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U.S. students will take the SAT online

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Re: U.S. students will take the SAT online

#31

Post by dandesim »

AustinDev wrote: post #9
axus wrote: post #6

"This week, students in the U.S. will begin taking the new SAT on their own devices — including a tablet or a laptop — or on school devices." I'd thought "never trust the client device" was the golden rule to prevent cheating. A background process that reads the display and fills in the field when you start typing would be difficult to detect.

I don't know if they'll have a software based 'anti-cheat' but you could be completely undetectable using this method: HDMI out into splitter from graphics card or tablet, whatever. Use secondary box to ingest video and spit out answers on an alternate display.

1. if you can figure out how to do this, you're intelligent enough to score in the top 90th percentile on the exam. 2. good luck getting away with this in person at the proctored exam.

Re: U.S. students will take the SAT online

#32

Post by gnicholas »

RheingoldRiver wrote: post #19

tbh I'm most interested by this: > "Today's students, they do a lot of their living digitally, they do a lot of their learning digitally and they do a lot of their test taking digitally," says Priscilla Rodriguez, who oversees the SAT for the College Board, the organization behind the test. How do kids work out math problems these days? Do they draw equations with their finger on a tablet/phone? Tablet pen on tablet?…

My kid is doing prealgebra now online (AoPS). When she's on an iPad Pro, she uses the Apple Pencil in the Notes app, side-by-side with the AoPS window. When she's on a non-Pro iPad she uses pencil and paper.

I assume kids will use scratch paper with the SAT, along with calculators.

> Are they learning math typesetting at a young age?

My kid loves doing LateX on AoPS, for some reason. I guess it will be useful if she's still doing online math when she gets to higher levels (it's not really necessary for prealgebra).

Re: U.S. students will take the SAT online

#33

Post by itishappy »

My friend took an important law school exam (GRE or BAR, not sure which) in the past 2 years that was self administered, and she described her experience as "harrowing." The kernel level malware they installed to monitor the exam crashed her device 4 times during the exam. This was after she got it running on a secondary device because it wouldn't even start on her M1 MacBook Air. The software recorded her screen and camera the entire time, and would invalidate her results if her husband entered the frame.

I can't imagine the stress this causes even on top of, y'know, having your entire career dependent on the results.

I hope they're using their savings to purchase managed devices and hire good IT support, but I'm not holding out much hope.

Re: U.S. students will take the SAT online

#34

Post by NelsonMinar »

Here's the company's description of how they will secure it: https://satsuite.collegeboard.org/sat/test-security-fairness

Still relying on the test being taken in a monitored environment, like at school or a test center. They emphasize that this new digital delivery means questions are less likely to be taken out of the test environment and published.

Re: U.S. students will take the SAT online

#35

Post by gnicholas »

null0ranje wrote: post #2

This sounds more about cuttings costs than anything else.

How does this cut costs? I would think they'll be spending a ton on online security and such. Imagine the fallout if this is hacked or goes down on test day. They will save some money on proctoring, since the exam is much shorter in duration.

Re: U.S. students will take the SAT online

#36

Post by Eldandan »

autoexec wrote: post #18

I'd rather go into a testing center and use someone else's device than infect my own system with whatever spyware they'll insist students install to try and prevent cheaters.

> try and prevent

Yeah, good luck with that. If there's one thing remote teaching during covid taught me it's that you can't stop someone from cheating during an online assessment.

Re: U.S. students will take the SAT online

#37

Post by justrealist »

dandesim wrote: post #29
screamingninja wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed; this will further devalue these standardized tests when the results cannot be fully trusted and stop correlating with academic success.

This are big statements to be making with no rationale. These will still be proctored exams in person, so there is no reason to believe that cheating will increase . Additionally, there is low indicators from the start that standardized tests correlate with academic success, hence the number of higher ed institutions no longer requiring them. People who want to cheat will always find a way to cheat. All you need to d…

Actually many higher ed institutions are re-instituting them this year: https://rhodeislandcurrent.com/2024/03/05/brown-shifts-back-...

Re: U.S. students will take the SAT online

#38

Post by insamniac »

jsunderland323 wrote: post #10
axus wrote: post #6

"This week, students in the U.S. will begin taking the new SAT on their own devices — including a tablet or a laptop — or on school devices." I'd thought "never trust the client device" was the golden rule to prevent cheating. A background process that reads the display and fills in the field when you start typing would be difficult to detect.

Seems like this could be a big win for local LLMs =D

The sad future.

Re: U.S. students will take the SAT online

#39

Post by iraqmtpizza »

gnicholas wrote: post #28

When I first heard they were shortening the exam by 30%, I thought that was unfortunate, since it would either make the test less reliable or impose a lower ceiling on the range it can assess. However, I later learned that it will be dynamic — depending on how a student does in the first section on a given topic, he will be given either easier or harder versions of a subsequent section. That means that they'll be abl…

If you can't opt out of the dumb-dumb version regardless of your answers to previous questions then the test is rigged. Not only would it not be directly comparable to previous test years, it would not be comparable to other versions of the test. Defeating the entire point (ranking students)

Re: U.S. students will take the SAT online

#40

Post by ghaff »

dandesim wrote: post #29
screamingninja wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed; this will further devalue these standardized tests when the results cannot be fully trusted and stop correlating with academic success.

This are big statements to be making with no rationale. These will still be proctored exams in person, so there is no reason to believe that cheating will increase . Additionally, there is low indicators from the start that standardized tests correlate with academic success, hence the number of higher ed institutions no longer requiring them. People who want to cheat will always find a way to cheat. All you need to d…

Standardized tests actually correlate better with academic success than a number of other measures. Some Ivies have recently been reinstituting standardized testing requirements.
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