ADVANCED PLACEMENT

Zachary, the 18-year-old in our class of six home-schooled children here, took a series of College Board Advanced Placement tests in May. As a result he has been given 65 units of credit at Oregon State University in calculus, physics, chemistry, biology, European history, and English, allowing him to skip a year and a half of college. (En tirely self-taught since his mother's death six years ago, his PSAT was 1480 and SAT was 1440.) That is the good news. The bad news is in the tests themselves.

The PSAT and SAT, Scholastic Aptitude Test, no longer exist (see Access to Energy 21-7, March 1994). The watered-down and "renor-malized'' (grades artificially raised to politically correct levels) replacement Scholastic Assessment Test is now given. Zachary was in one of the last groups to take the real test. His brothers and sisters will have to take the watered-down one. Noah (age 16) took example tests of both types here at home. He found that the new math tests have easier problems and are more easily completed in the time allowed. Also, the function that transforms raw scores to the familiar 200-800 scale has been revised to squeeze most scores into a narrower range. This removed about one-half of the "gender bias'' from the tests by reducing the number of high scores. The Advanced Placement Tests are a politically correct mine field. Socially engineered essay questions are everywhere (over 30 essays in the battery of tests Zachary completed) even in the science examinations. Several times, he decided to not answer questions when he realized that the desired answers were so incorrect that he could not honestly write them on the answer sheets.

Note: Thanks to an AtE reader, we now have the name and author of the science fiction story mentioned in AtE 21-1, July 1994, p 1. It is "Examination Day'' by Henry Slesar.