Regardless, my brother’s distrust of the Scholastic Aptitude Test results reflects a wider cultural attitude. Since its inception in 1926, people have asked: Is the SAT an effective tool? What do the results really tell us? Who is it biased against?

Throughout the decades, changes to the SAT reflect how the answers to those questions have continued to evolve. Last March, a new wrinkle was added—to the test and to the debate.

The new SAT I includes a mandatory writing section, upping the perfect score from 1,600 to 2,400, and it does away with some of the old faithfuls, including (my favorite) the analogy questions. The “Verbal” section is now known as “Critical Reading,” and those with math anxiety have even more to worry about: Algebra II curriculum is now fair game.

In a radical move, quantitative comparisons have become a thing of the past.

Though the quantitative questions have been criticized for being inaccurate, biased and susceptible to coaching, will a more qualitative test be any better? The new changes are welcomed by many, but the test has, of course, continued to raise questions about how we are choosing to evaluate students and their likelihood for success.

Most agree that writing is an invaluable skill in today’s information and communication-based society, but can a twenty-five minute essay portion really evaluate these skills? Anne Laskaya, the UO’s director of composition, feels the writing portion is only “somewhat better than a multiple choice test.”

“Students are actually making meaning with language by putting together words and sentences,” she said, “not just responding to other’s meaning-making.” However, she does have some concerns about how the new test might shape the high school curriculum. Will English teachers overcompensate, preparing their students only for a superficial and time-constrained writing exercise?

Ted Spencer, director of undergraduate admissions at the University of Michigan, doesn’t think so. According to him, the new SAT will encourage high school teachers in a good way: “We see the inclusion of writing on the SAT as one way to support teachers who are working to instill the importance of writing in their students.” But, like Laskaya, the National Center for Fair and Open Testing worries that “[it] will actually encourage educators to focus on how to write formulaic five-paragraph essays rather than developing students’ writing skills more broadly.”

“Teaching to a test makes education dead,” said Laskaya. “The diversity of approaches and personalities that students encounter in different teachers is what makes for a more supple mind.”

David Hubin, executive assistant president of UO, is a former chair of the national SAT committee that evaluated the last big change: the development of the SAT II tests. “Introducing writing proceeds from a very positive impulse,” he said. From his perspective, the new changes focus the test more on the skills currently being taught in schools, while abandoning its more esoteric elements.

With the SAT that has been in place, he said, you have people studying things that are “idiosyncratic to the test rather than really learning the reasoning ability or the content area that’s necessary to be intellectually successful.” He also believes the answers to quantitative comparison questions are almost always counterintuitive and, therefore, counterproductive: “Life is not based on, ‘If A looks larger, it’s not.’ That is not a skill that transfers.”

Therefore, Hubin thinks of the writing component as “a stride in the right direction” and a move toward a “closer curricular relationship.”

UO Director of Admissions Martha Pitts is also supportive of the new writing portion, which, in addition to essay, contains multiple choice questions very similar to the former Test of Standard Written English. “For students who were on the margin, [the TSWE] was the single best indicator of success at the University of Oregon.”

However, UO experts are realistic about what it means to bring writing into the testing room. “When it becomes artificially constrained and time constrained,” said Hubin, “that’s not real writing.”

And Laskaya believes that if the essay portion were longer—at least an hour—it would better recreate the timed writing conditions of midterm examinations. “If we’re going to value writing,” Laskaya suggests, “Let’s really value it.”

The SAT’s College Board, according to Hubin, has focused throughout its history on producing an even score distribution. But he points out that “you can get a bell curve on a trivial task just by making people do it quickly.”

“[The SAT] showed that it could effectively distribute people along a curve. That it measured something, and measured it consistently. But there wasn’t enough attention to the question: ‘Are we really measuring the cognitive attributes that we want to measure, or have we simply found some proxy that tells us we’re measuring it? And, do we know what talents the test is overlooking?’”

So what does the SAT measure? The College Board initially called the SAT an “aptitude” test, claiming that it reflects a student’s reasoning ability. However, some people have argued for a more “achievement oriented” exam. The Canadian Adult Achievement Exam, for example, helps determine an individual’s “present educational level and readiness for literacy instruction, general academic upgrading, core skills development and vocational selection”—not a person’s innate capabilities.

But can either type of test really predict collegiate success? Even the College Board acknowledges that “no test can accurately predict with one hundred percent certainty what your grades will be in college.” They acknowledge the importance of personal motivation but go on to claim that scores do “help estimate how well students are likely to do at a particular college.”

Ultimately, it all comes back to my brother’s questions: Can a test predict someone’s potential success in college—or, for that matter, in life? Where does determination come in? Is it a mistake to correlate a student’s “aptitude” with his or her intelligence?

Intelligence is “the ability to solve problems, or to create products, that are valued in one or more cultural settings,” says Howard Gardner, an affiliate professor at Harvard University. In an article from the early ’80s, Gardner defined at least seven types of intelligence, including the more traditional notions of mathematical or verbal intelligence, but also including body, or kinesthetic, intelligence, and inter- and intra-personal intelligence. Research has shown that individuals are most successful when they focus on utilizing their particular intelligence-strengths, and when they can use more than one type of intelligence in the learning process.

So, should we include a free throw contest in our application for admission? Not necessarily. When we discuss “kinesthetic learning” for example, we are more likely discussing the benefits of note-taking than a truly impressive backhand in tennis. However, further research on the human brain and psychology might change the way we understand intelligence, and it should be remembered that there are far more components of academic success than “book smarts.”

For potential Ducks, Assistant Vice President/ Director of Admissions Martha Pitts seeks to dispel some of the mystery and anxiety that surrounds the SAT. When Pitts hosts Parents’ Nights, she asks parents what they believe to be the single most important factor in admissions. “Three out of five times, the first answer I get is SAT scores.” In reality, SAT scores can only be used to help students qualify for admission consideration at the UO. No student is ever denied admission to the UO solely because of low SAT scores. “For us, the SAT is additional information that helps us make a decision about students who are on the borderline,” said Pitts. “Students and their parents worry far too much about the SAT.”

Personally, I agree that students can go overboard. When I took the SATs, I sat next to a girl who confessed to me that it was her second time. The first time she took the test she had a panic attack and threw up. Dave Hubin jokingly told me this behavior would fall under “error variance,” that is, when something that you don’t intend to measure is affecting the score. “We don’t want to be measuring a student’s facility with a particular instrument or their level of anxiety,” he said.

It is in the best interest of students, therefore, to relax.

Future Ducks, at least, can be comforted by the knowledge that the test can only help them. Once the UO has had a chance to evaluate this new test, the admissions office hopes that student scores will be able to help guide student advising and placement. For instance, the writing portion may provide additional information that will allow the university to recommend Academic Learning Services, said Pitts. In this way, perhaps the test can help every type of learner to succeed.