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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

#121

Post by pyromine »

spicyj wrote: post #17
pyromine wrote: post #9

To be honest I'm somewhat sad that Khan Academy is jumping on board with this and planning on offering SAT prep videos. I don't think it's appropriate to mix such meaningless skills as test taking, with the true skills Khan Academy helps teach. I believe it could distract students from the important material, by allowing them to care more of what will help them improve that one particular test score.

The official SAT problems are well-written and so we're happy to teach students how to do them. We're not going to teach test-taking.

But by specifically focusing on the SAT questions aren't you not focusing on the fundamental skills, but rather the specific of how they show up in the SAT's?

Re: Major Changes in SAT Announced by College Board

#122

Post by mh_yam »

BadCookie wrote: post #100
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.

I agree. My family income was in one of the bottom three ranges, and I had a score much higher than what is displayed for the top range. Looking back, it is a huge factor in where I've come from there.

Re: Major Changes in SAT Announced by College Board

#123

Post by Zhenya »

minor_nitwit wrote: post #112
Workaphobia wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

why not both?

when you test for both, its tougher to get a good measure on either.

Re: Major Changes in SAT Announced by College Board

#124

Post by Steko »

WalterBright wrote: post #116
abeinstein wrote: post #8

Earlier 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.

I didn't spend a dime on SAT prep and I did reasonably well (good enough to get into Caltech).

Good thing there were no questions about extrapolating from a sample size of 1.

Re: Major Changes in SAT Announced by College Board

#125

Post by Steko »

WalterBright wrote: post #117
hristov wrote: post #111

I wish I had had the chance to take this, I could have gotten a perfect score. Taking the SAT as an ESL student those obscure words just kill you. There is a set of words that appear nowhere in modern English other than on an SAT test.

If I was on a college admissions committee, I'd take into account ESL status when comparing verbal scores from one applicant to the next. It only makes sense.

There's TOEFL:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Test_of_English_as_a_Foreign_La...

Re: Major Changes in SAT Announced by College Board

#126

Post by Steko »

wtallis wrote: post #120
matchu wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The socioeconomic correlation isn't a bias - it reflects the reality that a poor childhood leaves you less prepared to do well in college. Erasing that effect without fully erasing the causes of the effect is a cover-up that defeats the purpose of the SAT. Making the test harder to hack by acquiring shallow knowledge (like memorizing "SAT words" without actually being well-read enough to have seen or used them before…

The fact that there's a natural correlation doesn't mean the SAT's correlation is identical to the natural one. And if it's worse than it should certainly try and change that.

Re: Major Changes in SAT Announced by College Board

#127

Post by anigbrowl »

truantbuick wrote: post #89
anigbrowl wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

But you knew in advance taht you were going to have to write an essay when you took the SAT, no? And while it may not have happened to you since, I can think of numerous examples where people have to do exactly that - lawyers, managers, doctors...

I'm sorry you find it hard to write things by hand, but that's something most people learn to deal with in junior school. I was a very slow writer myself, and I overcame it with...practice. Indeed, when under time pressure to write something I often find it easier to write by hand because I don't have editing facilities available beyond basic crossing-out.

Re: Major Changes in SAT Announced by College Board

#128

Post by anigbrowl »

anigbrowl wrote: post #82
chroem wrote: post #70

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…

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…

TepidSolarSoul, your account seems to be banned so I can't reply to your comment directly.

I certainly agree that 'maudlin' is harder to figure out etymologically, but on the other hand I don't think it's all that unusual either; one would certainly have come across it if one had read any amount of literature from the late 19th/early 20th century, whether than was something by Dickens or a bunch of Sherlock Holmes stories.

I personally think the fact that everyday vocabularies are shrinking is a terribly bad thing, and a trend we should be resisting rather than accommodating.

I didn't grow up with a silver spoon in my mouth or as the offspring of professional educators, incidentally - indeed they went through a phase of trying to discourage me from reading material that was too advanced or adult-themed. My parents read to me when I was small, my mother enjoyed crosswords, but the main thing they did for me was tell me to go look up a word in the dictionary rather than supplying a definition whenever it was asked for. I enjoyed reading enough to find the dictionary an interest in thing to browse in its own right.

Better keep opening Old Nassau's gates to the upper echelons of society for anybody who can ace this sort of trivia.

I'm not sure what you're trying to say here, but I'm not holding my breath for an invitation from Princeton.

Re: Major Changes in SAT Announced by College Board

#129

Post by mschulkind »

dragonwriter wrote: post #33
abeinstein wrote: post #8

Earlier 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.

> Previously, success on the SAT seemed to depend solely on how much money was spent on SAT prep. Most likely, a correlation is not causation thing -- people for whom success on the SAT is most important are likely to spend more money on test prep, but also be best generally prepared. As ueqirat points out, the research that has been done on SAT test prep utility hasn't actually born out a real effect.

I know it's just one datapoint, and SAT II, not SAT, but I took the SAT II writing test around 2000 and got a 600. I then took a test prep course over a few weeks, took the test again, and got a 690, which is a pretty big difference I'd say. I can tell you the test prep course certainly didn't improve my writing at all...

Re: Major Changes in SAT Announced by College Board

#130

Post by WalterBright »

Steko wrote: post #124
WalterBright wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't spend a dime on SAT prep and I did reasonably well (good enough to get into Caltech).

Good thing there were no questions about extrapolating from a sample size of 1.

Since the parent said "solely" all it takes is a single counterexample :-)
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