<body><div><figure><img src="https://img.particlenews.com/image.php?type=thumbnail_580x000&amp;url=10yE1E_0vDv1vKV00" alt="https://img.particlenews.com/image.php?url=10yE1E_0vDv1vKV00" width="1500" height="607" ><figcaption>PATCHARIN.IN / Shutterstock</figcaption></figure>This article is part of the collection: Artificial Intelligence Holds Promise for Education — and Creates Problems.The SAT is to standardized testing what the floppy disk is to data storage.Providers of some of the most popular standardized tests are rethinking their offerings as new AI tools are challenging traditional techniques for finding out what students know — and allowing new ways to give and score tests.For instance, ETS, one of the oldest and largest players in standardized testing, is moving away from traditional college entrance exams like the SAT to focus on new approaches to measure the skills and persistence of students.It’s been a period of upheaval for academic testing in general and for the 75-year-old nonprofit ETS in particular. During the pandemic, concerns about equity and accessibility prompted at least 1,600 colleges to make admissions tests like the SAT optional, at least temporarily. Then, earlier this year, ETS said that it will no longer administer the SAT for the College Board. A College Board spokesperson, Holly Stepp, says that because the group has moved fully to a digital format, “we now develop and administer the SAT and PSAT-related assessments directly.” ETS launched a rebranding effort in April to focus on what it called “talent solutions” rather than just academic testing. And it has downsized to readjust — it offered buyouts earlier this year to a large number of its employees, after laying off 6 percent of its staff last September.“The assessments that ETS will deliver in the future will be more behavioral than they are cognitive,” says Kara McWilliams, vice president of product innovation and development at ETS. “What that means is that we are going to create experiences that allow us to measure the behaviors of a user, not what the answer to the question is,” she adds. “So we want to look at things like perseverance. And when we're thinking about how we build these [assessment] experiences, we're creating nudges inside them [so] that we can understand things like, ‘Did you ask for a hint? Did you reach out to a friend? Did you ask for more time?’ So what are the behaviors that you're using to get to the answer? We don't really care what the answer is, but how did you get there?”One example of that work is the group’s new focus is its Skills for the Future initiative, a joint effort with the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching to reimagine assessments.The goal of the effort is to move away from requiring students to stop everything to sit in a room to answer questions for a couple hours, says Timothy Knowles, president of the Carnegie Foundation. Instead, he says, the group is experimenting with using data that schools have about their students — including from after-school activities like sports, clubs and internships — to measure and track progress on skills including communication, collaboration and critical thinking. </div></body>

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Will AI Make Standardized Tests Obsolete?

This article is part of the collection: Artificial Intelligence Holds Promise for Education — and Creates Problems. The SAT is to standardized testing what the floppy disk is to data storage. Providers of some of the most popular standardized tests are rethinking their offerings as new AI tools are...