> Most of my history/english/social studies consisted of rote memorization of facts, dates, and obscure words. I'm still flabbergasted on why the SAT has middle school level math problems while also testing you on an intractable memorization problem: vocabulary.
As someone who still has the SATs fresh in mind, vocabulary is actually a very small, and very easy, portion of the exam. It's a subcomponent of the Critical Reading section, which largely concerns itself with drawing conclusions from a given text. Anyone even moderately well-read should be capable of acing CR, and it was a not unusual occurence at my gymnasium (~5 out of 15 students in my year managed 800s, IIRC)
It's been about a decade since I took mine. Apparently, they got rid of analogies, which is what I was thinking of:
>In 2005, the test was changed again, largely in response to criticism by the University of California system.[32] Because of issues concerning ambiguous questions, especially analogies, certain types of questions were eliminated (the analogies from the verbal and quantitative comparisons from the Math section).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAT#2005_changes
That sounds like a great change. Each analogy required you to know 4 words (at least one of which would be rather obscure). I read quite a bit in grade school (still proud of myself for seemingly being 1 out of only 3 students who read the required 750 page John Adams over a summer), yet suffered miserably during this section.
I'm (un)fortunate enough to have taken the SAT long enough ago to have had analogies on it. I suffered through them, scoring disproportionately poorly on them as compared to my math score. It was frustrating since I'm a voracious reader. I did not understand why such an important test would require memorizing so many obscure words to perform well, especially since most of the math section is about solving puzzles and trick questions. It seemed a completely useless skill.
It was years later that my (bilingual) wife explained her view on the analogies. She saw them as logical puzzles to figure out. If a student understands word roots and has some concept of foreign (romantic) languages or latin, it is simple for them to apply this knowledge to remove possible answers, figure out properties of the words, and solve the analogy.
My high school (even with 3 years of mostly worthless spanish) never presented me this toolbox. We spent 2 years in english classes with SAT prep vocabulary tests. We memorized random words and their definitions. It never occurred to me that this was contrary to the purpose of the verbal section of the test.
It is sad that people seem to feel the same way about the math section as I felt about the analogies section. "There's no way I can memorize every possible answer."
I actually rather enjoyed the analogy section as they were like small logic puzzles and far more enjoyable than the incredibly dry passages they choose for the comprehension sections. Admittedly, I do enjoy esoteric vocabulary and have an unusually good memory for it.
With regard to the removal, I had thought it was due to complaints of cultural bias towards upper class whites; the canonical example something along like "oarsman : _______ as runner: marathon"
As someone who still has the SATs fresh in mind, vocabulary is actually a very small, and very easy, portion of the exam. It's a subcomponent of the Critical Reading section, which largely concerns itself with drawing conclusions from a given text. Anyone even moderately well-read should be capable of acing CR, and it was a not unusual occurence at my gymnasium (~5 out of 15 students in my year managed 800s, IIRC)