Coleman’s comments on vocabulary provoked little response at the time, although one commentator accused him of “sending a message that devalues language.” The notion that some words are not worth knowing is bound to raise the hackles not only of people who love the wealth and power of all kinds of words, including fancy ones, but also of people who know just how much importance educational experts attribute to what they call “lexical richness,” or a large and diverse vocabulary. Coleman just so happens to be both of those kinds of people, and he understands that the question is less what vocabulary students should learn vocabulary than how they should learn it.

The College Board’s unfortunate remarks make it sound like the choice is to decide which of two classes of words to teach and test—the technical (e.g., “hypothesis”) or the writerly (e.g., “unscrupulous”)—neither of which is particularly likely to appear in ordinary conversation. The real choice, though, is between treating vocabulary as part of a strong education that incorporates a lot of reading in all the disciplines or teaching vocabulary explicitly with word lists, flashcards, quizzes, and high stakes standardized tests. The surprising news is that the College Board seems to be adopting the first view, even if it has done a poor job in saying so.

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There is a simple explanation why the SAT does not test words like transform and hypothesis. They are too easy. The linguist Dennis Baron, who runs The Web of Language, suggested that it is inevitable that some SAT words are on the obscure side. Baron said, “If [the College Board’s] goal is to [test] words that only the most massively memorizing kid is going to know. . . then [it is] going to have to reach. It’s like the spelling bee,” although he acknowledged that the SAT’s words are not as extreme as those used by the Scripps National Spelling Bee, which itself added a vocabulary test this year.

The College Board has to preserve the difficulty of the Reading section of the SAT, because it a norm-referenced exam: It ranks students by percentiles along a bell-curve distribution. As a result, the exam must be designed so that only a small minority of test takers will be able to answer over 90 percent of the questions correctly. In contrast, most state standards assessment tests are criterion-referenced exams. They set a standard for test-takers to meet, with the hope that all of them will do so. Everyone cannot get an 800 on the SAT Reading section, but all the students in the nation could test at or above grade level on a Common Core State Standards assessment exam; indeed, that is the aim of the Common Core. The difference between the SAT and standards tests lies, ultimately, in what they are designed to do. State assessments are designed to identify failing students, while the SAT has historically been used to identify the most successful ones, those who can get into the relatively small fraction of selective schools among the nation’s 6,000-plus colleges and universities.