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Comment by redwyvern | Hacker News Reader

"But if readers can’t supply the missing information, they have a hard time making sense of the text."

This is what angers me the most about the ACT exam. I recall that passages with vague and uninteresting topics were difficult to comprehend. What was even more infuriating was a passage on a capacitor physics experiment in one exam. I initially enjoyed the passage because I had a thorough understanding of capacitance and voltage across two plates, but it turned out that for the sake of the "comprehension," the equation for capacitance was INTENTIONALLY rearranged in a way that violated the laws of physics. In other words, the meaning and relevance of the content of a passage in a comprehension exam like the ACT was intended to be misleading for the sake of testing attention to one tiny detail.

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Do you recall when you took the test? I’d like to find the test because I work with ACT tests daily and have never seen a passage where the laws of physics were intentionally violated for sake of “comprehension.”

Additionally the ACT reading passages are very focused, not vague. They may be uninteresting but much of a student’s college experience is reading uninteresting things. The ACT is designed to predict how students will perform in college, not how “smart” they are or how “good of a reader” they are.

No wonder the test costs money. If you can pay for uninteresting material that won't benefit you in the real world, you're prepared for college.

> much of a student’s college experience is reading uninteresting things.

Wait, what?? That was certainly not my experience, and judging by the barrage of texts I get from my now college-attending child, isn't his experience either.

He did find a lot of what he was given in his California high school was boring. Enrolling in it was a bit of a shock after his prior experience.

Reading is often boring when the text is not of interest to the reader. Perhaps it depends on your major and so on, but as a former English major I would find it extraordinary for someone to go 4 years of college and never read any text they weren’t interested in. Not to say that any of the books I read in college were bad, but taste is a thing. Just because something has won a Pulitzer Prize or whatever doesn’t mean it will be equally interesting to all people.

I'm studying CS and don't even look at textbooks until I'm doing a problem set and realize that I don't yet know enough to solve it. In most cases, I just need to look up a definition. Then I can search for the relevant passage and read just that, which doesn't feel boring because I have a clear goal.

Of course that strategy doesn't work if you're asked to "read this book and write about it" (Obviously, I have no idea what an English major is like.), but when it's applicable, postponing reading until you have an immediate reason to do it helps me a lot to avoid boredom.

Pretty much every "recognized" book I've read was interesting in some way or another. I might have disliked it, or disagreed with it, but it surely wasn't boring. I used to find lots of books boring when I had no idea how to read them. Especially older works require context to read them in. You have to figure out why you are.

Another thing is that a book may not be worth the investment, but that's a different category. I don't really want to read War and Peace or Infinite Jest, but I doubt they're boring. I'll just get more enjoyment bang for my buck out of reading my preferred genre, but if I had to read them for professional reasons (I consider college such) it wouldn't be an issue.

> taste is a thing

Taste is a very, very overblown thing. It's often used as a strict thing, set in stone, and giving full carte blanche to ignore lots of works or people. But in reality it's very flippant and malleable and often developed out of sheer chance.

You'll find that people who don't read at all have no taste for any book.

Anecdotally as a recent high school student I recall taking numerous standardized reading tests with less than accurate science passages.

I similarly had a question on my 4th grade qualification exam. In the science section they asked a multiple choice question as to what would change the weight of a glass of water. One of the "wrong" answers was heating it... luckily I knew that I wasn't supposed to know relativity so I answered it correctly.

That's when you leave a friendly note. But I guess you are not supposed to think for yourself. Just react.

>They may be uninteresting but much of a student’s college experience is reading uninteresting things.

Wow. What a revelatory statement.

Some reflecting observations. 1. Since when is an institution designed to increase your knowledge uninteresting?? That signals a broken institutional approach.

2. The number one real world skill is being able to filter for signal against noise.

If you're inserting a bunch of noise into the test, the most highly-adapted minds are going to be filtered out with low results.

If you're learning something foundational, it's usually incredibly dull until after you've learned it. Its difficult to imagine anyone finds matrices, and associated basic operations, to be an interesting representation until after they've learned to make use of it to understand bigger ideas. Those first few lectures are horribly boring. And of course, undergrad is mostly foundational learning.

And then you should consider that at least in the US, you have 2 years of general education; that is, you have 2 years of courses outside the field you've explicitly decided liking.

And of course you can have a preference of practical over theory, where most lectures on theory are uninteresting unless they clearly lead up to a practical implication, that you're currently interested in.

It's absurd to imagine that anyone goes to college with a 100% interest in every course, unless the college caters directly to each student's whim. And we know they don't, and im not sure we want them to.

when I took the SAT, I first took a practice test and scored quite poorly on it, but when I realized that all of the things I had missed were tiny details, or very literal interpretations of questions, I scored very well on the actual test. The same was true of the math test, as well. The SAT is basically testing how easy it is to fool you with a trick question.

However, in defense of the SAT, I'd wager that this is pretty strongly correlated with critical reasoning and ability to succeed in college and beyond.

I have read that the SAT is basically an IQ test in disguise. If that's true, there's no need for it to correspond to real-world skills. That's not what it's meant to test, and the only reason it deals with vocabulary and mathematics is to dodge the controversy surrounding IQ tests.

This is by no means the only perspective on the SAT, but it's a reasonable one.

https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2011/12/04/why-should-...

I'd say that's fairly accurate—in general, it doesn't really test for skills you would learn above 8th Grade, and mainly just tries to see what you're capable of.

An IQ test (there are multiple types) tests crystallized intelligence and fluid intelligence. The way I have heard them described is basically crystallized intelligence is a test of accumulated knowledge/previously seen patterns versus fluid intelligence being the ability to see a pattern in a novel situation and figure out how to solve the novel situation (on-the-spot problem solving). They are linked. I have also read from different sources that high fluid reasoning can lead to an increase in knowledge acquired. For the SAT to be a genuine determinant of the difference in ability we would have to have all people taking the exam to have the same preparation(school/sub-culture/country/teachers and pre-test work). One could compare it to an IQ test in the sense that it is testing learned information with novel problems? IIRC the test correlates with college/university success because it can showcase the combination of inherent skill and preparation necessary to succeed in a college environment (I would assume this is heavily debated).

Here is the Wikipedia article on the difference if you want to look up sources or dive into this topic more: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluid_and_crystallized_intel...

If you want to research the different types of IQ tests: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient

Prior to 1994, the SAT could serve as an IQ test. Scores could be used for admission into high-IQ clubs.

The 1994 changes slightly broke that, particularly at the high end. Subsequent changes, for example the removal of analogies, have moved to test away from measuring IQ. Today it really isn't an IQ test at all. It's an achievement test.

> It's an achievement test.

what's that?

Personally, I heavily prefer the SAT over the ACT—it's a very no-nonsense, clean way to see the capabilities of a person, and isn't relying too heavily on questions related to a specific subset of a topic.

It's definitely a better indicator of performance and capability than a GPA, in my opinion.

I am extremely familiar with both tests. What version of the SAT are you referring? The current version (re-designed a few years ago) is nearly identical to the ACT with the exception of integrating graph-reading questions into the reading and writing sections rather than having their own section.

Current. I took both roughly two years ago for Duke TIP.

Which did you take first?

I took them within a month of eachother, but I can't recall which I took first. I got my results back first on the SAT, so possibly it?

(On a sidenote, it's annoying that the SAT site didn't allow me to use things on it related to my test scores because of the age I got them at. Suppose it's legally mandated though.)

Yes, it’s really more about eliminating the wrong answers, than getting the correct one.

I have known people that didn’t budge on their scores and people that shifted by 200 points on the old 1600 point scale. Not sure how much it has changed over the years. I would wager that test taking in general is at least somewhat of a skill. The more multiple choice tests I took the better I became at them. There seems to be an underlying pattern most teachers use.

> I initially enjoyed the passage because I had a thorough understanding of capacitance and voltage across two plates, but it turned out that for the sake of the "comprehension," the equation for capacitance was INTENTIONALLY rearranged in a way that violated the laws of physics. In other words, the meaning and relevance of the content of a passage in a comprehension exam like the ACT was intended to be misleading for the sake of testing attention to one tiny detail.

Seems like it could be a good test for people who will be in the future reviewing scientific papers.

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