Yuen Yuen Ang is a political science professor at Johns Hopkins University. Her recent research on Chinese patents is admired by economists AND by SAT test writers!
In 2006, China launched an ambitious campaign to promote indigenous innovations by rewarding inventors who filed new patents. The results seemed impressive. Between 1990 and 2014, Chinese inventors filed a staggering 4.6 million patents.
OK, here’s where SAT test writers step into the picture. A recent vocabulary in context passage presented students with this question: Was the massive increase in Chinese patents TANTAMOUNT or equivalent to technological innovation or was it MISCONSTRUED or wrongly interpreted as technological innovation?
The choice between TANTAMOUNT and MISCONSTRUED sparked a vigorous online debate. The answer hinged on key information in the second half of the passage. It turns out that Yuen Yuen Ang and her colleagues made an important distinction between “novel” and “non-novel” or “junk” patents. Ang discovered that junk patents vastly outnumbered truly novel patents. As a result, she concluded that the massive increase in Chinese patents has been MISCONSTRUED as an indicator of technological progress.
TANTAMOUNT – equivalent to
MISCONSTRUED – wrongly interpreted; misjudged