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In a piece out in The Atlantic today, "The Case for SAT Words: High-schoolers should know what 'unscrupulous' means," journalist and SAT tutor James S. Murphy speculates on potential changes in the SAT's vocabulary testing strategy to be made by David Coleman, the architect of the Common Core, who is now running the College Board. Murphy frames his thought piece around the question, "If difficult vocabulary does disappear from the SAT, what will the consequences be for language?"

As part of his research, Murphy referred to Academic Vocabulary and the New Wave of Testing, posted on this blog by Vocabulary.com director of curriculum development Georgia Scurletis in September of this year. Murphy also interviewed Vocabulary.com executive producer and lexicographer Ben Zimmer, and even links to our school leaderboards.

In order to understand Coleman’s remark about SAT words, Georgia Scurletis wrote at Vocabulary.com, we need to understand how the Common Core thinks about vocabulary, and, in particular, about different classes of vocabulary.

The Common Core Standards are unambiguous about the value of vocabulary.  They state, “The importance of students acquiring a rich and varied vocabulary cannot be overstated.” They are just as clear about the importance of reading for this acquisition: “vocabulary acquisition eventually stagnates by grade 4 or 5 unless students acquire additional words from written context.”  The Common Core is no enemy of language, but an advocate for its study within its natural habitat.  It is a friend of reading.

The same cannot be said for the SAT.  From the exam’s inception in 1926 and almost without interruption, the SAT has relied heavily on testing vocabulary, perhaps most notoriously in its antonym questions, which asked examinees to pick the best antonym of a stem word from among five choices.  Since the mid-‘90s, the test has moved away from such contextless questions, which were particularly rewarding to those who memorized the dictionary definition of vast numbers of words.  The problem has not gone away, however.  Ben Zimmer, the executive producer of Vocabulary.com, suggested that “a lot of what might be considered the traditional SAT words might have been a little esoteric and also very specific in their meaning,” which meant that “you just learned this strange-sounding word and its meaning and you’re done,” rather than learning the kinds of words that take on different meanings in different contexts.

The Atlantic piece goes on to examine the role vocabulary proficiency plays in assessing educational potential and attainment, asking: 

And why is vocabulary such a good index? Is it only an index?  Is the size of a person’s vocabulary like the brightness of a parrot’s plumage, a form of display meant to signal fitness?  Or is a lexicon more like a beak, a tool that the stronger and sharper it is the greater the chances are for its owner to thrive?  Does knowing words show you are smart or make you smart?

To find out how Murphy begins to answer this question, read the full text of the article here.