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Major Changes in SAT Announced by College Board

nytimes.com

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Re: Major Changes in SAT Announced by College Board

#41

Post by lhc- »

abeinstein wrote: post #25
vonmoltke wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, maybe I'm just an outlier but I got a 1370 in 1997 without really trying, let alone actually spending money to prepare. I'm also a 100% product of public schools.

Yeah I meant more than it is very easy to go from the 400-500's range to the 600-700's range with SAT prep. Especially on the writing section -- they only test on 20ish grammar rules, many of which are subtle and wouldn't necessarily be noticed without prep.

I scored very well on the SAT's back in 2001 or so (better than 700 on each section) with no prep. I dont think anything on there was beyond the reach of a normal HS student. I went to public HS and took no advanced math or english classes prior to the test.

Re: Major Changes in SAT Announced by College Board

#42

Post by ars »

spicyj wrote: post #35
watty wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are these "clear socioeconomic preferences" of the SAT?

Here's a striking image from NBC: https://twitter.com/NBCNews/status/441295567168081920

That's hardly specific to the SAT, that's true in basically every single thing measured. Including health.

Lower income people do worse. Or perhaps people who are "worse" have lower income.

Re: Major Changes in SAT Announced by College Board

#44

Post by saraid216 »

rayiner wrote: post #29

> For many students, Mr. Coleman said, the tests are mysterious and “filled with unproductive anxiety.” Nor, he acknowledged, do they inspire much respect from classroom teachers: only 20 percent, he said, see the college-admissions tests as a fair measure of the work their students have done in school. What is really interesting to me is that while the rhetoric against the SAT (and similar tests like the MCAT and LS…

Higher population numbers would account for both effects, no?

Re: Major Changes in SAT Announced by College Board

#45

Post by the_watcher »

My immediate reaction: My score is now forever unrelatable to all except those who took the exam between 2005 and 2014. Not that anyone has asked my SAT score since I got into undergrad, but now a sizable group of people who did substantially poorer than me will seem as though they did extremely well (a 1550, for example, means something very different depending on which exam you took, while my score of above 1600 will immediate remind people I took the 2400 exam).

It doesn't affect me at all, and I'm not complaining, but that's what ran through my head.

Re: Major Changes in SAT Announced by College Board

#46

Post by sarah2079 »

ars wrote: post #42
spicyj wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's a striking image from NBC: https://twitter.com/NBCNews/status/441295567168081920

That's hardly specific to the SAT, that's true in basically every single thing measured. Including health. Lower income people do worse. Or perhaps people who are "worse" have lower income.

Yes. And these are problems that need addressing. Especially when the people who are doing worse are not even the ones earning the low income, just those with the bad fortune of having low income parents.

Re: Major Changes in SAT Announced by College Board

#47

Post by Cookingboy »

jfmercer wrote: post #26

Sounds like they're dumbing down the SAT. Those soon-to-be-cut "obscure" vocabulary words are critical for mastering English.

First of all, I don't think it's true. And secondly, even if that's true, mastering English isn't exactly a top priority skill needed for young people to succeed in today's world, especially not up there with math and science (which is ridiculously easy on these standard tests and is weighted less. Actually, does SAT even have a science portion???). SAT does not test general knowledge either. (Yes, I know of SAT-II, but they aren't taken by most people and aren't required by colleges).

Re: Major Changes in SAT Announced by College Board

#48

Post by prawks »

Removing the penalty for wrong answers seems to be an interesting choice to me. I thought a strong part of the test was the emphasis on carefully considering the questions so that the answers given were deliberate.

Without a penalty, guessing is just a chance for free points. Not really a measure of any skill aside from test taking (of which the SAT already suffers from enough). But I guess if all of your tests at a university are similar to the SAT, it might be a good measure of your potential success.

Re: Major Changes in SAT Announced by College Board

#49

Post by the_watcher »

vonmoltke wrote: post #20
abeinstein wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a former SAT prep teacher, I'm very excited to learn about Khan Academy's partnership with the College Board. Previously, success on the SAT seemed to depend solely on how much money was spent on SAT prep. Glad to hear that the College Board is interested in leveling the playing field.

Eh, maybe I'm just an outlier but I got a 1370 in 1997 without really trying, let alone actually spending money to prepare. I'm also a 100% product of public schools.

I did literally no prep whatsoever (just walked in to the test location the day I was told to), and did very well. I'm sure test prep would have helped my writing score (my lowest one) by teaching me how to write a god awful essay that contained the pieces to get you extra points, but my verbal and math scores were about as high as they were going to get.

The secret to standardized testing is fast reading comprehension. I've always been a fast reader (without sacrificing comprehension). It frees up time to go back and really spend time on the tougher questions that just isn't available if you have to spend a long time just reading the question (it's more than just in the reading comprehension section, since you have to actually read every question to get through the test).

Re: Major Changes in SAT Announced by College Board

#50

Post by transientbug »

picomancer wrote: post #28
aet wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you propose to add to this list?

Basic algebra and geometry: Order of operations; simplifying expressions; solving quadratic equations by factoring; finding area and perimeter of shapes; the classic "garden problem" (maximize area of a rectangle given fixed sum of 3 sides); naming the Platonic solids; adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing complex numbers; logarithms; solving exponential equations. I think probability, in particular Bayes' T…

Part of the problem for why this stuff isn't taught in high school as much is that (and I do say this with some hesitance, as an engineering student who has had a strong math education, imo) I feel most people would probably not benefit much from having that additional content added into the high school course. The other and more major issue I see is that universities seem to be (just from personal experience and hearing friends stories too) starting to want students to take most of their higher maths, that above basic algebra it seems sometimes, at the university. While you could argue that this is because they are greedy and want more money from forcing students to take more classes, I'd like to think that the reason why is because of how fragmented american high school math courses can be.

Personally, as an engineering student, I'd rather take most of my math classes here at my university because they tend to all be tied together (both with the math department and engineering department courses) well and I know that where I leave off in Ordinary Diff Eq, I will pick right back up from in Ord. Diff. Eq 2. Coming from having taken calculus and calculus 2 in high school and having entered straight to calculus 3 in university, I didn't have this comfort and in fact ended up missing some content between the classes as a result. There is also the issue of choice, and the limits of it within the context of high school curriculum.

Just my 2 cents against teaching additional stuff in high school (or probably addressing the wrong point within this comment). Also, I'm not sure (obviously) what its like across the nation, but at my high school at least these topics where all covered and taught to (nearly) all students: > Basic algebra and geometry: Order of operations; simplifying expressions; solving quadratic equations by factoring; finding area and perimeter of shapes; the classic "garden problem" (maximize area of a rectangle given fixed sum of 3 sides); naming the Platonic solids; adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing complex numbers; logarithms; solving exponential equations. [...] solving linear congruences with small moduli by trial and error; finding gcd and lcm; prime factorization;

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