Tricky is in the eye of the beholder
Sometimes I feel like the SAT is a kind of Rorschach test. It’s so laden down with cultural baggage and anxieties (about race, class, social mobility, you name it) that people’s opinions — and they tend to be very, very strong opinions — seem to reveal more about their own concerns than they do about the actual test itself. I also sometimes feel as if people who complain about the SAT’s purported “trickiness” are missing the point of the it: both the questions and the incorrect answer choices are deliberately written to exploit the kinds of mistakes that people are most likely to make when working through the various kinds of questions. The real issue is whether that whole setup is a valid means of testing, well… whatever it is that the SAT is supposed to be testing (which is of course something that no one can agree on anyway).
I do feel obligated to point out that for the small percentage of test-takers whose skills are such that they can disregard the multiple-choice aspect and simply answer the questions, the whole concept of trickiness is essentially a moot point. (more…)