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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

#391

Post by ecshafer »

whynotminot wrote: post #259
ecshafer wrote: post #168

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…

This is what I don't understand about the movement that wants the SAT/ACT removed for college admissions, or claim that it's biased. Sure, it's biased. Everything is. But it's biased in an open, auditable way that students of any background can prepare for. The rich will always have an advantage of course, but this is one of those areas where grit and determination can actually close the gap considerably. Remove that…

I absolutely agree. I grew up in a single parent household in poverty. But I was able to beat people on the SAT who grew up in extremely wealthy families. I have met plenty of people that graduated from highschool with a great gpa and went to good schools solely because of their family, and I have known dozens of people that I know are pretty sharp who didn't get to school because of family circumstances.

Anything that seeks to further widen the rich / poor gap like this is in my mind, completely unethical.

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

#392

Post by csa »

gxs wrote: post #388
csa wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 numer…

> I’m not sure what exactly we are trying to finesse with your suggested changes. Maybe you should ask then instead of going on some dumb rant? Maybe that was an attempt at a rhetorical question, but given how much you missed the mark, I took it more literally. Big bang btw just refers to doing it all at the end all at once vs in smaller steps over time, it’s not to be taken literally. It doesn’t imply grandeur or an…

> Also, you missed the entire point of OPs message, as an educator, they were suggesting that perhaps the SAT doesn’t do all you suggested.

Except that it does, and there is data to back it. As an example, some elite schools have stated that they really like using the SAT since it predicts success at their respective schools.

One simple Google search (there are many more):

https://www.manhattanreview.com/sat-predictor-college-succes...

“On average, SAT scores added 15% more predictive power above high school grades alone when attempting to understand how students will perform in college. Within narrow high school GPAs, SAT scores further helped predict a student's future success in college.”

> I don’t know what we’re trying to finesse either, can you explain what you mean by finesse?

What do “granular tests” tell us that the SAT, SAT IIs, and AP tests do not already tell us?

The short answer is “not very much”.

The results of these tests are accurate enough to make meaningful predictions and decisions.

Note that there is some interesting work in learning portfolios (probably an optimal variation of “granular test”) that can be useful for structuring individual learning plans, but that sort of misses the point of broad-based standardized tests, which is normalizing widely varied experiences.

Note that standardized tests fail two types of people at the margins, but these are largely addressable, and the benefits outweigh the costs imho:

1. Folks who have test anxiety. Familiarization with the test reduces this substantially for most people affected by this.

2. High-performing folks (think top 5% or better) who don’t have high attention to detail on computer adaptive tests. Also addressed by test familiarity. I’ve seen folks who should be maxing a test get lower than the max because they were careless in some early questions.

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

#393

Post by rany_ »

BobbyTables2 wrote: post #181
Atotalnoob wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can detect if you are running in a VM

Doesn’t “virtualization based security” in Windows mean that everyone is running in a VM?

I think that's only for the so-called Windows Sandbox.

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

#394

Post by gnicholas »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #389
vkou wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is more of a stereotype than a universal constant, It's a well-known fact. You may also observe how prisons are full of young people. Brains that are still developing are far more likely to make really stupid decisions without regard for consequences. If I were to pick qualities for a driver, and had to choose between 'Makes good decisions' versus 'Faster reflexes', I'd pick the former any day. Note that we do…

> It's a well-known fact. It's a well-known fact that different people mature at different rates. > You may also observe how prisons are full of young people. The bulk of prison inmates are in their 30s and 40s: https://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_age.j... > Brains that are still developing are far more likely to make really stupid decisions without regard for consequences. Then how come there are…

> how come there are so many more 40 year olds in prison than 20 year olds?

You'd want to look at the age at which someone committed the crime for which they are imprisoned, not their current age, to assess the affect of age on crime-related statistics. Also, the juvenile justice system typically lets people out at 18 or 20, unless they were charged as an adult. So you don't have the same buildup of late teenagers being imprisoned at 20 as you do for people who are older.

It is factually the case that brain development continues until around age 25. The impulsive areas of the brain develop/myelinate earlier than than the prefrontal cortex, for example, which exercises executive function and impulse control.

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

#395

Post by dragonwriter »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #389
vkou wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is more of a stereotype than a universal constant, It's a well-known fact. You may also observe how prisons are full of young people. Brains that are still developing are far more likely to make really stupid decisions without regard for consequences. If I were to pick qualities for a driver, and had to choose between 'Makes good decisions' versus 'Faster reflexes', I'd pick the former any day. Note that we do…

> It's a well-known fact. It's a well-known fact that different people mature at different rates. > You may also observe how prisons are full of young people. The bulk of prison inmates are in their 30s and 40s: https://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_age.j... > Brains that are still developing are far more likely to make really stupid decisions without regard for consequences. Then how come there are…

> Then how come there are so many more 40 year olds in prison than 20 year olds?

Because age demographics of prison are very distant from age demographics of people committing crimes at the time they commit them for a variety of reasons, starting with the fact that imprisonment happens after conviction which happens after the crime. But also because of both discretionary leniency to first time offenders (which younger criminals are more likely to be) and younger criminals even apart from whether they are first time offenders, and because of formal enhancements to punishment for repeat offenders, which combined mean that, for otherwise similar immediate predicate offenses, older criminals are more likely to be imprisoned at all and likely to be imprisoned longer.

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

#396

Post by dragonwriter »

gnicholas wrote: post #394
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's a well-known fact. It's a well-known fact that different people mature at different rates. > You may also observe how prisons are full of young people. The bulk of prison inmates are in their 30s and 40s: https://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_age.j... > Brains that are still developing are far more likely to make really stupid decisions without regard for consequences. Then how come there are…

> how come there are so many more 40 year olds in prison than 20 year olds? You'd want to look at the age at which someone committed the crime for which they are imprisoned, not their current age, to assess the affect of age on crime-related statistics. Also, the juvenile justice system typically lets people out at 18 or 20, unless they were charged as an adult. So you don't have the same buildup of late teenagers be…

> It is factually the case that brain development continues until around age 25

No, its factually the case that brain development continues for most of life, with different capacities peaking at wildly different ages on average (with some peaking after others have gone into significant decline), and considerable variation between individuals in each capacity, with executive function, specifically, reaching a plateau starting around the mid-20s on average (but again with considerable variation among individuals.)

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

#397

Post by pc86 »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #387
pc86 wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#datatracker-home 17,310 admissions, down 10.3% week over week 2.1% of deaths, down 8.7% WOW 1.5% of ED visits, down 14.6% WOW 7.4% of tests are positive, down 0.9% WOW None of those numbers indicate growth. None of those numbers indicate a significant proportion of the population. I'll give you geography, but that's also characteristic of an endemic illness - distributed acro…

Notice how I didn't say growth, since it bounces up and down. And that looks like a significant proportion to me. If your argument is that these numbers are not enough for "very widespread extent", then are you saying it was never a pandemic to begin with? And you already said it was endemic. Are you arguing that a pandemic needs bigger numbers than that?

You didn't say growth but the definition of pandemic is "characterized by very widespread growth or extent."

98.5% of ED visits are for something else. What would that number have been in 2020 or 2021?

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

#398

Post by torstenvl »

bobthepanda wrote: post #373
torstenvl wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comment seems odd. If the vision test is enough to show you can read a sign on the highway, why does that make it a joke? Are you suggesting that someone shouldn't have a license if their vision is not correctable to 20/20, even if it's good enough for all essential driving tasks?

people drive on more than just highways. particularly on a street, road signage is not nearly as large

Fair enough. Thanks!

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

#399

Post by AnthonyMouse »

dragonwriter wrote: post #395
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's a well-known fact. It's a well-known fact that different people mature at different rates. > You may also observe how prisons are full of young people. The bulk of prison inmates are in their 30s and 40s: https://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_age.j... > Brains that are still developing are far more likely to make really stupid decisions without regard for consequences. Then how come there are…

> Then how come there are so many more 40 year olds in prison than 20 year olds? Because age demographics of prison are very distant from age demographics of people committing crimes at the time they commit them for a variety of reasons, starting with the fact that imprisonment happens after conviction which happens after the crime. But also because of both discretionary leniency to first time offenders (which younge…

Most of those would explain a delay of a couple years, not a couple decades, and the rest is rather the point. If this was disproportionately youthful indiscretion then there wouldn't be many repeat offenders in their late 20s and 30s, since they'd have grown out of it.

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

#400

Post by Dylan16807 »

pc86 wrote: post #397
Dylan16807 wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Notice how I didn't say growth, since it bounces up and down. And that looks like a significant proportion to me. If your argument is that these numbers are not enough for "very widespread extent", then are you saying it was never a pandemic to begin with? And you already said it was endemic. Are you arguing that a pandemic needs bigger numbers than that?

You didn't say growth but the definition of pandemic is "characterized by very widespread growth or extent." 98.5% of ED visits are for something else. What would that number have been in 2020 or 2021?

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/us/covid-cases.html

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/us/covid-cases.html

The severity has dropped more than the prevalence.

Hospitalizations suggest that in the US the peak in Jan 2024 was around 80% as big as Jan 2023. If that's accurate, then Jan 2024 had more cases per day than most of 2020 and a good chunk of 2021. That's a lot of extent. There had been 120 thousand cases in the entire world when pandemic was originally declared, and the US is currently doing a multiple of that each week.

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