How Would You Do on the New SAT?
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
(1) An internet ready device.
(2) Reliable internet service.
(3) A quiet environment where they're able to study undisturbed.
(4) Have the time available to study, no younger siblings to watch over, and don't have a strenuous paid job.
For many lower income kids studying for the SAT isn't practical, even if the material is available at no cost. Khan Academy certainly helps a lot of students that can't afford expensive tutors or private classes, but it's by no means a complete solution. We need to do more as a society to help disadvantaged students prepare for college.
(6) Are in a culture where being studious is not considered a bad thing.
There are probably more, too.
Even though the show is obviously meant to be entertainment first, I feel it does a good job to show how frustratingly often the characters' actions are not a direct result of bad decisions alone, but always at the very least also to do with their lack of education (and 'learned' self-discipline), random events, precarious and stressful living situations, societal issues, and basically anything else that is 'external' and by definition not the characters' faults.
And being reminded of that makes me empathize more, despite the fact that I cringe at how stupid so much of the stuff is, and how superficially easy it seems to avoid much of it.
Really though there's probably always going to be some level of education outcome gap between rich and poor kids, having an easier and more stable home life is a substantial leg up.
[0] http://freakonomics.com/podcast/fix-broken-high-schooler-fou...
The real world doesn't have tests, it has continuous collaboration to solve problems.
This may sound trite but it was my experience and reflects many real-world data points of my friends. Tests and University were a colossal waste of time, and we would mostly be in better positions today [financially, career] if we had done almost anything else with our youth.
[1] http://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2014/08/07/335285098/rich-kid...
[2] http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/poverty-disturbs-c...
*Edit: Other comments have pointed out the difficulties in just having Internet access, skills to use the Internet, awareness of free online training, cognizance that training can improve your SAT outcomes, understanding that SAT outcomes are tied to many other positive life outcomes, etc.
Seriously, parents matter. That's why it bugs me when parents are used as an excuse for underperforming students. As difficult as it may be, schools must take full responsibility for their students, and not share it with their parents. That is the ONLY way those students will get what they need.
Responsibility must come with authority. As schools cannot legally take full authority over students, and must share it with parents, it is impossible for them to take full responsibility.
I think there is a good argument that society ought to consider means to mitigate disadvantages due to parenting, and consider the extent and circumstances in which greater intervention is appropriate, that's a discussion which goes far beyond the schools to broader policy questions, and which I can't see ever being resolved in favor of general and total community responsibility -- and thus authority -- unshared with parents, whether via the schools or any other mechanism. As such, I think talk of schools taking unshared responsibility for outcomes is overly simplistic and ill-considered.
In the US many public libraries having computers that are available for use by anyone and are often open till 8 or 9 at night(and many schools also allow students access to computers during their "free/study" period(s)). And with the Labor laws restricting the hours a minor can work on a school day; only situations at home that require their presence would prevent a self-motivated "poor" student from studying for this test.
Now how a "poor" student would be able to afford to take this test much less the crazy expensive colleges/universities in the US is an entirely different matter.
It's technically true. It rarely affect the ability. But it does affect the result anyway. Wealth is a known good predictor in results: https://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2012/08/29/the-correla...
Being rich or poor has a strong, fairly direct, causal relationship to being relatively free from or subject to various environmental and other conditions -- both proximate to the time of the test and at earlier developmental stages -- that have adverse impacts on ability to score highly on any standardized test.
(For a dramatic demonstration that is in the news right now see Flint, Michigan.)
The gap between "rich kid" and "poor kid" performance on the SATs is much, much bigger than just "this SAT studying source or that one"
On initial read, I thought it was saying 209 salads and 209 drinks. Now, obviously the question would be trivial and the total revenue impossible it that were the case, but I wish in general that math questions were written much less ambiguously.
I'm okay with that sort of logical reading comprehension being part of the test. It certainly feels like an important real-world skill...
I also had to run the interpretation of 209 "salads and an unknown number of drinks" through my head as I parsed it.
I do see the value in learning how to remove ambiguity when trying to solve a problem, but I'm not convinced that is what they are intentionally testing.
On the other hand, I really liked how it says you may not use a calculator on the ones that did not need a calculator -- especially when running off to a calculator would have only made things worse!
There's an argument to be made that real life is never that way, so we should be preparing students to evaluate ambiguities in questions.
Furthermore, if a worker would come up to me an question, "Does this mean 209 of each" I would think he kid is not bright and needs direction for everything????!!!!
we know that s + d = 209 (1)
and we know that 6.5s + 2d = 836.5 (2)
we can rewrite (1) as d = 209 - s (3)
substituting (3) into (2) we get 6.5s + 2(209 - s) = 836.5 (4)
solving (4) for s yields s = 93 (5)
[ 1 1 ] [ s ] = [ 209 ]
[ 6.5 2 ] [ d ] = [ 836.5 ] (1)
[ s ] = [ -4/9 2/9 ] [ 209 ]
[ d ] = [ 13/9 -2/9 ] [ 836.5 ] (2)
[ s ] = [ 93 ]
[ d ] = [ 116 ] (3)> [1] 6.5x + 2 y = 836.5
and
> [2] x + y = 209
Solve [2] for y and substitute into [1]:
> 6.5*x + 2(209 - x) = 836.5
You can also do this with linear algebra but this is the way I would have known as a normal high schooler taking the SAT.
I feel like these are good questions that test a student's ability to reason about the problem, rather than just apply a formula.
If you can't do pretty well on a test like this, you're probably not going to get much out of college, and are probably wasting your time and money by going there. Either do something else or prepare for college better.
Not everyone should go to college, and it shouldn't be a prerequisite for living a good life in our society. I work with plenty of excellent people with no degree and besides a mostly self-imposed stigma about not going to college, they're doing just fine.
I'm not sure doing well on this quiz is necessary to "get much out of college." College usually has courses other than algebra.
My other concern was the answer to #1, namely, "4m + 5b" vs "5m + 4b". I feel like if you know it is in that form (sum rather than product) the two answer choices are just intended to trip people up who are moving through the test at speed.
Problems that are intentionally difficult to parse fail as tests of "real world" problem solving skills because in the real world it is almost always possible to seek clarification.
I can't help noticing that most of those questions contained at least one bit of completely irrelevant information. Each of those questions could be worded less ambiguously and more concisely--to test math skill, rather than reading skill. You can trick more students into getting a wrong answer by inserting red herrings and ambiguous sentences into the question, but in doing so, you are no longer strictly testing their math skills. There is no particular need to ask these questions as story paragraphs rather than lists of known facts.
The following are the same math problems, with dramatically simplified wording. If you find them easier to understand than the originals, that is because I have removed the part of the problem that involves translating the text into facts relevant to the question.
1. Armand spent 5 hours texting at a rate of m texts/hour.
Tyrone spent 4 hours texting at a rate of n texts/hour.
What expression represents the total number of texts sent?
2. P = 108 - 23d models the weekly workload of an employee.
P is the number of work units remaining for this week.
d is the number of days the employee has spent working this week.
What does the value 108 represent?
3. h = 3a + 28.6 models height (h) in inches at an age (a) in years.
How much taller does the modeled subject grow per year?
4. A vendor sells salads for $6.50 and drinks for $2.00.
The vendor sold 209 items for a total of $836.50.
How many of the items were salads?
5. Cultivar A of a fruit tree produces 20% more fruit than cultivar B.
Cultivar A produces 144 fruits.
How many fruits does cultivar B produce?Read some of the comments elsewhere in this discussion. There are some people that noticed how "209 salads and drinks" could be interpreted as "209 salads, and an unspecified quantity of drinks" or as "209 * ( a salad or a drink )". That has nothing to do with one's ability to take a system of two equations and two variables and solve it for either variable, and everything to do with poor question design.
Professional pollsters work very hard at tuning the exact wording of poll questions, to eliminate hidden biases in the question itself and to better reveal what the participants themselves think. These samples have non-mathematical bias embedded in the questions.
Also both of those interpretations are ruled out by a check of the math. 209 salads and 209 salad + drink combos are both more profit than the food van made so if a student answers those they failed to check their work at all.
Also the phrasing there is the same as student would have seen tons of times before taking the test. It's not exactly an extremely exotic way to write it out. Really this is one of the more straightforward questions of the batch presented.
I suppose if the test really wanted to be practical, there would be a few questions about student loans, tuition rate increases, and post-graduation employment rates.
My core argument is that making the questions wordier do not make them better questions for a math test. Most of the practical math I have ever done (anecdotal) has not started as a paragraph of prose. It most often begins as a chart, table, technical drawing, or list of numbers. If I ever need to translate between English and math, it has almost always been to document the mathematical model, rather than implement a model from a written description. I therefore cannot fathom why mathematical pegagogy has such an infatuation with story problems.
Real life just throws a pile of numbers at you, maybe gives you some column headings, and expects you to make sense of it yourself. You want practical? Put up an image of a medical bill next to the insurance statement and ask the student how much they owe. Good luck with parsing that "off vst l3, 2MT38K, diag" and the "negtd max" and the "less copay".
Or significantly earlier (e.g., the John Hopkins University Center for Academically Talented Youth uses it as one of the options for qualifying exams for their programs students starting in Grade 7.)
There are two age bands for SAT test-takers. The great majority of test-takers are of senior high school age, mostly eleventh graders or twelfth graders in their last two years of secondary school (so typically sixteen or seventeen years old as they take the test). They take the test at that age for one part of an application to college or university, as the article points out.
A younger age band for SAT test-takers are younger children taking the SAT for Talent Search[1] testing. All four of my children have participated in Talent Search testing (inherently, all with the previous version of the SAT, or even the version before that), all testing for the first time in sixth grade (just before their twelfth birthdays). Taking the SAT, or the competing brand of college entrance test the ACT, at such a young age is to identify young people who are ready for more challenging levels of study than usually served up by United States middle schools (lower secondary schools). My children have taken various online courses or supplementary locally arranged group courses at late elementary or middle school age, and have taken quite advanced courses at senior high age. My oldest son, now a hacker for a startup, got into the world of supplementary mathematics courses, discussed in another article submitted to Hacker News recently,[2] and found that experience very helpful for his career development.
I agree with the statement that the SAT is
bizarrely simple compared to the college entry exams at my country
and that would be true compared to the university entrance examinations used in a lot of countries that Hacker News readers come from. On the other hand, the SAT or ACT are only one element, and not the most important element, of college admission in the United States, and it's easy in general in the United States to enter higher education after secondary education--the majority of high school graduates do.
My children all score well on the SAT (and the ACT) when they take it at young ages for Talent Search. The key to the standardized tests used for college entrance in the United States is reading ability. Kids don't read for fun in their youth like they did in my generation. I am amazed (and my children are amazed) at how little reading contemporary children do. My stock advice on getting ready for standardized tests is "read, read, read, and read." My two older sons call the ACT, particularly, the "American Reading Test." Anyone who can read well can ace that test.
A few years ago, I reread the section "Suggestions for Study" in the front matter of John DeFrancis's book Beginning Chinese Reader, Part I, which I first used to learn Chinese back in 1975. In that section of that book, I found this passage, "Fluency in reading can only be achieved by extensive practice on all the interrelated aspects of the reading process. To accomplish this we must READ, READ, READ" (capitalization as in original). In other words, vocabulary can only be well acquired in context (an argument he develops in detail with regard to Chinese in the writing I have just cited) and the context must be a genuine context produced by native speakers of the language. So what I tell my children about test prep, and this advice has served them very well, is read whatever you find fun to read, and keep on trying out new kinds of reading matter. Read widely. Read the cereal box while eating breakfast. Read a newspaper or magazine. Read books on any subject imaginable. Put down the video game and read. Get away from the computer (in our family, this sounds like "Do as I say and not as I do") and read. Read, read, read, and read. Then there is nothing to worry about in any United States college entrance test.
[1] http://cty.jhu.edu/talent/testing/about/sat.html
http://www.ctd.northwestern.edu/program/numats
[2] http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/03/the-math...
Which country is that?
It was my understanding that in US people take SAT after finishing high school and use these scores to enter universities. But this quiz looks like it's intended for 10 year olds.
Do I misunderstand something here?
Edit: here's my own frame of reference for a math level of a 16-17 year old just out of school. Problems are definetly harder than average, but nothing out of scope of state-approved math curriculum:
http://new.math.msu.su/admission/exams-write.html
(Russian, but understanding the language is not necessary for half of the problems). Of course, I expect a general exam to be easier, but not so drastically.
These are just simple linear equation systems; where are the roots, the powers, the trigonometry, the logarithms, the limits, the integrals?
There is multiple articles from various view points on the fact that education in the US is declining.
"American students are continuously proving to know less in subjects like history." "A 2010 study by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) showed the U.S. history testing scores are "stagnant," with only 9 percent of fourth graders correctly identifying a photograph of Abraham Lincoln and stating two reasons for his importance."(Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/11/public-education-10...)
"The United States invests more in K-12 public education than many other developed countries, yet U.S. students remain poorly prepared to compete with global peers."(Source: http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesmarshallcrotty/2012/03/26/7...)
"There’s a delightful and true saying, often attributed to Joseph Sobran, that in a hundred years, we’ve gone from teaching Latin and Greek in high school to teaching remedial English in college." (Source: http://www.thefederalistpapers.org/education-2/middle-school...)
1. Trying to identify the very best high school students across a wide range of schools who deserve a shot at an elite university with an international reputation. (Lots of flaws here)
2. Providing some insight about which students at an average high school are 2nd quartile, 3rd quartile, etc. If they're all going to college so that they can learn to be police officers, nurses, desk clerks, etc. (odd social choice), then testing people on rudimentary math makes sense.
Its not. Its supposed to be a lower-level test of math ability. High-school level mathematics is tested in the Level 1 and Level 2 Mathematics SAT Subject Tests, not the Mathematics portion of the core SAT.
(Integrals are calculus, which, while often taught in high-school, is considered college-level math, which is why it is an AP subject.)
But seriously, I really wouldn't do as well. I was a scantron-taking machine back in high school, and I aced the SATs because it was exactly what I was used to. This new one, in my opinion, gives much more objective results.
\*edit: nevermind, I got 5/5 in just a few minutes. Guess I'm not as rusty as I thought, and this test only has easy algebra.
The related NYT article today suggests that all the extra english may actually make it worse for ESL students, so it's interesting to see if those goals will work at cross purposes.
PS: You can get a basic phone with unlimited text messaging and talk time for ~10$ a month. EX: Republic Wireless
It is important, but I think that a question is whether it should be important. That is, what is the value of a test that only, or even just primarily, evaluates how well you've prepared for it? One (or at least I) would like a test that somehow evaluated only actual knowledge / skill, so that one's score couldn't be improved by drilling. (As showerst (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11067591) points out, the reason one wouldn't like drilling to improve the score is because it's the rich kids who are able to afford the time and resources to drill, and so you're testing the wrong thing entirely.)
But the SAT doesn't really go beyond basic algebra, and after getting an engineering degree, that feels burned into my ROM. I retook the GRE over a decade after my last math class, without studying, and still crushed it. Certain skills (reading quickly, parsing questions correctly, working backwards from multiple choice answers) don't leave you.
I understand where this critique is coming from. My sister teaches 6th grade math to a class where ~80% doesn't speak english at home. She's just now beginning to expose them to simple problems (10 = 2x, solve for x and the like). She's basically dual-hatting as an english teacher and a math teacher, and it's significantly more difficult. That limits time she has to expose her students to more advanced concepts, or some of the funny more beautiful parts of math. Not saying the SAT shouldn't change...understanding real world problems is important. But there will be demos that face disadvantages.
Perhaps change the url? This is the larger discussion. Main article here: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/09/us/sat-test-changes.html
I'm pretty sure I read a study about this, but my google-fu is not helping today.
https://collegereadiness.collegeboard.org/sample-questions/m...
> The number of phones that she has left to fix at the end of each day can be estimated with the equation
"Has left to fix" could be misinterpreted as meaning "she has to fix this many," instead of simply "how many remain."
If you understand that it's just saying "P is how many remain", then it's clear that the formula is simply saying that she started with 108, and she fixes 23 per day.
>Each week, she receives a batch of phones that need repairs.
Substitute d = 0, meaning she has worked no days yet. Then P = 108. Thus when she has worked no days yet, she has 108 phones to repair. Alternately phrased, Kathy starts each week with 108 phones to fix.
Genuinely curious, not confrontational: why? That is, why do you think that the answer that is marked correct is not, or might not, actually be correct?
So the formula doesn't give enough info.
I'm sorry; I'm confused. In that case, the equation would say that there are P = 216 - 46d phones to fix after d days. This isn't the same equation as the given P = 108 - 23d, although its right-hand side is proportional to the right-hand side of the original.
(That is, I'd agree with you if we were given just the ratio (phones to fix per week)/(phones fixed per day), but we're given more than that. Perhaps it's important to notice that we are given an equation (left-hand side = right-hand side), not just a formula (right-hand side by itself).)
So the question does not provide enough information to select the answer they have designated as correct.
(This is many days later and I no longer have the question in front of me, and I'm not willing to invest the time to find it. But this was my thinking when I posted this).
I feel really dumb.
So they sold 209 salads, and then it is asked how many salads were sold. Well, 209, no?
Assuming they meant to ask how many drinks were sold, 209 salads * $6.50 per salad, comes out to over $1300. So about -250 drinks were sold, that is 250 were bough from customers.
Assuming instead they meant that it was 209 drinks that were sold, the number of salads then comes out to (836.50 - 2*209) / 6.50 which is 64.38
What am I missing???
Given
s + d = 209
6.5 * s + 2 * d = 836.5
solve for s
The key word is total which means it is 209 things, of which some are drinks and some are salads.
The question is horribly worded, but I hope that helps clear some ambiguity. It's a system of equations -- 2 equations, 2 unknowns, which makes it a slightly harder problem.
- s + d = 209
- 2d + 6.5s = 836.50
- Solve for 's'
Man, I miss math.
Find x
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=836.50+%3D+6.5+*+x+%2B...
Wolfram Alpha is awesome as long as you know how to properly define the question, and when it comes to "word" problems that is 90% of the work. So this new version of the SAT just makes me think they want to make it more challenging for people who have reading comprehension problems. And the test being in English doesn't do one bit to help with that; case in point all of the discussion here about how the questions could be interpreted.