Emphasis on Skill Preparation

ACT and SAT probe a student’s mastery of certain basic and transferable skills such as reading, thinking, writing, problem-solving, quantifying etc.  These are skills that must be used continuously throughout college and beyond.  Indeed, the undergraduate experience is, in great part, focused on the further enhancement of these skills.

The oft-stated notion of college as preparing graduates for “life-long” learning has never been more necessary than in our information age.  Much of the content of our colleges’ curriculum is out-dated before it is ever taught.  A good bit of what seniors study probably wasn’t even known to their faculty four years earlier.

Graduates will change careers repeatedly in the decades following the collegiate experience.  No major or concentration of studies as an undergraduate can possibly prepare tomorrow’s professionals for what lies in their future.   Professionals desperately need a well-honed set of learning skills to have a fighting chance at success.

Entrance tests send a clear message, resonating through the halls of America’s high schools, that attention needs to be paid to helping students acquire as many tools for their learning kits as possible.  In that motivated teachers are usually inclined to “teach towards the test,” their students are well served if K-12 teachers resist the temptation to pile on more content in favor of drilling harder at what used to be called the three “R”s.

These are not skills that can be mastered quickly; that fact should call into question the utility of much of the cottage industry that has grown up around preparing students in a week, month or semester in order to dramatically improve their entrance test scores.  But questioning the crash prep courses, as many critics do and should, is a very different thing from dismissing the tests themselves.  ACT and SAT measure the skills acquired throughout a student’s learning career to date.  In so doing they impress the importance of those essential skills on all concerned…and that is certainly for the best.