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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

#321

Post by zerocrates »

nebula8804 wrote: post #170
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.

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

Yeah they're (in)famous for their onerous hiring process, and specifically for asking lots about high school.

See for example this Reddit thread posted by a rejected candidate (and note Canonical CEO Mark Shuttleworth is in the comments!)

https://www.reddit.com/r/recruitinghell/comments/15kj845/can...

or this HN post:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34507640

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

#322

Post by jjallen »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #316
ro_bit wrote: post #261

This is a great step for accessibility, but will not go well with Collegeboard's level of incompetence. I took the GRE (administered by the same company that owns collegeboard) remotely online and as soon as I started the test their absolute spyware of a lockdown browser immediately closed. Despite me passing the system check immediately before the test, the lockdown browser thought I was cheating and immediately shu…

If you are based in the US, try to make a claim with your credit card or, if more adventurous, small claims court to sue. It seems pretty easy to win. Also, send a letter to your attorneys general office to explain what happened. > got 99th percentile scores on everything This part was unnecessary to include. Nothing but humblebragging there.

I disagree. It shows that the original test taker was less likely to be cheating than a lower scoring person and the system was at more likely to be at fault.

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

#323

Post by kyleamazza »

MengerSponge wrote: post #289
jimbokun wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Think it was just making the point he or she didn’t have any reason to cheat.

I'd be less surprised by a 99th percentiler cheating than a 90th percentiler. I know plenty of smart kids who enjoy gaming systems after all.

Your comment comes off as "people who score well on tests are more often cheaters", supported by anecdotal evidence. Above all, it's hardly relevant to the overall discussion and feels more like a grievance.

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

#324

Post by ThinkBeat »

They are making it quite a bit easier for the students to score high. Which seems unfair to anyone who has already taken the test in the old way

> The test is also one hour shorter (down from three hours), has shorter reading >passages and uses digital tools, like a highlighter, a graphing calculator and a >bookmark to go back to skipped questions.

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

#325

Post by blitzar »

kyleamazza wrote: post #323
MengerSponge wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd be less surprised by a 99th percentiler cheating than a 90th percentiler. I know plenty of smart kids who enjoy gaming systems after all.

Your comment comes off as "people who score well on tests are more often cheaters", supported by anecdotal evidence. Above all, it's hardly relevant to the overall discussion and feels more like a grievance.

A score of 14/100 on a test is unlikely to have cheated.

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

#326

Post by zerocrates »

itishappy wrote: post #33

My friend took an important law school exam (GRE or BAR, not sure which) in the past 2 years that was self administered, and she described her experience as "harrowing." The kernel level malware they installed to monitor the exam crashed her device 4 times during the exam. This was after she got it running on a secondary device because it wouldn't even start on her M1 MacBook Air. The software recorded her screen and…

I don't know if there was a remote LSAT option, but I could see this being the bar exam. It's pretty common to have to use crummy testing lockdown software for actual law school exams: they want you to write a bunch and nobody can handwrite anymore, nor does anyone want to read it, but they also don't have the capacity or inclination to provide computers for this purpose, so it's all BYOD. That's just for regular in-person exams, and the remote context only amps things up with the surveillance aspects.

A friend just recently described to me a similarly stressful experience of taking an AWS certification exam remotely and worrying about accumulating too many "strikes" in the eyes of the remote proctor and not being allowed to finish. So they actually preferred going to a testing center.

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

#327

Post by ThinkBeat »

I think these types of tests should only be administered on computers provided to the students. Not bring your own device.

The enormously draconian spywear that is installed makes me jumpy. Not just due to the nature of the software, but for unknown errors and crashes happening due to some incompatibility. There has to be a million different ways a computer could be set up, Oh which only a small subset has been properly tested.

It also gives rich students a potential benefit, since they may have computers with bigger screens, faster cpu, which might be advantageous. (Of course they already have thousands of other benefits)

I think similarly specced computers provided to the students would make this fairer and more reliable.

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

#328

Post by ro_bit »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #316
ro_bit wrote: post #261

This is a great step for accessibility, but will not go well with Collegeboard's level of incompetence. I took the GRE (administered by the same company that owns collegeboard) remotely online and as soon as I started the test their absolute spyware of a lockdown browser immediately closed. Despite me passing the system check immediately before the test, the lockdown browser thought I was cheating and immediately shu…

If you are based in the US, try to make a claim with your credit card or, if more adventurous, small claims court to sue. It seems pretty easy to win. Also, send a letter to your attorneys general office to explain what happened. > got 99th percentile scores on everything This part was unnecessary to include. Nothing but humblebragging there.

I did seriously consider charging back, but considering it would probably get me banned from taking further tests and a couple grad schools I was applying to wanted the scores, I didn't pursue it.

I mentioned it in a few other replies, but my intent was just to show that I didnt need to cheat. I really dont think GRE scores are worth bragging about and I wish I could go back and edit my comment seeing as it clearly didn't come across as intended.

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

#329

Post by csa »

lvl102 wrote: post #182
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.

In an ideal world, we wouldn’t have a tiered education system and that everyone will have access to master any subject/curriculum regardless of age. Therefore, we wouldn’t need an arbitrary and flawed aptitude tests.

> In an ideal world, we wouldn’t have a tiered education system and that everyone will have access to master any subject/curriculum regardless of age.

I’m not sure where you are, but I’m in the US (specifically California). This dream of yours pretty much exists.

> Therefore, we wouldn’t need an arbitrary and flawed aptitude tests.

The aptitude tests are more for matching folks who will be more closely matched in terms of quantity and speed of learning. There is definitely some virtue signaling as well via elite admissions, but that doesn’t exclude anyone from learning pretty much most subjects.

Maybe I don’t understand what you’re suggesting.

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

#330

Post by csa »

gxs wrote: post #121
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 a nice ideal to strive for, but until everyone goes through the same education system there will always be a need for some form of...standard testing across the board. I think the closest we’d be able to get to this is maybe smaller, more granular standardized test that do a better job of testing multiple specific dimensions over an academic career vs a big bang at the end. Somehow that actually sounds kind o…

> I think the closest we’d be able to get to this is maybe smaller, more granular standardized test that do a better job of testing multiple specific dimensions

Don’t we pretty much have this via AP tests and SAT II Subject tests?

> over an academic career vs a big bang at the end.

I hate to say this, but describing the SAT as a “big bang” strikes me as funny. It’s a test of fundamental literacy and fundamental numeracy for well-educated people. It’s not that hard.

The catch is that the preparation that yields high scores is developed over years.

For math, it’s taking the subjects and understanding the fundamentals of these subjects. Sadly, overall math education in the US is very weak and very skewed towards males. Note that most Asians (East and South) that have to take the SAT or GRE tend to and expect to get very high scores — it’s just that easy.

For the language sections, it boils down to having read and understood enough high quality “high brow” content. This high brow content covers most if not all of the vocab, reading comprehension, grammar, etc. that are needed for the test. Sadly, most young people are not exposed regularly to this type of content, and they rarely read it critically if they do have access.

I’m not sure what exactly we are trying to finesse with your suggested changes.

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