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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

#141

Post by dylan604 »

arjvik wrote: post #127
dylan604 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Number Sense! Despite how pointless those tests were, the whole experience was super fun!

Howdy fellow Texan! I still use some of the "tricks" learned to do that test. However, I struggled for a long time in my higher math classes for not having any work to show as I was just doing it in my head. It was finally solved when told that the AP exams gave partial credit based on the work shown.

I also did the Calculator tests. It's why I learned to 10-key.

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

#142

Post by potemkinhr »

itishappy wrote: post #33

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…

Damn it, I just realized AWS online exams for certification are pretty much the same if you read the TOS, I just might book a exam in a physical exam center. Too many unknown ifs and I don't have to expose my machine.

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

#143

Post by nextworddev »

TillE wrote: post #139
spenczar5 wrote: post #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…

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.

He also had the fortune of joining Microsoft early in its hyper growth stage?

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

#144

Post by jmeyer2k »

eganist wrote: post #129
jmeyer2k wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what we're working on building at AutoMark ( https://automark.io ). We're currently building grading tools for teachers, but eventually want to build out a tool to accurately monitor a student's performance over time. There's a lot of potential for AI to disrupt the education system from high school to college to a career. Currently, a GPA and a few test scores (SAT, ACT, etc) are the most in depth view into…

> eventually want to build out a tool to accurately monitor a student's performance over time. How does AutoMark account for disparities in quality of education?

This is a very hard problem to solve - nobody has successfully solved it before. It's not just a practical problem, because there are also a lot of political motivators. It's difficult to get districts to adopt new technologies, and teachers have a way they already like to teach.

There are already some great quality resources online to learn subjects like math, history, and science, but we believe the missing piece is grading - you're never actually evaluated whether you learned something online.

We think by giving students unlimited practice and feedback, along with quality learning materials, we can work on chipping away at this issue. AI will allow scaling access to quality tutoring, practice, and exams, all of which significantly improve eduction (currently, this costs $40-$X00/hr, but will cost much less with AI assistance). It's definitely not a quick fix to solve the issue of instructional quality.

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

#145

Post by arjvik »

dylan604 wrote: post #141
arjvik wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Number Sense! Despite how pointless those tests were, the whole experience was super fun!

Howdy fellow Texan! I still use some of the "tricks" learned to do that test. However, I struggled for a long time in my higher math classes for not having any work to show as I was just doing it in my head. It was finally solved when told that the AP exams gave partial credit based on the work shown. I also did the Calculator tests. It's why I learned to 10-key.

You're right - I still use number-sense tricks for fast multiplication :)

For Calculator, I wrote https://git.io/ti84rpn so that I could use the fast parenthesis-less Reverse Polish Notation without having to adapt to a whole new calculator keyboard.

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

#146

Post by gnicholas »

orochimaaru wrote: post #111
gnicholas wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article doesn’t indicate that students will be allowed to take the SAT at home, does it? Test centers and high schools is all I saw mentioned.

So my kid (7th grade) was taking a standardized test yesterday at her school. School rules have them keep their phones in the locker - not allowed in class. Locker is far away from testing room so that blue tooth is ineffective and they cut the wifi during test time so watches cannot be used to cheat.

> they cut the wifi during test time so watches cannot be used to cheat.

What about cellular-enabled watches? At my kid's school, they don't allow kids to wear smartwatches on standardized test days.

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

#147

Post by bombcar »

donmcronald wrote: post #133
itishappy wrote: post #33

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…

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…

The point isn’t to stop all cheating, it’s to catch the most blatant idiots cheating.

That’s really all that’s required.

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

#148

Post by ml_giant »

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…

When I took the GRE in 2017, I got a really bad bloody nose right when the test started and I couldn't pause the test.

The person monitoring wouldn't let me have a bunch of tissues at the computer (Perhaps due to cheating concerns), so each time I needed a new tissue I had to raise my hand and she gave me one.

I didn't end up scoring very well.

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

#149

Post by jobmeplease »

ghaff wrote: post #80
dylan604 wrote: post #63

Earlier 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…

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

I applied to Canonical a few months back and they made me write an essay describing my high school grades, extracurriculars, and test results. I've never had that experience in any other job app so it's pretty Canonical specific but it does happen.

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

#150

Post by gnicholas »

jcranmer wrote: post #137
testfoobar wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

> However, in my experience, not one kid had an IEP that allotted them extra time to take tests.

There's a difference between the IEP that the school uses and the accommodation request for standardized testing. It would be pretty obvious to you if a student in your class were given extra time for in-class tests, but much harder for you to know if that student qualified for extra time on the SAT. If you knew when they were taking it then perhaps you could figure it out, but people who bend the rules to get extra time tend to not go around advertising when they're going to take the SAT, or at which test center, since that might out them as receiving extra time.

All this to say: I'm not so sure a classmate would know if a fellow student received extra time on the SAT.

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