Analogies are to SATs what babies are to bathwater
TOMORROW at 8 a.m., several hundred thousand bleary-eyed high school students will pick up their #2 pencils and go down in history, the last generation required to confront the analogy section of the SAT. You remember: "Discard: eviscerate as jettison: heave," or is it "dump: ditch?" Hmm.
In its infinite wisdom, the College Board has decided that it's time for a little nip and tuck. Apparently, the SAT needs some straightening out, and students need less coddling, so there will be harder math problems, an essay, more reading comprehensions, and, gasp, grammar. Try asking your 16-year-old what he would do with a semicolon; that should provide some mirth at the dinner table.
And suddenly the Board has developed a conscience. The old SAT, it seems, is unfair to those unfortunates who can't afford tutors. It's time for a fairer test. This explanation, however, doesn't seem to float. Jon Zeitlin, general manager of SAT programs at Stanley Kaplan suggests: "Like all standardized test questions, the new writing sections are as bland and as predictable as a middle-aged accountant."
But could there be even more to the story? Some Draconian, Halliburtonian twist? Is it just a coincidence that in 2003, the University of California college system announced that it was considering dispensing with the SAT, after research confirmed that the test wasn't doing its job? Hundreds of thousands of College Board consumers -- sorry, applicants -- going down the drain, and the Educational Testing Service, which isn't some pie-in-the sky nest of do-gooders but a serious business, the creators of over 500 tests for everyone from wannabe CIA agents to golf pros and barbers, got nervous.
In order to accommodate the new sections, the analogy will become: (a) dust, (b) history, (c) kaput, and thousands of years of intellectual tradition will go down the drain. So sorry to those Indian scholars who introduced them in their sacred texts; tender regrets to those who later took them to heart: Plato, Aristotle, Aristophanes, and St. Paul -- a none too shabby lot who actually developed a method of thought, a philosophy, a way of understanding the world, all based on analogies.
But if ETS, as they tell us, is only trying to do its job, it doesn't mean I have to continue to do mine. After 30 years of working with hundreds of students on the SAT, I'm considering throwing in the towel. The analogies were the only section of the SAT that suggested thinking could be entertaining, at times like a game or a puzzle, something you could actually figure out if you put your mind to it. They were like juggling, croquet, or billiards: one idea ricocheting off another and, in the process, that great eureka moment when you sunk it.
The analogies suggested a revolutionary concept: Academic performance can be playful, even fun. But, alas, the analogy has come to this: a quaint, dusty notion suggesting relationships between two sets of objects are not as important as completing a few more reading passages, then interpreting them as millions of others do, in the most conventional of manners.
Adios, analogies, but before you vanish, some respectful consideration must be paid. Let us reflect on those days 5,000 years ago in India, when those teachers, known as Enigma Makers, offered puzzles, paradoxes, puns, and analogies to their students to interpret and solve.
They might have taught the Upanishadic notion of God by instructing them to dissolve salt in water and taste it from the surface, the bottom, and the middle. "It is always salty. How are the two connected?" Pause. "The universal being, though invisible in all of us, while invisible like the salt, lives in all of us."
These questions followed the Indian tradition of the philosophical enigma, calling for interpretation. No multiple choice answers allowed. Students were taught to use their ingenuity in the hope that the act of coming up with the solution would be a more transformative and profound experience than merely memorizing texts.
But when you got to go, you got to go. It doesn't seem to matter to the College Board that the study of analogies led to the development of science, ethics, art, and politics; that they taught us about associations, relationships and connections; and that they promoted a new kind of creativity, a new way of understanding the world.
As a matter of fact, the College Board might do well to reflect upon one of the earliest analogies from the Upanishads: "There are many in the world, who, puffed up with intellectual conceit, believe that they are capable of guiding others . . . but they are devoid of deeper understanding; therefore, all that they say merely increases doubt and confusion in the minds who hear them. Hence they are likened to blind men leading the blind."
Ted Sutton is an educational therapist in Cambridge.
