Something is Wrong with SATII-Chinese

One of the driving forces of the rising popularity in learning Chinese in the US is its recent inclusion as a subject test in SAT II. Our local Chinese school has boasted that three of their students have received perfect scores with others doing pretty well scores-wise. Sounds great, right?

I was skimming through some Chinese BBS today and happened upon someone complaining that their child has also scored perfect on the Chinese SAT II but is in the 57 percentile. What? 43% of the test-takers are receiving perfect scores?!

A quick Google search confirmed this. There are much talk in online forums about this skewed score distribution and its being worthless: here is one example.

Obviously, it's not a good thing to have nearly half of participants scoring perfect in a test of SAT caliber. Something is wrong here. It's a new test, so there must be a lot of kinks to be worked out. But another reason may be that most people who (bother to) take this test are the ones who are or were native Chinese speakers, at least when they were kids. Or they have substantial upbringing in a Chinese-oriented family environment. They dominated the test and they dominated the scores.

It does cheapen significantly the aura of the "perfect score", whatever it's worth. It leaves others embarrassed for making one or two silly mistakes to be dropped way off in the scoring scale. If it continues to be this way, then the question would really be: why bother?

It will be interesting to see if anything is going to be done about this new test.