The Big Problem with the New SAT
nytimes.com
The Big Problem with the New SAT
1–10 of 40 posts
Re: The Big Problem with the New SAT
#2The SAT doesn't correlate to grades...
And grades don't correlate to much either.
Re: The Big Problem with the New SAT
#3This highlights a number of problems with our public education system in general. I think the problems with the SAT highlighted in the article are reacting to these problems, not the other way around as the author seems to suggest.
* There is no standardized high school curriculum across schools, and even when curriculum is standardized, it is taught unevenly. It's hard to have a college entrance exam that covers a significant amount of content as a result, because it puts kids from poor areas at a huge disadvantage in even getting in to college. It's also very hard to identify which students are from good schools and which are from bad ones, so adjusting test scores to compensate isn't a solution.
* Teacher-student ratios in public schools do not lend themselves to the kind of one-on-one work it takes to become a good writer. Unless we're prepared to say "you have a better chance getting in to college because you went to a suburban school district", this can't be a huge part of the test. Writing ability as a high school senior is largely correlated to the amount of attention you got from your English teacher. If you're a good student in a bad school, you probably get very little attention because you're not acting up.
* There's already too much "teach to the test" as it is. Making the SAT yet another test where students have to cram and memorize content is not the solution.
There are plenty of standardized tests that cover content. The problem is that they are far too basic for college entrance purposes. Turning the SAT into a content-focused test does not solve a problem that colleges have; many colleges are not looking for the best students, but for a racially-diverse selection of the most teachable students. What schools should do (and many already do) is require students from lower quality schools to take a semester of remedial classes free of charge to get them up to speed with whatever the base assumption of prior knowledge is at that school.
Re: The Big Problem with the New SAT
#4There is a fundamental misunderstanding here.
The SAT is not designed to rank students. The SAT is designed to solve a supply/demand problem. There are less spaces available at top universities than there are applicants. The SAT creates a bell curve, allowing schools to go a standard deviation or two out to pick their incoming class.
If the test was an absolute ranking, you'd end up with a large number of people scoring 100%, and the test becomes worthless to colleges as a filter.
Re: The Big Problem with the New SAT
#5The SAT doesn't correlate to grades... And grades don't correlate to much either.
There's a small correlation between SAT scores and college performance, but that's mainly because the types of questions asked for the SAT are the types of questions that are asked in college exams. SATs have ZERO correlation with success in life though.
Re: The Big Problem with the New SAT
#6There is a fundamental misunderstanding here. The SAT is not designed to rank students. The SAT is designed to solve a supply/demand problem. There are less spaces available at top universities than there are applicants. The SAT creates a bell curve, allowing schools to go a standard deviation or two out to pick their incoming class. If the test was an absolute ranking, you'd end up with a large number of people scor…
The article is making the claim that the test is already pretty worthless to colleges as a filter because the differences that separate, say, a 99.9th-percentile score from a 98th-percentile score (number picked by myself at random, as the article didn't mention any that I saw) don't actually correlate to much of anything of use for selecting who should get into the top schools. Especially if those differences are largely "had more time and money to spend on preparation." It reports that research shows that grades are a better predictor. (Though high schools are also hardly immune to grade inflation pressures, for the same reason that the huge test prep industry has sprung up—parents don't care about merit or fairness, they care about doing whatever they can to get the best-perceived college for their own kids. I find it doubtful that changing the SAT in the way suggested would do anything to address this root issue.)
It also makes an interesting side point about year-to-year results for tracking overall education progress.
Re: The Big Problem with the New SAT
#7The SAT doesn't correlate to grades... And grades don't correlate to much either.
There's a small correlation between SAT scores and college performance, but that's mainly because the types of questions asked for the SAT are the types of questions that are asked in college exams. SATs have ZERO correlation with success in life though.
"SATs have ZERO correlation with success in life though"
That is wildly untrue for any value of "success" that includes socioeconomic status.
Re: The Big Problem with the New SAT
#8The SAT doesn't correlate to grades... And grades don't correlate to much either.
There's a small correlation between SAT scores and college performance, but that's mainly because the types of questions asked for the SAT are the types of questions that are asked in college exams. SATs have ZERO correlation with success in life though.
Did somebody get low SATs?
Re: The Big Problem with the New SAT
#9The purpose of the SAT is to be a unbiased barometer; say what you will about it, but everyone takes the same test. Unfortunately, a 4.0 GPA from an obscure high school may tell you very little about a candidate.
I don't know how much admissions officers care about 96th versus 99th percentile, but if someone has an otherwise amazing resume yet ranks in the 40th percentile on their SAT, that's a bit of a red flag.
Re: The Big Problem with the New SAT
#10The problem with the SAT is it mostly judges what you've learned, not how well you can learn. If we're going to have a test for college, it should judge your future potential and ability, not just how well your high school taught you.