Thursday, September 15, 2011

SAT Takers Rallying Against Answerist Agenda

In a bit of very-welcome good news released by the noted educationalists at The College Board, average math SAT scores have dropped one point this year. For us in the Math Skeptic community, this should be good news.

However, it may not be so simple.

This drop has been attributed to an overall increase in the number of students taking the SAT, a total of 1.65 million last year. This attribution has been consequently disputed by noted attribution-disputationists at Fair Test, who argue that the test-and-punish strategy of the No Child Left Behind act is to blame.

None of these organizations and policy wonkers seem to notice the elephant on the table, which is the fact that the SAT is nothing more than a divisive tool of the Answerist hegemony, designed to rank students by their degree of assimilatability into the one-right-answer educationalist paradigm.

Which is why these results are mixed. The declining scores mean that more students are rallying against this agenda of rampant answerism, exercising their right of free expression in the the face of standardized testing. However, the increase in test takers means that more students have been socialized into the answerist paradigm in the first place.

The results show that we in the Math Skepticism community must redouble our efforts to oppose answerism in all its forms. One day, I hope, we shall be victorious!

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