As a member of the first year of students who were required to do the writing section, I'm glad it's gone. What an absolute crock that was, and it probably screwed up the other sections as well. When you make an already ponderous test over an hour longer, it becomes less about aptitude and more about endurance.
Major Changes in SAT Announced by College Board
81–90 of 152 posts
Re: Major Changes in SAT Announced by College Board
#82Am 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…
No. I was also depressed about the approach of 'we're excluding arcane words!' I do really well on those tests - not because I have encountered every word that might come up, but because I do have a big enough vocabulary to draw analogies and guess at the meaning of arcane words by looking at their internal structure, eg Membranous seems to consist of membrane + ous, so I guess it's an adjective to describe something that has a membrane-like quality.
I developed a love of etymology from spending many long hours poring over dictionaries as a child, including the bits about word roots and so on. When I see that things like this are being dropped from the SAT, it's like being told that that knowledge and the effort to acquire it lacks value.
Re: Major Changes in SAT Announced by College Board
#83As a member of the first year of students who were required to do the writing section, I'm glad it's gone. What an absolute crock that was, and it probably screwed up the other sections as well. When you make an already ponderous test over an hour longer, it becomes less about aptitude and more about endurance.
As if real life never presented such challenges.
Re: Major Changes in SAT Announced by College Board
#84This 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.
Agreed... a test that aims to be as broadly applicable as possible should accommodate as many variations and common problems as possible. It may be the difference between 20 million people taking it and 20.3 million, but for that .3 million it's incredibly important.
Re: Major Changes in SAT Announced by College Board
#85Sounds like they're dumbing down the SAT. Those soon-to-be-cut "obscure" vocabulary words are critical for mastering English.
Besides it's fun to tell people you have logolepsy, but the seizures are controllable.
Re: Major Changes in SAT Announced by College Board
#86"Math questions will focus on three areas: linear equations; complex equations or functions; and ratios, percentages and proportional reasoning. Calculators will be permitted on only part of the math section." As if math requirements for American students aren't low enough already.
Voluntary extra tests are required for people who need to prove more than competence in fundamentals. I'm sure there are many people who wish their field was better represented in the test. But you have 3 hours to get a read on quite a spread of topics, it necessarily must be rather hit and run, with the deep dives saved for later.
Having taken several such tests, I can't help observing that they're also administered by the College board and cost money to sit - something on the order of $75 each.
Re: Major Changes in SAT Announced by College Board
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 st…
Yeah, to expand on what I meant,
Population growth -> Naturally leads to more people willing to criticize the SAT because percentages. Especially if there remains a similar or greater level of exposure to it, which there has.
Population growth -> Larger applicant pool, and assuming Yale or whoever is unwilling to drop the SAT as a filtering mechanism, naturally means they'll raise their various bars, including the SAT score cutoff.
Re: Major Changes in SAT Announced by College Board
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sucks really badly for dyslexics though.
Agreed... a test that aims to be as broadly applicable as possible should accommodate as many variations and common problems as possible. It may be the difference between 20 million people taking it and 20.3 million, but for that .3 million it's incredibly important.
Yes probably needs the ability to do an oral Viva - funnily enough one of my uncles did that at Oxford back in the 50's for his MA as his writing was so bad :-)
Re: Major Changes in SAT Announced by College Board
#89As a member of the first year of students who were required to do the writing section, I'm glad it's gone. What an absolute crock that was, and it probably screwed up the other sections as well. When you make an already ponderous test over an hour longer, it becomes less about aptitude and more about endurance.
As if real life never presented such challenges.
Real life has never sprung a random topic on me at 7:30 AM and required me to have a handwritten essay written 25 minutes later. This essay, in a wildly naive attempt to limit the subjective value of writing, was judged largely on "coherency".
We had computers back in 2005, and almost all students typed their school essays out, but the college board hadn't got with it. Since it took me so long to handwrite things, I didn't have a moment to think about the topic. Instead, my strategy was to prepare an extremely formulaic essay, and then furiously write as fast as I could. Hey, it worked, except I was already stressed and tired by the end of the essay with over 3 hours of test to go.
To backtrack a bit, I've always assumed the SAT to be about aptitude for reasoning, not about throwing "real life" challenges at you.
Re: Major Changes in SAT Announced by College Board
#90This 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 always assumed analogies were explicitly designed as a mechanism for testing vocabulary, not reasoning. I don't understand how analogies would have any value in testing reasoning skills. I can't imagine an analogy question that isn't either obvious or subjective.