Live data from Hacker News

U.S. students will take the SAT online

npr.org

101–110 of 407 posts

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

#103
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…

Man, I hate computers. Just let me user paper.

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

#104

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…

I suspect the Bar exam. My wife went through that twice in two different states, and it's an insane amount of stress, because the consequences of failure rest entirely on the test taker.

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

#105
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 had this experience as well outside the US. And while the police stations in my country are famous for its bad experience and treatment, They still much better and you get to deal with more reasonable rules and people (although it is oppressing regime) than what I saw during my GRE test.

Hint: To be fair all my few visits to stations were me reporting things (finishing paperwork) not being arrested.

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

#107

VM? Folks are talking about how you have to install privacy invading software that monitors down to the OS kernel. What prevents someone from just using a VM for the exam and a VM for cheating?

You can detect if you are running in a VM

You can run your VM such that VM detection can't detect it. It's an arms race. The mouse is always ahead.

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

#108

An extended family member is going to take the digital SAT next week. - The digital test is now adaptive: https://blog.collegeboard.org/what-digital-sat-adaptive-test... - I'm curious how this year's test will perform to the released analysis of the 2022 test: https://reports.collegeboard.org/media/pdf/2022-total-group-... From the 2022 report: 1,737,678 total took the test. Female: 6% of 890,254 = 53,415 females got…

> Asian: 27% of 175,468 = 47,376 got 1400-1600 (highest scorers)

Damn. I'm asian myself but 27% when TA is less than 10% is just plain weird.

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

#109
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…

[deleted]

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

#110
As a former educator, I look forward to the day that we can simply track student ability in a trustable manner based on long term data collection in the classroom rather than requiring these additional, often expensive, exams. We would need to mediate our classroom interactions more than we do now - but the tools do so usefully are there if packaged correctly.
Post reply on HN