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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

#171

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.

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

yes

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

#172

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…

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 in…

It’s still paying in time for a poor person. The wealthy hire an SAT tutor for a hundred+ an hour to bump their kid’s scores up by a third for maybe 20 hours of work. The poor student will spend much more time. It’s like many things where the poor pay in time rather than money.

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

#173
post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They stopped requiring road tests? Man, seems like that would cause a bunch of cybertrucks to drive into hotels or something.

I believe that most states require road tests to get your first license or to get a license if you have been unlicensed for a while but stopped requiring them for a renewal, at least if you've got a clean driving record. In at least some states this was based on data that showed that for people that had clean records the rate of road test failures was very low, and those were almost always due to test anxiety and the…

Many states no longer require a road test. Instead you take a state approved driving course and the instructor certifies you as meeting the state driving skill requirements. Most states with this system do have an option to still take a state administered driving test instead but most new drivers just take the course. My daughter got her license last August and we paid for the course. They didn’t teach her anything. They had her drive around the local neighborhood for the state mandated numbers of hours for the course and the “instructor” then signed off. All real driving instruction she received came from me.

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

#174
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Some of the math competitions I participated would penalize for skipping around. You were awarded +5 for correct answers and -4 for incorrect or skipped questions. It was not uncommon for negative scores. In one test, any stray marks were also marked as incorrect. No erasing, no changing a 7 to a 9, or anything was allowed. The questions leaned toward an increasing difficulty, but there could something very difficult…

It's cute but doesn't make any difference. Add 4 to the score for every question and you get 9 or 0. The factor of 9 makes no difference so call it 1 or 0. Now your score is just the number of questions you got right, but the ranking is exactly the same as the original scoring system.

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

#175

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.

Isn't the issue that you need a shared test to measure students from across different classrooms, let alone different cities, states, countries, etc.? I agree that it would be great if student ability could be evaluated in some other way that met the same requirements as a standardized test, but I just don't see how to do that.

Apart from, I guess, a one-on-one interview for every student with the colleges they apply to. That wouldn't scale, and people would complain about bias with that, and not without reason.

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

#176
post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 in…

It’s still paying in time for a poor person. The wealthy hire an SAT tutor for a hundred+ an hour to bump their kid’s scores up by a third for maybe 20 hours of work. The poor student will spend much more time. It’s like many things where the poor pay in time rather than money.

Poor people's parents don't have the money to bring them to vacations, enlist a violin teacher or drive them to baseball on the weekends, so clearly they have more time to allocate to studying and thus are advantaged. Conclusion: do away with meritocracy and just exclude poor people altogether. Did I get the "logic" right? Of course put this way it can't be valid because that wouldn't support the American Neomarxist delusion, sorry I meant worldview.

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

#177
The online SAT was much easier than the written version, because (1) You don't have to read big essays anymore in the reading part, and (2) both math sections have the Desmos graphing calculator, with absolutely no features taken out. Desmos is far more convenient to use than a TI-84 for many things, so it made all the problems, especially the hard ones, much easier.

Also, in my opinion, their Bluebook testing software is actually pretty good, especially compared to other digital testing software I had to use over the years, like ClearSight.

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

#178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t see how this is any different from a normal test? If you skip a question or get it wrong the penalty is you don’t get any points for it.

As stated: "You were awarded +5 for correct answers and -4 for incorrect or skipped questions." Answer question 1 correctly: +5 Skip question 2: -4 Answer question 3 correctly: +5 Net score: +6 If skipped were just ignored, the net score would be +10.

It's still equivalent to "normal" tests, because the cost of skipping and the cost of answering incorrectly are the same. A test in that format with N questions and a test in the normal "1 point for a correct answer, 0 for anything else" with N questions are related as follows, assuming C correct answers:

  Score in the +5/-4 system: 5 C - 4 (N-C) = 9 C - 4 N
  Score in the +1/0 system:  1 C + 0
It's basically a "9 points for a correct answer, 0 for anything else" test that simply starts with a score of -4 N.

It's very similar to the difference between Celsius and Fahrenheit.

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

#179

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.

How would you compare raw intelligence or cross schools? That kind of calibration and opportunity for smart students who had other reasons to not focus or care about high school and other remedial grades is really important.

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

#180

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.

Man I hate this. The one thing I loved about schooling in Iran is that there wasn’t a constant system of surveillance. I hate the idea of long term data collection during a time a kid is supposed to be able to learn.

Yup. Take a test and show you should be a good fit for a school, awesome, have to be tracked throughout a relatively boring (classroom-wise, except for programming class) couple years of high school, no thanks.
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