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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

#61

Post by dublinben »

the_watcher wrote: post #52
prawks wrote: post #48

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…

Penalties for wrong answers are the ultimate test of test-taking abilities (actually, to an extent, an ability to implement probabilities). Your strategy changes based on how many answers you can eliminate, rather than on if you know the correct answer.

If you know all the answers though, you won't skip any or get any wrong. I didn't get a perfect score by guessing on the hard questions.

Re: Major Changes in SAT Announced by College Board

#62

Post by baddox »

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

What's the solution from SAT's perspective? Normalize scores with each student's family income? Give easier questions to poorer students?

Re: Major Changes in SAT Announced by College Board

#64

Post by [deleted] »

transientbug wrote: post #50
picomancer wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 hea…

[deleted]

Re: Major Changes in SAT Announced by College Board

#65

Post by MetricMike »

the_watcher wrote: post #45

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 wi…

If you chop off the essay score, you'll still be related to everybody ever (with respect to test revisions).

Re: Major Changes in SAT Announced by College Board

#66

Post by dublinben »

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…

In my experience, you should know most of those skills before high school anyway.

Re: Major Changes in SAT Announced by College Board

#67

Post by jonnathanson »

chimeracoder wrote: post #24

This sounds nice, but I'm not holding my breath for hope that the "new" SAT will be any better. I took both the "old" SAT (the one that they discontinued around 2004) and the "new" SAT (the one that they're now discontinuing). I actually thought that the structure old one was better in many ways - for example, the analogies were often terribly written , but the idea of testing analogies as a reasoning tool is very po…

Analogies are legitimate tests of reasoning ability. As I recall, however, the analogies of the "old" old test often relied on obscure words. This turned them into de facto vocabulary tests, defeating their purpose as pure assessments of reasoning. At the very least, vocabulary became a confounding variable in assessing the specific aptitude that analogies were meant to assess.

One could make a strong argument for plain-English analogies, absent the $10 words. If every test taker understood most of the words, then we could test for reasoning ability on a more normalized basis.

That's not to say testing vocabulary is totally invalid. Opinions vary. But if we assume vocabulary is worth testing, then we should test it independently.

Re: Major Changes in SAT Announced by College Board

#68

Post by xanados »

I do not envy the College Board. We are in a social and political environment where many issues that bear directly on the test are things you can't discuss in polite company (e.g. whether IQ is a real and relevant phenomenon, the 0.8 correlation between IQ tests and the SAT, the correlation between IQ and socioeconomic status). This makes it extremely difficult to both optimize for their goals, and to communicate that to the involved parties. Because of this it's hard to even know what their true goals are and whether they are actually going to achieve them.

Re: Major Changes in SAT Announced by College Board

#69

Post by the_watcher »

dublinben wrote: post #61
the_watcher wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Penalties for wrong answers are the ultimate test of test-taking abilities (actually, to an extent, an ability to implement probabilities). Your strategy changes based on how many answers you can eliminate, rather than on if you know the correct answer.

If you know all the answers though, you won't skip any or get any wrong. I didn't get a perfect score by guessing on the hard questions.

So no penalty for wrong answers increases the chances of an undeserved perfect score but decreases the test-taking skills advantage in understanding when to guess and when not to guess. The latter is much more common than the former.

EDIT: Said the penalty, meant no penalty

Re: Major Changes in SAT Announced by College Board

#70

Post by chroem »

Am I the only one here that's bothered by a further narrowing of the expected knowledge of students? A good engineer or programmer isn't a human calculator who can bang out hundreds of caclulations per minute or recite petty facts in a very specific area. Good programmers and engineers draw on their wide breadth of knowledge, and the deep understanding it generates, to solve complex and abstract problems.

Anecdotally, I'm seeing a substantial number, if not the majority, of CS students who can't code worth a damn, but got into the department solely because they did well in a small number of unrelated subjects.

While I'm not terribly concerned with the changes in the SAT, I am concerned about it adding more momentum to this trend.

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