to see more universities opening up other options that don’t require the SAT in the coming years. Temple University is one school that did something like that recently.
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I agree on this one. What will be interesting though is how the scores fall this year. By essentially turning this into Smarter Balanced Junior, I expect the scores to have a massive drop, further eroding the need for this test to begin with.
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I think as always it should depend on the kid. If they are going into the military or not to college for whatever reasons they may have, they should have the option to opt out if they choose. Once again, it can not and will never be a one size fits all so the state DOE and governor need to get over that!
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This is true but I felt that way even before this “new” SAT. I will say that I do think it is great that DE pays for the SAT and has kids take it in school (where I grew up you had to pay for it and you had to take it on a Saturday) but I can see how it would cause confusion around requirements for students who otherwise would not have had a need to take it (both before and after it was common core aligned).
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Bates College has not required the SAT for years. We also took the SAT and the ACT on a Saturday, so it didn’t disrupt the rest of the high school. If the state (that’s us) is paying for the SAT, people who are not going to college should not have to take it.
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