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" The SAT is changing. The test is getting rid of its written portion as a way to distance itself from the ACT. They&amp;#039;re also doing away with the penalty for wrong guesses and dumbing down the vocabulary section to accommodate more frequently used words. They are trying to adapt, they say, to be more &amp;quot;focused and useful&amp;quot; for students. But the problem isn&amp;#039;t what&amp;#039;s on the SAT. The problem is that we use the SAT as a valid measure of a young person&amp;#039;s intelligence at all. Google, a company that evolved from a search engine into the world&amp;#039;s de facto incubator for great ideas that define our future, does not look at standardized tests when they hire applicants. They don&amp;#039;t look at whether or not an applicant went to a Holy Grail of the standardized test lottery -- an Ivy League school -- either. They look at the work the candidates have brought into the world. They test candidates with their own equations, collaboratively, in front of a white board. A lot of that test is to see how they handle tough or impossible questions with others \u2014 to see if they can do it with a warmth and infectiousness, and not dance on the grave of the others that cannot. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s &amp;#039;intellectual humility.&amp;#039; Without humility, you are unable to learn,&amp;quot; Google&amp;#039;s HR head Lazlo Bock tells Quartz. &amp;quot;Successful bright people rarely experience failure, and so they don&amp;#039;t learn how to learn from that failure.&amp;quot; All of that is antithetical to the dog-eat-dog, score-high-at-all-costs test-taking culture that America has distilled in its young people. And all of that is exactly why Google is the most futuristic corporation on this planet. They know that this kind of ingenuity and collaboration \u2014 not just knowledge \u2014 is what makes a smarter world. It is also what makes better people. We have ritually and ceaselessly sucked the fun and wonder out of learning in a country that is pushing kids into adulthood aimless, goalless, robotic and depressed as a way to feed a system that we now know does not work. Then we blame the adults for questioning the intent of that system, even when there is none. Do not mistake a less-tested America for an Everybody Wins America \u2014 an academic extension of those soccer games where nobody keeps score. We need to keep score to stay competitive, to remark on ingenuity and encourage drive, to understand where help is needed and where greatness needs to be challenged further. But we don&amp;#039;t need to do it in this increasingly antiquated, old-world way, a holdover from when we knew much less about our kids&amp;#039; biology, how they learn, and how to compel them to be better. Currently, we have our kids fill in bubbles, and if those kids fill in the bubbles wrong on a forgotten Saturday morning when they are 17, they&amp;#039;re cast to a lower lot for the rest of their lives.  This cannot be the American ideal.  Make no mistake: The next revolution is not another industrial one or another technological one but it will be our first educational one. America can lead the pack if it gets over its hubris, identifies and changes its faults, and unshackles itself from the tyranny of rules and routine that exist only for the sake of themselves. Why try to play catch up with the old world when the greatest companies in the new economy are already here, in this country, creating new ways to make the world better? These companies are disregarding the rest of the world&amp;#039;s urge to retrofit an exponential stream of new information into a few hundred bubbles on a thin, white sheet of paper. Only those kinds of companies are forging our future. Why don&amp;#039;t our kids deserve to be taught the same way?  China has better test scores across the board than the U.S. They do not have Apple or Facebook or Microsoft or Google. They do not have our ingenuity. Let&amp;#039;s start appreciating it, rewarding it, fighting for it. Let&amp;#039;s start drilling a love of learning into the brains of our kids, in the place where fear and anxiety currently reside. Let&amp;#039;s ball up the thin, white sheets of paper and throw them in a big pit together. Let&amp;#039;s watch it all burn and talk about how we can make it all burn brighter \u2014 before somebody else does it instead. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/news/a27561/the-sat-is-the-problem/>