Major Changes in SAT Announced by College Board

Post by wtallis » Thu, Mar 06, 2014, 9:46 PM UTC

the_watcher wrote: post #147

wtallis wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

Checking my work with the assumption I made mistakes is distinct from knowing that 2 of the 5 answers are wrong, and therefore my expected value of a guess is positive vs. when i cannot eliminate any. Saying that checking your work and knowing some answers are wrong but not which one is right are the same thing is simply not true.

Way to ignore the last sentence of my comment. I consider the guess to be separate from the process of elimination that precedes it and sometimes obviates it.

Post by matchu » Sat, Mar 08, 2014, 4:45 AM UTC

wtallis wrote: post #132

Steko wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Of course - I never said otherwise. But the changes they're making don't seem to be simply about making the test more accessible and less elitist; they seem to invite ceiling effects, and I don't see how that helps anyone. Rather than making test prep widely available, the College Board should strive to design a test for which the only effective prep is getting a solid well-rounded education, and they should pay no a…

I agree that, if the SAT were ideal, there'd be no way to prepare for it in particular.

However, a nationally standardized test must have consistent scores to be useful, and currently the best way to do that is to keep the general format and content consistent. That means that a student can discover and prepare for the test's general format and content in advance, which is definitely advantageous.

A truly ideal SAT would have a different format and test wildly different skills every time it's issued in order to defeat the idea of test-specific preparation, but still produce meaningful scores. I'm skeptical that such a test can produce sufficiently consistent scores, though I'm very willing to someday be proven wrong by some clever test developer. That'd be pretty neat.

So, until we create an SAT for which test-specific preparation is meaningless, it's important that test prep resources are distributed evenly so that students with good educations won't have artificially lower scores due to unfamiliarity with the SAT's standard format and content. It's an unfortunate but necessary compromise :/

Re: Major Changes in SAT Announced by College Board

Re: Major Changes in SAT Announced by College Board