I take the SAT this saturday. To be blunt: They owe everyone a fucking apology over this.
Major Changes in SAT Announced by College Board
101–110 of 152 posts
Re: Major Changes in SAT Announced by College Board
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not sure what you are saying. The claim is that you could have done better had you really tried and taking courses is one way of doing that.
Some feel if they succeed without trying, then this success is more meaningful than those whose foundation for success was built on hard work.
Some also feel their time is better spent on learning and smart work and not dry, repetitive practice of test-taking strategies.
Re: Major Changes in SAT Announced by College Board
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Really you can just always guess. When you can't eliminate any answers, guessing has the same expected value as leaving the question blank. If you can eliminate one or more answers, the expected value is higher for guessing than for leaving the question blank. So in no situations does guessing decrease your expected value.
Re: Major Changes in SAT Announced by College Board
#104Earlier 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.
SAT prep has little effect on SAT scores. From research on this topic [1]: "Does test preparation help improve student performance on the SAT and ACT? For students that have taken the test before and would like to boost their scores, coaching seems to help, but by a rather small amount. After controlling for group differences, the average coaching boost on the math section of the SAT is 14 to 15 points. The boost is…
There is a lot of bad test prep out there, especially any test prep taught by high school teachers. I have done test prep privately for six years and I can guarantee you coaching can have substantial effects. These studies group all test prep under a giant umbrella, but take elite 1 to 1 test prep and the premium price it costs that parents actually pay and you'll see substantial gains. I have spend $0.00 on advertising in the last six years and I am routinely overbooked because of word of mouth. There's just so many awful teachers and courses out there.
Re: Major Changes in SAT Announced by College Board
#105Am 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 somethin…
"Membranous" definitely isn't arcane (membrane is a contemporary word relevant in scientific contexts), but much of the actual SAT-tested vocabulary like "maudlin" definitely are anachronisms (whose etymology root from obscure cultural allusions).
How could one possibly make the mental reasoning leap over multiple levels of indirection from "maudlin" to "Old French Madeleine", and then to "Mary Magdalene" in archaic Latin, and THEN to the word's actual meaning of "overly sentimental"? I might have invoked my Roman Catholic upbringing to figure that one out on-the-fly during my exam? Please.
In case you think I'm joking, I'm literally not making this convoluted chain of indirections up: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/maudlin#Etymology
As further reinforcement, surely, the word's frequency of occurrence in corpora over time peaked in 1900, and then its usage dropped off a cliff. Meanwhile, "membrane" still remains widely used and very pertinent. Corroborating Google n-gram viewer statistics (shortened Google Books URLs):
maudlin: http://goo.gl/cfGSZP membrane: http://goo.gl/aFK9La
Yet, "maudlin" was among the list of commonly-tested vocabulary words in my SAT prep book, and it was even included in the bundled stack of veritable flash cards for practice drills.
However, I can't remember seeing "membranous" in the same stack, probably because the knowledge of hard sciences is underrepresented in the test content (instead, you had to take the completely separate SAT subject tests to demonstrate your command of the more-than-relevant scientific disciplines).
Better keep opening Old Nassau's gates to the upper echelons of society for anybody who can ace this sort of trivia.
Re: Major Changes in SAT Announced by College Board
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
No, if you're actually checking your work properly, you're going in with the assumption that there are mistakes to be found, and you're looking for reasons why your answer might be wrong - the same as when you're trying to eliminate a candidate answer in a multiple choice test (especially if "none of the above" is one of the choices). The gaming the odds aspect of the SAT only comes into play when you've run out of time or run out of knowledge to use to support or contradict possible answers.
Re: Major Changes in SAT Announced by College Board
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
I don't think College Board wants to normalize for background differences; that would be a lazy and hugely treacherous to do. Instead, they are tackling the background differences head on by doling out free test prep. I believe education as a whole is heading toward widespread accessibility of top-quality education for everyone. But for now, Khan Academy is taking a small step to democratize test prep, and it should be enough to make a noticeable difference.
Re: Major Changes in SAT Announced by College Board
#108My 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…
Unlike alma maters or perhaps Xoogler status, I don't think SAT scores ever comes up casually in a conversation, and where it does I doubt someone scoring 1500/2400 would be mixed up for someone scoring 1500/1600.
Re: Major Changes in SAT Announced by College Board
#109One thing nice about the change is that for a wrong answer students won't be penalized.
Re: Major Changes in SAT Announced by College Board
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It's not the College Board's problem to solve. Their goal with the SAT is to offer colleges a predictor of college success. Why should they try to incorporate a form of affirmative action into their test? Why not leave that up to the admissions offices that will have a more complete picture of the applicant's background?
Making test prep materials more accessible doesn't really sound like affirmative action to me. It's not an attempt to counterbalance this particular socioeconomic bias, but rather to remove it.