An Elegy for the SAT Literature Subject Test

The SAT Literature Subject Test, also known as the SAT II Lit, will breathe its last breath summer 2021. What follows is an obituary for the most pedantic, recondite, and downright baffling test that ever was.

In over ten years teaching test preparation, I have prepared students for all kinds of standardized tests, from run-of-the-mill standards like the TOEFL and SAT to the bizarrely-named SCAT (no, I didn’t make that one up). Yet there has been no test from which I have derived so much perverse pleasure teaching as the SAT II Literature Test, a one-hour 60-question test that assesses student understanding of literature through excerpts from prose fiction, drama, and poetry. As of this summer, the College Board has dropped this test, along with the rest of the SAT Subject Tests, from its arsenal, and so I have taken this opportunity to bid farewell to a test that I got to know so intimately.

Literature is commonly understood as a subject that evades the objectivity we expect in scientific disciplines, so the very idea of assessing a student’s interpretation of literature with multiple choice questions — each having but one clear-cut correct answer — is itself fraught with issues. Some (including students) would say that such assessments contradict the very intention behind language arts classes — namely, to encourage the understanding that multiple interpretations are possible and correct, so long as students can justify them. There as many valid interpretations of a piece of literature as there are readers of that piece, and any objective meaning remains elusive (supposedly).

Yet, from the fact that we often disagree about the correct interpretation of a piece, it does not follow that all interpretations are equally valid. Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice is no more a novel about the virtues of old age than Homer’s Iliad is a story about the virtues of compassion. In other words, while there may indeed be many possible and justifiable interpretations, there are also a lot that are just plain wrong.

It is in this realm between the correct and the plain wrong that the SAT Lit test writers perform their balancing act. And it is in having and explaining the esoteric secrets behind the right and wrong answers to these questions of literary interpretation that I get my pleasure as a teacher.

For there is some pleasure that every teacher derives from being in the position of the grand font of knowledge, the deep wellspring of erudition. We get a kick from sharing the happiness of understanding with others. Sure, as teachers we should display humility and humanity in front of our pupils. But, at the same time, great teachers are sought after for their subject-matter expertise — tutors are hired because of the asymmetry between the student’s ability and the tutor’s mastery. Many of us have felt that magnetic attraction to a teacher who always has the perfect analogy, aphorism, or anecdote at hand to illuminate the concepts in a curriculum.

The SAT II Lit, more so than many other tests, puts the teacher in that vaulted position. Can you count the iambs in this stanza? Can you discern whether this sentence is an example of antithesis rather than oxymoron? Can you tell if the author’s tone was facetious or just outright caustic? No? Allow me to enlighten you! Are you seriously going to self-study your way there?

To give you an idea of what the test is really like, let’s explore the following poem and a question about it from an actual past test.

This Victorian poem by Alfred Lord Tennyson (1850) address the theme of the constant changes that nature undergoes from a very human perspective that resists that change and dreams to hold things true and stable. In my experience, most students are able to say some fairly intelligent things about the message of this poem; I would hardly say that Tennyson’s intentions here are utterly opaque.

But consider the way a student is asked to respond to this poem’s theme in a typical SAT II multiple choice question:

Where exactly to begin? How ought one to navigate the nuanced connotations of the particular phrasing in the choices? Even students who have read the poem and feel a fairly solid grasp of its message are likely to feel lost. Who could blame them?

Certainly the speaker has “admiration for the power of nature,” but does he “fear” giving into it, as (A) has it? The speaker definitely has an “understanding” of nature’s changes (D), but is any “dread” expressed anywhere? Similarly, we can affirm the speaker’s “awareness of natural processes” in (B), but what does “another truth” refer to? Does his “dream” count as “another truth”? Or does his dream count as a “longing to re-create the world” (E), a choice which also correctly points out that he accepts “the world as it is” in the first two stanzas? It seems (C) is the only outright bad option, since no discussion of deception is present… or is it?

And so students find themselves not so much analyzing the poem as nit-picking over the shades of meaning in the test creators’ phrasing. Isn’t analyzing a poem, though, and providing their own perspective on it precisely what language arts classes are supposed to teach students to do? Is it the intention of an education in a literary tradition to have students navigate labyrinthine multiple-choice questions such as the one above?

Well, in comes the test-prep tutor to save the day! You see, he says, you need to understand the wider context in which this poem was written. Tennyson wrote it as the growing knowledge of the science of geology had just begun to reveal the true age of the Earth and the extent of the upheavals our landscape has undergone — those mountains were once sea floors and these hills were once mountains. This knowledge, of course, challenged the traditional Biblical account, to which Victorians of Tennyson’s time were still quite wedded. Tennyson is expressing, therefore, his reluctance to give up this “dream” of faith despite the mounting evidence that modern science provides to challenge it. Choice (B) is, therefore, correct: Tennyson is “aware” of the scientific explanation of a “natural process” yet dreams of “another truth” (a spiritual one) to which he cannot “think farewell.”

None of this helpful background is provided along with the poem on the test, of course, and so students remain lost at sea until they can be rescued by the life buoy of erudition tossed their way by a qualified instructor. My pleasure comes from being able to bring some objective solidity to a subject as famed — even derided — for its irredeemable subjectivity as literature. So much satisfaction comes from being the one person in the room who can untie the Gordian knot and then walk a class through the process by which the feat was achieved. Whether students can repeat these mental acrobatics once they’ve left the classroom is less clear.

In the past decade, significant revisions to existing tests, a reduction in number of institutions requiring standardized tests, and now the outright elimination of some tests have all called into question the position of multiple-choice standardized testing in college admissions. This has only been exacerbated, it goes without saying, by the ongoing pandemic.

The College Board’s abandonment of the Subject Tests tests is reminiscent of the revision it gave to the main SAT test back in 2016, a revision that involved a simplification of the test and the removal of some of the most recondite question types. (These were, by the way, the questions we test-prep teachers most loved to explain).

The important question is this: What does it really mean to get a high score on a test like this? What does it really say about your ability to (1) excel in a four-year college program and (2) engage deeply in this particular subject as an academic? More to the point, if an intense regimen of test-preparation tutoring can ‘game’ your multiple-choice performance, does that make you more suited to the study of this subject at the university level? Recent trends seem to indicate that colleges are increasingly suspicious of the significance of certain standardized test scores, and their admissions philosophies have been emphasizing other aspects of candidates’ application profiles.

In my view, by tossing this test aside, the College Board naturally increases the importance of its AP tests: the AP English Language and Composition exam and the AP English Literature exam. Students who want to show competence at college-level reading and writing will increasingly seek to score well on one or the other of these tests, and colleges continue to take score on these tests seriously. Therefore, we can expect the number of students taking these tests to increase. The majority of the score for these exams (55%) comes from written work; for example, students respond to a passage by providing a rhetorical or literary analysis, the sort of task that will be expected of them in college humanities courses. Colleges will be eager to know that student writing under timed, proctored conditions, during which the meddlesome intercession of tutors and the Internet is impossible, meets at least some standard of quality. Besides, a score of 5 (sometimes a 4) can get students much more out of the effort put into an AP test than they ever could from the Subject Tests: many universities recognize a 5 on the AP English Language and Composition (AP Lang) as advanced credit or placement for the equivalent of English 101, thus saving students that bane of the freshman year.

While I do have a modicum of nostalgia for my time teaching the SAT Lit, and while there is a part of me that will miss navigating students through its esoteric puzzles, we should be glad that things are moving in a sane direction. That is, less emphasis on multiple-choice banalities, and more focus on the big-picture skill of writing a cogent, insightful essay.

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