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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

#71

Post by saagarjha »

ldjkfkdsjnv wrote: post #27

People dont talk about this, but the SAT used to be more of a signal of intelligence and academic ability. In the 70-90s, you could really trust a good SAT score. Its been nerfed, they purposefully removed the performance aspect, its now very common for not that intelligent people (relative to the true intellectual elite) to get perfect scores. This changes who ends up at elite institutions, and effectively who makes…

Do you not think people who score highly today could not take the test from the past and do well?

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

#72

Post by Kon-Peki »

gnicholas wrote: post #48
glial wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shorter is good, but dynamic tests (called "computer adaptive tests" or CAT in the industry) make it difficult to follow longstanding best-practices for test taking. When I took the SAT, I could quickly scan through the questions in the current section and mark those that looked difficult, and save them for the end. With a CAT test, it's typically one-question-at-a-time, and if you're a strong test taker, they get su…

That is true for adaptive tests that operate on a per-question basis. What I have read of the new SAT is that it operates at a session level. So if you do well on the entire first session, you get a harder version of the next session on that topic (reading or math). Students should still be able to use the technique you mention to identify hard questions and save them for last.

> What I have read of the new SAT is that it operates at a session level. So if you do well on the entire first session, you get a harder version of the next session on that topic (reading or math).

That is positive. I've seen issues with adaptive tests not being resilient to accidents and brain farts: if a kid fat-fingers the response to a question early in the test, they may never get the computer to give them questions of a suitable difficulty later in the test. Thus they never even have a chance to get a score that accurately reflects their ability.

If the SAT is session-based, each session needs to be large enough that a single question can't tank the whole thing, but at the same time there also needs to be enough sessions to allow for properly dialing-in the knowledge level. In reality, the ideal situation is that the test should allow for an unlimited number of sessions, but each session is time-limited. Something along the lines of stopping once the test-taker gets below a certain score on 2 consecutive sessions.

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

#73

Post by saagarjha »

dylan604 wrote: post #68
glial wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shorter is good, but dynamic tests (called "computer adaptive tests" or CAT in the industry) make it difficult to follow longstanding best-practices for test taking. When I took the SAT, I could quickly scan through the questions in the current section and mark those that looked difficult, and save them for the end. With a CAT test, it's typically one-question-at-a-time, and if you're a strong test taker, they get su…

Some of the math competitions I participated would penalize for skipping around. You were awarded +5 for correct answers and -4 for incorrect or skipped questions. It was not uncommon for negative scores. In one test, any stray marks were also marked as incorrect. No erasing, no changing a 7 to a 9, or anything was allowed. The questions leaned toward an increasing difficulty, but there could something very difficult…

I don’t see how this is any different from a normal test? If you skip a question or get it wrong the penalty is you don’t get any points for it.

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

#74

Post by setgree »

kalkr wrote: post #62

When I took my SAT someone crashed into a utility pole and the power went out. We ended up having to retake, which was super annoying since that test was so damn long. I wonder what they'll do this year if the same thing were to happen?

In fairness, if the power had gone out when I was taking it with pencil and paper, I think we would have also had to retake it.

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

#75

Post by iraqmtpizza »

glial wrote: post #50
iraqmtpizza wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Comparability across test years is taken seriously by the folks that make these tests (see e.g. [1,2]). There are valid criticisms to be made, but flippantly calling the test 'rigged' is not constructive. [1] https://www.jstor.org/stable/1435437 [2] https://www.ets.org/research/policy_research_reports/publica...

I don't care if they claim to take it seriously if they deliberately and thoughtfully make the tests not comparable

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

#76

Post by pc86 »

UncleSlacky wrote: post #70
pc86 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's 2024, the pandemic has been over for a number of years now.

The "emergency phase" was declared over, however we're still in a pandemic. Most people want to pretend it's over, but nobody has told the virus.

COVID is endemic. Endemic and pandemic are mutually exclusive things.

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

#77

Post by ldjkfkdsjnv »

saagarjha wrote: post #71
ldjkfkdsjnv wrote: post #27

People dont talk about this, but the SAT used to be more of a signal of intelligence and academic ability. In the 70-90s, you could really trust a good SAT score. Its been nerfed, they purposefully removed the performance aspect, its now very common for not that intelligent people (relative to the true intellectual elite) to get perfect scores. This changes who ends up at elite institutions, and effectively who makes…

Do you not think people who score highly today could not take the test from the past and do well?

Theres clearly a class of people that would do worse on the old tests. You couldnt as easily study for the old tests.

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

#78

Post by axus »

dandesim wrote: post #31
AustinDev wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yep, the article says the exam is still on-site and proctored. Any cheating would have to be self-contained to the laptop and not obvious to someone looking over the cheater's shoulder.

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

#79

Post by ghaff »

ldjkfkdsjnv wrote: post #77
saagarjha wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you not think people who score highly today could not take the test from the past and do well?

Theres clearly a class of people that would do worse on the old tests. You couldnt as easily study for the old tests.

There was still a ton of high school test prep in the 70s. Admittedly, Kaplan etc. mostly came in a bit later.

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

#80

Post by ghaff »

dylan604 wrote: post #63
icyfox wrote: post #11

When I took the GRE in 2017, everything was digital as well. But I couldn't believe how locked down the experience was. The testing center in downtown SF had no windows, a metal detector, and you had to check all food outside of the testing room. Just in case you were going to try to cheat off of your banana. I think each computer was also recording a video of you taking the test although I might be mistaken here. Ce…

> I'm shocked at how laissez-faire we've gotten for college entrance exams, to the point that they stopped requiring SAT altogether, but are starting to bring it back. there's a lot of things they've done is head scratching. i loved when they changed the scores so that your result from 10 years prior suddenly become a lower result so people had to know when you took the test to properly weight the result. The laissez…

Who is looking at your SAT score from 10 years ago?
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