Major Changes in SAT Announced by College Board • Hacker News Board

Re: Major Changes in SAT Announced by College Board

#71

Post by the_watcher » Wed, Mar 05, 2014, 9:19 PM UTC

MetricMike wrote: post #65

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).

Yes, I know. But if I got a 1500 on the new 2400 test, you could always just say you got a 1500. There's going to be some number of people who forget about the change and when it happened (people do it now, I doubt they'll forget less often now). However, you say a score above 2400 and everyone immediately remembers the change.

Again, I don't care about how this affects me, it's just the most interesting and relevant part to me.

Re: Major Changes in SAT Announced by College Board

#72

Post by cykho » Wed, Mar 05, 2014, 9:45 PM UTC

It's great when a standardized test keeps on changing. It kind of negates the point. Fundamentally the SAT (or any general test) is an arbitrary measure of you much you study. Just leave it be I say.

Re: Major Changes in SAT Announced by College Board

#73

Post by rch » Wed, Mar 05, 2014, 9:56 PM UTC

I'll start respecting the SAT just as soon as the results can be accepted as a measure of general intelligence. It shouldn't be that difficult to simultaneously test for both content mastery and aptitude.

Re: Major Changes in SAT Announced by College Board

#74

Post by walshemj » Wed, Mar 05, 2014, 10:00 PM UTC

devindotcom wrote: post #12

This is great. I think the changes to the essay portion are excellent. As a native english speaker, my instinct is to emphasize the essay part - but I realize that's idealistic. Still, I think essays and writing are critical for showing one's ability to synthesize (there's that word) and organize one's ideas or those of others. I think writing should be emphasized and multiple native languages supported... but that's…

Sucks really badly for dyslexics though.

Re: Major Changes in SAT Announced by College Board

#75

Post by trillium » Wed, Mar 05, 2014, 10:00 PM UTC

the_watcher wrote: post #51

abeinstein wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The writing section is the only one I think test prep would have helped with. Especially with essay structuring. I just wrote a response to a prompt the way I've always written.

For the writing section, you have to follow an exact structure and use the right amount of words. You can also make stuff up to support your arguments.

It's basically "Write a generic 5 paragraph essay using memorized argument flow."

Re: Major Changes in SAT Announced by College Board

#76

Post by wtallis » Wed, Mar 05, 2014, 10:04 PM UTC

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.

Being able to eliminate wrong answers is pretty much the same skill as being able to notice that you made a mistake when you look over your work. It's valuable for more than test taking.

Re: Major Changes in SAT Announced by College Board

#77

Post by rayiner » Wed, Mar 05, 2014, 10:30 PM UTC

saraid216 wrote: post #44

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?

To a degree. In 1976, someone at both medians at Yale would have a 1410 on the 1996 scale.[1] In 2013, that was a 1510. I can't find percentile charts from back then, but I believe the distribution has stayed roughly the same, which means that Yale has gone from a median score in the top 4% to one in the top 1%.[2] In 1976, about a million people took the SAT, so a top 4% score was a pool of about 40,000 potential students. In 2013, about 1.7 million people took the SAT, so a top 1% score was a pool of about 17,000 potential students.

So population growth explains part of it, and much of the rest can probably be explained by improved financial aid causing applications at Yale to go up by a higher percentage than the overall increase in number of test-takers.

What's really telling is that, despite all the criticism of the SAT, Yale responded to the increasing number of applicants by using the SAT more aggressively to filter applicants. In other words, when faced with a larger applicant pool, Yale decided to reject students with SAT performance that it had previous deemed adequate, because it couldn't think of any better criteria to use to distinguish the additional applicants.

[1] Yale's data: http://oir.yale.edu/sites/default/files/W032_Fresh_SATs_5.pd.... Tables for calculating recentered scores pre and post-1995: http://research.collegeboard.org/programs/sat/data/equivalen....

[2] http://www.collegeboard.com/prod_downloads/highered/ra/sat/S....

Re: Major Changes in SAT Announced by College Board

#78

Post by chubot » Wed, Mar 05, 2014, 10:44 PM UTC

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

This is a horrible graphic. What are the numbers written? Is it a mean, median, etc.? What's time frame? And if there is a single number, why is it a bar? I'd like to see a box plot.

Not to mention all the junk in the background. What do the dotted lines even mean? Tufte would have a heart attack.

Re: Major Changes in SAT Announced by College Board

#79

Post by compare » Wed, Mar 05, 2014, 10:50 PM UTC

jonnathanson wrote: post #67

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 pl…

I did decently the last time I took that analogies test. For me, it was all about analyzing the sub-word component meanings (i.e. each syllable and the relations of the syllables,) not just analyzing the vocabulary at the word level. Maybe I'm just strange.

Re: Major Changes in SAT Announced by College Board

#80

Post by the_watcher » Wed, Mar 05, 2014, 10:51 PM UTC

wtallis wrote: post #76

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.

Being able to eliminate wrong answers is pretty much the same skill as being able to notice that you made a mistake when you look over your work. It's valuable for more than test taking.

I disagree. Checking your work and realizing you forgot a semi colon or that you made an addition mistake is a very different skill than being able to eliminate an answer since you know it is incorrect. Further, it's an even more distinct skill to know when you have eliminated enough answers for your expected correct answer value >= your expected wrong answer value.

That's not saying that they are not valuable skills on their own, but at age 16, they are far more associated with test prep than what the SAT purports to measure.