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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

#91

Post by Workaphobia »

jaybaxter wrote: post #54
ars wrote: post #43

Why is "ending the longstanding penalty for guessing wrong" a good thing?

When there is a penalty for wrong guesses, students who have a pretty good idea that they know the answer, but aren't certain, must waste time determining whether it is in their favor to answer the question. Evaluating whether it is worth it to take a guess is a test-taking skill, and the SAT is trying to shift away from test-taking skills.

What's hard about it? If you can eliminate even one answer it's in your favor to guess.

Re: Major Changes in SAT Announced by College Board

#92

Post by rayiner »

saraid216 wrote: post #87
rayiner wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 SA…

Obviously you would expect Yale to raise SAT medians in addition to other criteria as the number of applicants goes up, in order to maintain the class size (which it has done for the relevant time). What's interesting is how much the bars are raised relative to each other. Remember, the criteria aren't perfectly correlated. If you go from top 4% SAT to top 2%, and top 10% GPA to top 5%, you should expect the number of people passing the filter to shrink by much more than 50%. It could be as much as a 75% reduction if SAT and GPA aren't correlated at all.

Apparently, the number of applications at Yale have gone up by 2.6x since 1976, and the admissions rate has gone down by 3.5x. So Yale needs to raise its various bars to let through 1/3 or 1/4 as much of the applicant pool, in totol. The fact that it has raised its SAT bar from top 4℅ to top 1% suggests that all the increased stringency in the admission standard comes from the SAT criterion. Indeed, to achieve that increase in SAT median with only a 2.6x increase in apps, Yale probably had to make some criteria less stringent.

That's the crazy part. Not that SAT went up, but that it seems to have been the primary tool to filter the additional applicants, to the exclusion of other criteria.

Re: Major Changes in SAT Announced by College Board

#94

Post by exue »

truantbuick wrote: post #81

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.

I always found it interesting the super strong correlation between essay length and score, and that the scorers are supposed to not care about factual accuracy at all. I also found that almost every single essay question had "right"-sounding and a "wrong"-sounding answer, as in answering one way would always make you sound smarter to the reader. I guess if you just know that you can do pretty well by following these rules you'll follow the formula.

Re: Major Changes in SAT Announced by College Board

#95

Post by jonnathanson »

Workaphobia wrote: post #90
jonnathanson wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The whole point of analogy problems is to test reasoning skills. Specifically, logical skills, inferences, categorization, and so forth. The vocabulary test nested within the analogy test is incidental. It creates a bivariate challenge (vocabulary + categorization), which is not necessarily an invalid test. It's just not a pure test of analogies, and it's also duplicative of the vocabulary portion of the test.

In re the value of analogies, there are some computer scientists and philosophers who believe analogy-drawing is the irreducible core of higher cognition. I'm not sure I'd go that far, but Douglas Hofstadter has come close:

http://www.amazon.com/Surfaces-Essences-Analogy-Fuel-Thinkin...

Re: Major Changes in SAT Announced by College Board

#96

Post by hga »

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…

This is something that's been going on for a long time, something I watch as one who took the exam in 1979. Since then it's been successively watered down to the point it's much less useful. E.g. MIT now accepts the ACT ... and finds it's a better predictor than the SAT (!!!).

Re: Major Changes in SAT Announced by College Board

#97

Post by hga »

rch wrote: post #73

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.

It used to be a fairly good measure of 'g', and I note the tables I found on the net that equate the scores of the 1979 exam I took are very close to my results on formal IQ tests, like within 2-3 points.

Reversing the watering down of the exam ... that's pretty hard to imagine for the foreseeable future.

Re: Major Changes in SAT Announced by College Board

#98

Post by picomancer »

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…

> most people would probably not benefit much from having that additional content added into the high school course

It would be great if we could switch from content to teaching actual mathematical reasoning. You can read a famous essay called "Lockhart's Lament" for more about this subject. But that's not something that's happening right now either in classrooms or on the standardized tests.

My point is that you have to teach something in high school, and it doesn't feel like the new SAT tests anywhere near four years' worth of content.

> linear equations; complex equations or functions; and ratios, percentages and proportional reasoning

"Linear equations" are a topic that can easily be taught in a month or less. "Complex equations or functions" is unclear, but I assume this means quadratic equations or maybe basic trigonometry -- probably a semester's worth or less. "Ratios, percentages and proportional reasoning" is really middle school level math -- or even elementary school level. It doesn't belong in a high school curriculum, except as review or remedial material.

So all of this content consumes less than a year of high school. I agree that maybe four years of intensive math coursework may be the wrong bar to set for the SAT, but is it setting the bar too high to expect college-bound seniors to know more than a single year worth of math content?

For that matter, only the best students should be expected to get a high score on the SAT; otherwise, the SAT score becomes meaningless. So I should re-phrase the question:

Is it setting the bar too high to expect the best math students among college-bound seniors to know more than a single year worth of math content?

Re: Major Changes in SAT Announced by College Board

#99

Post by gmichnikov »

It's worth noting the similarities to the Common Core. David Coleman was one of the main authors of the Common Core and is now president of the College Board.

This article: "Sometimes, students will be asked not just to select the right answer, but to justify it by choosing the quote from a text that provides the best supporting evidence for their answer." "Going forward, though, students will get a source document and be asked to analyze it for its use of evidence, reasoning and persuasive or stylistic technique."

CCSS CCSS.ELA-Literacy.CCRA.R.1 Read closely to determine what the text says explicitly and to make logical inferences from it; cite specific textual evidence when writing or speaking to support conclusions drawn from the text. CCSS.ELA-Literacy.CCRA.R.8 Delineate and evaluate the argument and specific claims in a text, including the validity of the reasoning as well as the relevance and sufficiency of the evidence.

Re: Major Changes in SAT Announced by College Board

#100

Post by BadCookie »

jmduke wrote: post #15

This is the best news about college admissions that I've heard in a very long time. As someone who was fortunate enough not to be disadvantaged by the clear socioeconomic preferences of the SAT (and I'm guessing the ACT as well, though I had much less exposure to it), this is absolutely a step in the right direction.

As someone who was perhaps the poorest member of my graduating class at an elite, private college, I can say with some degree of certainty that the SAT was an important, if not the most important, factor in helping me gain access to opportunities that no one from my rural community had ever had before. So in that sense, the SAT can be a tremendous equalizer, even if it is often the opposite.
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