Live data from Hacker News

SAT: Getting the lowest score possible

colinfahey.com

61–70 of 94 posts

Re: SAT: Getting the lowest score possible

#61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it's clear (to me at any rate) that you're being sarcastic. But, speaking as someone who once was a SAT taker and now is in a position to hire people based on their SAT scores, your sarcasm is unwarranted and you're looking at the SAT in an incorrect light: the SAT, all things considered, does reflect something . It's not a random number the College Board pulls out of their backside. At the end of the day, havin…

...teachers don't want standardized tests to be used as metrics to determine the quality of their teaching, and they wanted to set the evaluations themselves. There's a very good reason for good teachers to push back against evaluations based on standardized testing, and that's the fact that they can be assigned bad students to force them out of their jobs. When two equally qualified teachers at the same school teach…

Wait a second - the system is known to be corrupt and political. Therefore, we should reduce external accountability and give more control to the corrupt political actors?

Re: SAT: Getting the lowest score possible

#63
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[deleted]

West Germany and East Germany, North Korea and South Korea, China and Taiwan These nations exhibit a strong difference in adult height also. The reason is well known to be mass childhood malnutrition in command political-economies. Ethical studies cannot reproduce the effect because malnourishing children is not ethical. Relationships between environment and heritable factors in human development are heavily dependen…

I am from Germany and you are the first person to tell me about malnutrition in the GDR. After a quick google i call it BS. Yes, the GDR was a pretty shitty state, but socialism per se does not eat babies.

Re: SAT: Getting the lowest score possible

#64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...teachers don't want standardized tests to be used as metrics to determine the quality of their teaching, and they wanted to set the evaluations themselves. There's a very good reason for good teachers to push back against evaluations based on standardized testing, and that's the fact that they can be assigned bad students to force them out of their jobs. When two equally qualified teachers at the same school teach…

Wait a second - the system is known to be corrupt and political. Therefore, we should reduce external accountability and give more control to the corrupt political actors?

That's a bit of a strawman. I never said external accountability was unnecessary.

Using standardized testing of students for teacher evaluation, without accounting for variation in students (both random and orchestrated) will not bring better teachers into public schools.

Re: SAT: Getting the lowest score possible

#65

A lot of the comments here are related to the idea of whether or not the SAT can be regarded as being much like an IQ test. It can, and psychologists routinely think of the SAT that way. Despite a number of statements to the contrary in the various comments here, taking SAT scores as an informative correlate (proxy) of what psychologists call "general intelligence" is a procedure often found in the professional liter…

How did you get involved with SET? The people who ran that back when I was a student/study participant (20 years ago!) were amazing. I got a free college CS class when I was 12-13 out of the deal, which got me my first reliable dialup access to the Internet and UNIX/VMS shells for the next few years. It's hard to thank them enough.

Re: SAT: Getting the lowest score possible

#66
Mostly off topic, but do USA schoolschildren get taught to use things like "number of degrees of arc", "measures in degrees" and "inverse logarithm" instead of just "degrees" and "exponentiation"/"exponential" (and the use of the last one is the geometric mean, which is a much pithier explanation and concept).

And, a correlation of .52 isn't the same as a coin toss: that would be a correlation of 0.

Re: SAT: Getting the lowest score possible

#67
post #66

Mostly off topic, but do USA schoolschildren get taught to use things like "number of degrees of arc", "measures in degrees" and "inverse logarithm" instead of just "degrees" and "exponentiation"/"exponential" (and the use of the last one is the geometric mean, which is a much pithier explanation and concept). And, a correlation of .52 isn't the same as a coin toss: that would be a correlation of 0.

Yes, they do.

After 35 years teaching in Australia, my parents are now in NYC running seminars for teachers there.

They are constantly shocked at the amount of time spent in classes memorizing lexicon, dates, etc. without actually learning to apply any of it. The students can very confidently regurgitate what the "number of degrees of arc" means, but they have no idea how to apply that to anything. They'll also spit out the exact date of some war, but have no idea who fought, why, or what any outcome was.

Re: SAT: Getting the lowest score possible

#68
post #32
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would be true, but you are in fact allowed to miss a couple of questions and still get a perfect score.

That depends on the section of the test. Critical reading you can get several wrong, writing depends on your essay score, and math you typically can't get any wrong.

I made 1 mistake and math and ended up with 790. I was quite annoyed with myself when I walked out knowing exactly which question I messed up too.

Re: SAT: Getting the lowest score possible

#69

A lot of the comments here are related to the idea of whether or not the SAT can be regarded as being much like an IQ test. It can, and psychologists routinely think of the SAT that way. Despite a number of statements to the contrary in the various comments here, taking SAT scores as an informative correlate (proxy) of what psychologists call "general intelligence" is a procedure often found in the professional liter…

Just a comment, because I know you get some stick when you bring this material up.

I do appreciate it, and think it really does need to be drummed into people. Particularly the material on job performance indicators(IQ and work samples everyone). Also, you should be consulting with this if you aren't already.

Re: SAT: Getting the lowest score possible

#70
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

West Germany and East Germany, North Korea and South Korea, China and Taiwan These nations exhibit a strong difference in adult height also. The reason is well known to be mass childhood malnutrition in command political-economies. Ethical studies cannot reproduce the effect because malnourishing children is not ethical. Relationships between environment and heritable factors in human development are heavily dependen…

I am from Germany and you are the first person to tell me about malnutrition in the GDR. After a quick google i call it BS. Yes, the GDR was a pretty shitty state, but socialism per se does not eat babies.

Malnutrition is not a simple binary condition. However, while East Germany was one of the wealthiest areas of the Soviet Union and economically better off than many nations today the average diet was lacking by current western standards.

Don't forget this was the middle of the Green Revolution, but the USSR was still slightly behind the curve. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Revolution

Post reply on HN