So some questions can only be answered by smart people. What are they trying to measure exactly?? As a smart kid, I never understand why people were always trying to knock us down. The other kids would brag to me that they got to take their SATs untimed. I got a perfect score and still got rejected from five colleges.
New SAT, New Problems
41–45 of 45 posts
Re: New SAT, New Problems
#42On the posted question, I don't understand why only A is the right answer, when B is also correct. The two quantities are correlated, so having any one of the two lets you predict with some margin of error the other.
Re: New SAT, New Problems
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
7075.471698 technically rounds to 7075. Less than 0.5, round down. 0.5 or greater, round up.[1] But saying "what's the least" and then "round your answer" at the same time is silly. If you ask a student "each bus holds 10 people; how many buses do you need to move 32 people?" the answer is 4. I would hate to be asked to "round" that answer. 7075 rupees is too few; 7076 is the first whole number that is "enough." The…
I'm glad you pointed this out to your teacher. It is worth noting, though, that if it weren't for the arbitrary "If it's exactly halfway inbetween, you should just round it up" rule taught as received wisdom in school, your teacher would've been on stronger ground. And it is reasonable that they were attempting, in their way, to convey (or even fully come to terms with themself) the understanding that the nearest int…
The "0.5 rounds up" is kind of arbitrary, but it has the advantage of "you only need to look one digit out to round."
4.49 obviously rounds to 4.
4.51 obviously rounds to 5.
4.50, since it "should"[1] follow the same rules as any other number that starts with "4.5", thus rounds to 5.
Say I were looking at a real number of arbitrary length, such that it starts with 4.500000000000... and maybe has a non-zero digit somewhere in it before it terminates. With the "round up on .5" rule, I don't have to keep on reading out indefinitely to round it.
[1] This "should" is assertion.
Re: New SAT, New Problems
#44Here's the College Board's page on the redesigned SAT: https://www.collegeboard.org/delivering-opportunity/sat/rede... Here's a 200 page PDF on the new format with lots of sample questions: https://www.collegeboard.org/pdf/sat/delivering-opportunity/... The sentence completions are gone; now we have words in context. Essay is twice as long. No independent writing section. Math is more algebra and prob/stats focused,…
More coachable is probably the goal. A big problem for the college board is that insofar as the SAT is difficult, math driven, and g loaded, Asian people tend to score too high. This creates political pressure for colleges to stop using the SAT in admissions, an existential threat to the college board.
I'm just spitballing here, but I always assume the reason Asians do so much better is because it is game-able and the Asian subculture pressures students to overstudy.
Re: New SAT, New Problems
#45On the posted question, I don't understand why only A is the right answer, when B is also correct. The two quantities are correlated, so having any one of the two lets you predict with some margin of error the other.
You are right about being able to predict either, but the specific quantity described in A is the slope, while in B it is the inverse of the slope.