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U.S. students will take the SAT online

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Re: U.S. students will take the SAT online

#161

Post by jcranmer »

gnicholas wrote: post #150
jcranmer wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They get extra time allocation to take tests - 50% more in most cases. The numbers I hear tossed around is that a substantial fraction (20% to 40%) of school kids in some of the elite public and private schools have IEPs. Clearly there are kids who need the extra time. But that many? An IEP is a catch-all term for anything that requires special adjustment for a student. What the adjustment is varies depending on th…

> However, in my experience, not one kid had an IEP that allotted them extra time to take tests. There's a difference between the IEP that the school uses and the accommodation request for standardized testing. It would be pretty obvious to you if a student in your class were given extra time for in-class tests, but much harder for you to know if that student qualified for extra time on the SAT. If you knew when they…

You're aware that we generally took the SAT in the same kind of classrooms that we took our class tests, or the state standardized tests, or the APs? (Okay, the APs were largely in the gym instead of classrooms because there's several hundred people taking the AP exam at the same time, but same thing really).

If kids were getting extra time on standardized tests, we'd know.

Re: U.S. students will take the SAT online

#162

Post by dylan604 »

astrea wrote: post #153
jobmeplease wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I applied to Canonical a few months back and they made me write an essay describing my high school grades, extracurriculars, and test results. I've never had that experience in any other job app so it's pretty Canonical specific but it does happen.

I thought that part of the application was a bit odd. High school me is so different from current me that I might as well be writing about a different human being entirely.

These kinds of interviews just scream ageism. For younger applicants, High School may be the most significant bit of life experience they have yet had. For older employees, high school is just a distant memory that was at most a seed that has grown into a much more branched experience

Re: U.S. students will take the SAT online

#163

Post by polski-g »

eganist wrote: post #129
jmeyer2k wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what we're working on building at AutoMark ( https://automark.io ). We're currently building grading tools for teachers, but eventually want to build out a tool to accurately monitor a student's performance over time. There's a lot of potential for AI to disrupt the education system from high school to college to a career. Currently, a GPA and a few test scores (SAT, ACT, etc) are the most in depth view into…

> eventually want to build out a tool to accurately monitor a student's performance over time. How does AutoMark account for disparities in quality of education?

School quality has no impact in outcomes: https://web.archive.org/web/20161114182009/http://legis.wisc...

Re: U.S. students will take the SAT online

#164

Post by MichaelNolan »

Buttons840 wrote: post #49
Eldandan wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> try and prevent Yeah, good luck with that. If there's one thing remote teaching during covid taught me it's that you can't stop someone from cheating during an online assessment.

I graduated from WGU and I wouldn't have known how to cheat on the many proctored tests. The only special software I installed was Zoom. I had to have a detached USB camera and show myself and my testing area, and then during the test the camera was to my side showing both myself and the laptop screen. I'm sure it's possible, but that seems just as secure as a random highschool teacher, which was the only anti-cheat…

> The only special software I installed was Zoom

I wonder when they changed that. I was there around 2014, and back then you either had to install their anti cheat software, or go to a local testing/proctor center.

Re: U.S. students will take the SAT online

#165

Post by cute_boi »

ml_giant wrote: post #148
icyfox wrote: post #11

When I took the GRE in 2017, everything was digital as well. But I couldn't believe how locked down the experience was. The testing center in downtown SF had no windows, a metal detector, and you had to check all food outside of the testing room. Just in case you were going to try to cheat off of your banana. I think each computer was also recording a video of you taking the test although I might be mistaken here. Ce…

When I took the GRE in 2017, I got a really bad bloody nose right when the test started and I couldn't pause the test. The person monitoring wouldn't let me have a bunch of tissues at the computer (Perhaps due to cheating concerns), so each time I needed a new tissue I had to raise my hand and she gave me one. I didn't end up scoring very well.

The way some people have zero empathy hurts me a lot....

Re: U.S. students will take the SAT online

#166

Post by atonse »

the__alchemist wrote: post #128
germinalphrase wrote: post #110

As a former educator, I look forward to the day that we can simply track student ability in a trustable manner based on long term data collection in the classroom rather than requiring these additional, often expensive, exams. We would need to mediate our classroom interactions more than we do now - but the tools do so usefully are there if packaged correctly.

I'd go a step further and decouple education from social status stratification as much as possible. Maybe not realistic with evolution and primate dominance hierarchies, but we can hopefully (although I'm not positive...) overcome that.

How would you do that?

Higher education roughly correlated with higher salaries which roughly correlates with higher status.

Re: U.S. students will take the SAT online

#167

Post by jessriedel »

glial wrote: post #43
gnicholas wrote: post #28

When I first heard they were shortening the exam by 30%, I thought that was unfortunate, since it would either make the test less reliable or impose a lower ceiling on the range it can assess. However, I later learned that it will be dynamic — depending on how a student does in the first section on a given topic, he will be given either easier or harder versions of a subsequent section. That means that they'll be abl…

Shorter is good, but dynamic tests (called "computer adaptive tests" or CAT in the industry) make it difficult to follow longstanding best-practices for test taking. When I took the SAT, I could quickly scan through the questions in the current section and mark those that looked difficult, and save them for the end. With a CAT test, it's typically one-question-at-a-time, and if you're a strong test taker, they get su…

> make it difficult to follow longstanding best-practices for test taking.

Isn't that good? The effectiveness of test-taking strategies is a (minor) flaw in the SAT. People taking an ideal test would not benefit at all from learning strategies.

(The flaw is minor because all our methods for assessing people are gameable to some extent, and standardized general tests like the SAT are among the least gameable.)

Re: U.S. students will take the SAT online

#168

Post by ecshafer »

jmeyer2k wrote: post #120
germinalphrase wrote: post #110

As a former educator, I look forward to the day that we can simply track student ability in a trustable manner based on long term data collection in the classroom rather than requiring these additional, often expensive, exams. We would need to mediate our classroom interactions more than we do now - but the tools do so usefully are there if packaged correctly.

This is what we're working on building at AutoMark ( https://automark.io ). We're currently building grading tools for teachers, but eventually want to build out a tool to accurately monitor a student's performance over time. There's a lot of potential for AI to disrupt the education system from high school to college to a career. Currently, a GPA and a few test scores (SAT, ACT, etc) are the most in depth view into…

SAT And ACT and other standardized tests are the single best thing for giving poor students a leg up against rich students. We should be putting more emphasis on those tests. A poor but smart student can study for a test and do well on it, while they can not have continuous tutoring throughout school, paid grad students to do or proofread their homework, or extracurriculars that cost more than their parents pretax income.

Your business is selling an advantage to the rich students coupled with increasing student stress throughout school. Your "holistic" view can't account for "students grades are slipping because they were sleeping in their friends basement after their parent killed another parent" or "students grades are slipping because they are working 40 hours a week, illegally, at 14", but it will holistically show "student got a B+ so their dad who makes $500k a year hired a tutor for 10 hours a week".

Re: U.S. students will take the SAT online

#169

Post by knightoffaith »

ryandrake wrote: post #140
spenczar5 wrote: post #132

> [A high school student] says she's still nervous and anxious for the test, because she feels a lot of pressure to do well. "It's a very important test," she says. "It dictates what's going to happen for your college life. Man oh man, do I wish I could convince my high school self: the particular college you go to matters much less than you think. The SAT matters much less than you think. Grades matter less than you…

I think I would have told my high school self the exact opposite: Go for a better GPA. Go for a better SAT. Get into MIT or some other "elite" instead of the state school that I had to fall back to. Between companies that recruit at top schools, starting salary, salary progression, and compounding interest on savings, I'd probably be retired by now if I spent a just a tiny little extra effort in high school. You can…

If it's just about salary, at least for software engineers, you don't need to get into MIT or anything on par with it. Not nowadays. At universities far below MIT, plenty earn six-figure starting salaries, and a few people earn upwards of 300k starting (yes, only a few, but only a few from places like MIT as well, because this is a difficult thing to do whether you're at MIT or not. Perhaps the proportion of people who get such jobs is higher at MIT, but I would wager that this is because MIT tends to attract highly talented students moreso than other universities, not because of the MIT name).

Not to say MIT isn't a good goal to shoot for, of course. But doing so primarily out of financial interest isn't just heavily discouraged (I'm sure any MIT recruiter would tell you this) but also probably not worth it (particularly if you have to pay!). At least, not for software engineers, though I wouldn't be surprised if the same applied to other fields.

Re: U.S. students will take the SAT online

#170

Post by nebula8804 »

jobmeplease wrote: post #149
ghaff wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who is looking at your SAT score from 10 years ago?

I applied to Canonical a few months back and they made me write an essay describing my high school grades, extracurriculars, and test results. I've never had that experience in any other job app so it's pretty Canonical specific but it does happen.

Canonical? As in the company that makes Ubuntu? Those guys?
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