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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
#132> [A high school student] says she's still nervous and anxious for the test, because she feels a lot of pressure to do well. "It's a very important test," she says. "It dictates what's going to happen for your college life.
Man oh man, do I wish I could convince my high school self: the particular college you go to matters much less than you think. The SAT matters much less than you think. Grades matter less than you think. Pursue friendship and genuine interests, not standardized tests!
But friendship and genuine interests don’t have a billion dollar organization behind them, alas. (https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/210...)
Re: U.S. students will take the SAT online
#133My 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…
That's crazy because I imagine cheating is trivial for those that want to do it. All you would need is a clean install, an HDMI splitter, and a tiny earbud stuffed in your ear. Then someone in an adjacent room can feed you answers.
Even if they start making people put their ears up to the camera, that won't help much. Bone conducting headphones built into the arms of glasses will be virtually undetectable. Do you ban glasses? That won't help. I just tried putting my bone conducting headphones against my upper jawbone inside my mouth and they work fine at 30% volume. How do you prevent that?
What's the endgame? Do we end up with everyone completely hairless, naked, and forced to expose every orifice for the digital proctor?
The education industry is becoming satire. Bring back common sense IMO.
Re: U.S. students will take the SAT online
#134My 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…
And for all that nothing can stop anybody from just googling the answers on another device.
Except for the eye tracking that some of this software uses
Re: U.S. students will take the SAT online
#135> [A high school student] says she's still nervous and anxious for the test, because she feels a lot of pressure to do well. "It's a very important test," she says. "It dictates what's going to happen for your college life. Man oh man, do I wish I could convince my high school self: the particular college you go to matters much less than you think. The SAT matters much less than you think. Grades matter less than you…
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Re: U.S. students will take the SAT online
#136As 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.
Man I hate this.
The one thing I loved about schooling in Iran is that there wasn’t a constant system of surveillance.
I hate the idea of long term data collection during a time a kid is supposed to be able to learn.
Re: U.S. students will take the SAT online
#137When 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…
Many kids have an IEP - an individualized education plan. https://www2.ed.gov/parents/needs/speced/iepguide/index.html They get extra time allocation to take tests - 50% more in most cases. The numbers I hear tossed around is that a substantial fraction (20% to 40%) of school kids in some of the elite public and private schools have IEPs. Clearly there are kids who need the extra time. But that many? ADHD is the reas…
> They get extra time allocation to take tests - 50% more in most cases. The numbers I hear tossed around is that a substantial fraction (20% to 40%) of school kids in some of the elite public and private schools have IEPs. Clearly there are kids who need the extra time. But that many?
An IEP is a catch-all term for anything that requires special adjustment for a student. What the adjustment is varies depending on the situation--there's a reason it's called individualized.
Having gone to one of those "elite public schools", it wouldn't surprise me if that large a fraction of kids had an IEP (hell, I did). However, in my experience, not one kid had an IEP that allotted them extra time to take tests. The only specific test adjustment I'm aware of was one kid who was so blind he needed the exams to be large print to have a hope of reading them.
Re: U.S. students will take the SAT online
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
They stopped requiring road tests? Man, seems like that would cause a bunch of cybertrucks to drive into hotels or something.
I believe that most states require road tests to get your first license or to get a license if you have been unlicensed for a while but stopped requiring them for a renewal, at least if you've got a clean driving record.
In at least some states this was based on data that showed that for people that had clean records the rate of road test failures was very low, and those were almost always due to test anxiety and the person would pass on a second or third test.
Re: U.S. students will take the SAT online
#139> [A high school student] says she's still nervous and anxious for the test, because she feels a lot of pressure to do well. "It's a very important test," she says. "It dictates what's going to happen for your college life. Man oh man, do I wish I could convince my high school self: the particular college you go to matters much less than you think. The SAT matters much less than you think. Grades matter less than you…
Yeah like, Satya Nadella got his master's at UW Milwaukee. I went to a big state university and got a great education. If you're smart and you're not desperate to get into one of the "elite" schools, it's gonna be fine.
Re: U.S. students will take the SAT online
#140> [A high school student] says she's still nervous and anxious for the test, because she feels a lot of pressure to do well. "It's a very important test," she says. "It dictates what's going to happen for your college life. Man oh man, do I wish I could convince my high school self: the particular college you go to matters much less than you think. The SAT matters much less than you think. Grades matter less than you…
I think I would have told my high school self the exact opposite: Go for a better GPA. Go for a better SAT. Get into MIT or some other "elite" instead of the state school that I had to fall back to. Between companies that recruit at top schools, starting salary, salary progression, and compounding interest on savings, I'd probably be retired by now if I spent a just a tiny little extra effort in high school. You can get friends and hobbies anywhere and any time, but you can't re-do what undergrad you went to and what your first job was, which both have an outsized influence on your entire life's financial trajectory.