U.S. students will take the SAT online
npr.org
npr.org
I retook the test a couple months later inperson at a testing center (where they used computers with the same lockdown browser) and got 99th percentile scores on everything, and I would recommend anyone planning to take the SAT to still take it at a testing center.
In my experience at libraries and on college networks, that tracks.
A student who has excess bandwidth after acing a test is more likely to want to poke and explore the limitations of that system than a student who, at capacity, is almost perfect.
Unscientific, but I'd bet there are two major cheating populations: 95%+, and something like 50-75%. By definition there are a lot more of the mid-tier-barely-getting-by cheaters, but they also aren't as smart and are only dangerous to societal trust in aggregate.
Come to think of it, I missed the third major population: pre-meds
Anyway, this isn’t true in my experience. 167/170 in math got me 94th percentile. Far from a perfect score.
I only brought up the scores to indicate that I didn't need to cheat. I don't think GRE scores are a valid metric of competency or anything worth bragging about. I'm sorry it was taken in another way
It is only offered at testing centers.
> got 99th percentile scores on everything
Rather, I take it as an expression of personal pride (in the positive sense) that there was such incontrovertible evidence that the commenter had no need to cheat in the first place, told with the satisfying (but probably unrealised) hope that the people who unjustifiably accused the commenter of cheating were later aware of the top marks he or she achieved after taking the exam in person.
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.
I'm shocked at how laissez-faire we've gotten for college entrance exams, which I'd arguably say are much more important at getting you _into_ the graduate programs than the actual graduate program exams are themselves.
I don't know if the algorithm has changed since the early aughts, and I don't know if that approach is better or worse than the one-size-fits-all non-adaptive SAT, but the difference was always striking to me. You'd think that if the GRE adaptive approach was better statistically (by whatever measure) they'd move towards it soon for the SAT as well since they're going full digital finally.
to the point that they stopped requiring SAT altogether, but are starting to bring it back. there's a lot of things they've done is head scratching. i loved when they changed the scores so that your result from 10 years prior suddenly become a lower result so people had to know when you took the test to properly weight the result.
The laissez-faire attitude to drivers licensing when they stopped requiring road tests for new drivers was bonkers as well to me.
A lot of great employees rightfully spent their teen years screwing around and having fun before settling into career mode.
Since they put an Amazon affiliate link in he start menu I've just assumed they are full of them self.
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:
When I interviewed at Red Hat is was almost entirely technical. There was a computerized technical test (essentially "here's a VM, set up <several things>" and then a script grades it), a verbal technical interview, and then a panel/presentation that was specifically about the process I took my previous company through in adopting k8s.
it's one thing for a large company to do these kind of interview when the interviewee is knows what they're getting into, but it feels very different when a you're interviewing at a random early-stage startup and out of nowhere this guy starts asking you invasive personal questions. it really starts pushing the boundaries of legal interview questions.
anyway... this guy has since founded his own company writes inane linkedin-friendly blog posts filled with inspirational stories about "leadership" that make me gag.
That explains why Ubuntu is so full of bad ideas (such as snap) and reinventing the wheel (Unity, Mir).
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 person would pass on a second or third test.
A better lesson than the state approved course was paying for a morning on the skid pad at the local raceway with a real driving instrcutor. Once your young driver understands how to regain control of the car, they are much better prepared for the first emergency maneuver they will need to make while driving solo.
You can definitely push the car to the limit and see what happens when you go over in a _somewhat_ controlled environment (laws of physics still apply at the race track and you can still crash). Or you can teach them that a good driver is not the one who drives fast but the one who arrives alive.
In my state the motorcycle licensing works similarly in that you can skip the state test, however unlike what you described for cars, the course is excellent (standard MSF course). Also, the MSF does administer a (pretty tough) test.
Over the last 15 years Virginia has tried to move as many DMV processes as possible to online and closed many DMV locations to save money. The elimination of the road test for most new drivers was part of this effort.
My instructor drove me for 3 hours instead of the mandated 6, saved himself some gas.
The "adult" driver's license can be acquired at 18.
Never had to do a test when renewing my license even when switching states. (And, yes, I've had a very clean record.)
I subsequently got my license.
When I moved to Oregon years later and re-applied for a license, a driving test was required but the DMV lady waived it. Why? Probably because the DMV was way out in the country and she was literally the only one working the office.
I subsequently got my license.
Freedom(tm) is great.
I took the GRE just before they switched from scoring out of 800 on each section to scoring out of 180. After the switch they kindly mailed me “converted” scores on the new 180 scale, which turned my perfect math score—I hadn’t missed a single question—into a 178. I was not amused.
You’d think that no matter how weird of a mapping they decide to use, it’d at least preserve the endpoints…
Explains all the collisions I pass on the way to dropping the kids off at school nearly every day.
Michigan takes car culture seriously. You have to parallel park on the drivers test, and the Secretary of State offices (there is no DMV, because what a waste of taxpayer funds...) have eye charts when you renew your license.
The eye chart machines (they are electronic and usually at each clerk window) look like they are from the 70s for what its worth.
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?
WA also allows transferring of drivers licenses without additional testing. To me, this is the most problematic part, because different states have different rules around priority, proper usage of the left lane, etc. and WA is a transplant destination, and the resulting mix of driver backgrounds is chaotic. As a general example, in WA pedestrians have priority at all intersections, including where there is no visibly marked crosswalk, but this is not true in all states.
I agree that having more of a supervised learning period would be a good idea.
This is more of a stereotype than a universal constant, and you could just as easily say things like "younger people have faster reflexes and better eyesight" etc.
The question isn't whether some group in the aggregate has different statistical properties, it's whether we're willing to discriminate against an entire class of people, including the ones who aren't the cause of it, because of that statistical correlation.
Which is the same reason people saying things like "people over 65 should have their license taken away" are just as wrong.
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 don't let 12 year-olds drive. We have arbitrary age cutoffs that have nothing to do with quantifiable capability.
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 so many more 40 year olds in prison than 20 year olds?
> 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.
But now we're back to experience, and you have to be allowed to do the thing before you can get that.
> Note that we don't let 12 year-olds drive. We have arbitrary age cutoffs that have nothing to do with quantifiable capability.
We do, but we shouldn't. If a 12-year-old can pass the driver's test then either that 12-year-old is competent to drive or your driver's test is inadequate in testing drivers.
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.
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.)
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.
Hint: To be fair all my few visits to stations were me reporting things (finishing paperwork) not being arrested.
The person monitoring wouldn't let me have a bunch of tissues at the computer (Perhaps due to cheating concerns), so each time I needed a new tissue I had to raise my hand and she gave me one.
I didn't end up scoring very well.
Thus costing the company money which, was the ultimate goal.
One person doing this can be thought of as an asshole, when a meaningful percent of people behave this way you get actual change and or lawsuits.
I honestly prefer it to doing it remotely at home, where you have to show them your entire room (in the beginning and whenever they ask), install their software that wants full control to everything, and it still doesn't work half the time. One time I tried it told me bandwidth is insufficient - well, normally it's sufficient to have 2 or 3 Rokus stream in HD.
I can't imagine the stress this causes even on top of, y'know, having your entire career dependent on the results.
I hope they're using their savings to purchase managed devices and hire good IT support, but I'm not holding out much hope.
Students will use either school-owned or student-owned devices, which is not great. I would certainly opt for the former, since I wouldn't want to install this crap on my own computer. We'll find out in the next couple years how smoothly this goes. They've been doing the SAT online for a while outside the US, so hopefully the ironed out some of the bugs already.
But they won't have to worry about someone entering the frame, since testing will happen exclusively at proctored centers.
Luckily by the end most professors just switched to Zoom with cameras on, and instead modified the tests (eg making them harder, but open book, or multiple versions of the exam distributed randomly - similar to how some in-person exams will alternate between two question sets so no one can cheat off their neighbor)
They don't actually disqualify you (most of these places like https://www.proctoru.com or similar) just report to the exam administrator what they saw/noticed.
Some are even using AI flagging now - https://assess.com/remote-proctoring/
Some households -- especially if you have small children, or live in a small house without the luxury of separate rooms, noisy neighborhood, etc. -- may pose a challenge.
But outside those scenarios the candidate should know to dedicate one room to themselves for the duration of the test and preferably keep it locked from inside and inform others in the house not to disturb them for those 2 or 3 hours.
I am surprised to see this simple requirement -- that there should be no other person in the video frame (which will be audited for it, both manually and through automatic processing) -- is considered draconian? How? Are test takers expecting to take tests in rooms where anyone else can casually walk in, move around, etc?
To be sure there are other quirks like no bathroom breaks, no glancing away from scree, no mouthing the words as you read, no covering your face or sometimes no resting your chin on your hand as you think etc that all can become very tedious and stressful sure.
Even if they start making people put their ears up to the camera, that won't help much. Bone conducting headphones built into the arms of glasses will be virtually undetectable. Do you ban glasses? That won't help. I just tried putting my bone conducting headphones against my upper jawbone inside my mouth and they work fine at 30% volume. How do you prevent that?
What's the endgame? Do we end up with everyone completely hairless, naked, and forced to expose every orifice for the digital proctor?
The education industry is becoming satire. Bring back common sense IMO.
That’s really all that’s required.
The point isn’t to stop all cheating, it’s to catch the most blatant idiots cheating.
Things they're not doing that could allow some high-level cheating:
* DNA analysis
* Full body searches
* Faraday cages
Bad or average cheaters are unlikely to find success. Maybe great cheaters are likely to find success.
Which brand.... and how drool proof are they over an hour long test?
The big problem is when cheating is so easy and widespread that everyone knows it. Then it becomes the low friction path. This would explain what I've heard about some Indian school exams.
There are probably a lot of people doing minor cheating and a few people doing major cheating. In most cases, it's not enough to undermine the reputation of the qualification.
Oh, it's the same shape as the fraud problem that's popular here:
https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fra...
One memorable instance, I have a 37" 4K screen. In full screen mode the questions are in the top left and the multi choice answers are bottom right. The test proctor kept interrupting my exam because they assume I was looking away from the screen. I had to remind them repeatedly I'm using a large screen.
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.
Even online ides have had significant issues for me in the past which have eaten up 5-15 minutes of interview time. It sucks because I don't know how much cheating any of these measures actually prevent and anyone determined to cheat will be able to bypass them.
- The digital test is now adaptive: https://blog.collegeboard.org/what-digital-sat-adaptive-test...
- I'm curious how this year's test will perform to the released analysis of the 2022 test: https://reports.collegeboard.org/media/pdf/2022-total-group-...
From the 2022 report:
1,737,678 total took the test.
Female: 6% of 890,254 = 53,415 females got 1400-1600 (highest scorers)
Male: 9% of 841,224 = 75,710 males got 1400-1600 (highest scorers)
American Indian: 2% of 14,800 = 296 got 1400-1600 (highest scorers)
Asian: 27% of 175,468 = 47,376 got 1400-1600 (highest scorers)
African American: 1% of 201,645 = 2,016 got 1400-1600 (highest scorers)
Hispanic: 2% of 396,422 = 7,928 got 1400-1600 (highest scorers)
Native Hawaiian: 2% of 3,376 = 67 got 1400-1600 (highest scorers)
White: 7% of 732,946 = 51,306 got 1400-1600 (highest scorers)
Two or More Race: 10% of 66,702 = 667 got 1400-1600 (highest scorers)
Damn. I'm asian myself but 27% when TA is less than 10% is just plain weird.
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.
However, I later learned that it will be dynamic — depending on how a student does in the first section on a given topic, he will be given either easier or harder versions of a subsequent section. That means that they'll be able to better assess students of all abilities with fewer total questions. Sounds like a win to me.
Of course, dynamic testing like this is not possible with hard copies. Seems like a decent rationale for moving to computerized testing, though I would still be fine if they did it hard copy, for 3 hours.
[1] https://www.jstor.org/stable/1435437 [2] https://www.ets.org/research/policy_research_reports/publica...
Students should still be able to use the technique you mention to identify hard questions and save them for last.
That is positive. I've seen issues with adaptive tests not being resilient to accidents and brain farts: if a kid fat-fingers the response to a question early in the test, they may never get the computer to give them questions of a suitable difficulty later in the test. Thus they never even have a chance to get a score that accurately reflects their ability.
If the SAT is session-based, each session needs to be large enough that a single question can't tank the whole thing, but at the same time there also needs to be enough sessions to allow for properly dialing-in the knowledge level. In reality, the ideal situation is that the test should allow for an unlimited number of sessions, but each session is time-limited. Something along the lines of stopping once the test-taker gets below a certain score on 2 consecutive sessions.
I think each session is either half or a third of the test, for that subject. There could actually be more than two versions of the later session, to ensure that a student who makes a mistake or two isn't prevented from getting a relatively high score.
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.
Don't know how wide spread they are in other states, but it was part of the UIL Academics teams as statewide competition between school districts in Texas.
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 very similar to the difference between Celsius and Fahrenheit.
you're really trying to make something into something it is not.
for the curious, here's an example test: https://bryantheath.com/files/2021/02/Q104.pdf
edit: you only get 10 minutes to take the test
But it's not. Skipped questions before your final answer get a bad score, while skipped questions after your final answer get a medium score.
If you take a blank test and answer the last question only, your score drops by hundreds of points.
No normal test does that. That's how it penalizes skipping around.
I also did the Calculator tests. It's why I learned to 10-key.
For Calculator, I wrote https://git.io/ti84rpn so that I could use the fast parenthesis-less Reverse Polish Notation without having to adapt to a whole new calculator keyboard.
Isn't that good? The effectiveness of test-taking strategies is a (minor) flaw in the SAT. People taking an ideal test would not benefit at all from learning strategies.
(The flaw is minor because all our methods for assessing people are gameable to some extent, and standardized general tests like the SAT are among the least gameable.)
They get extra time allocation to take tests - 50% more in most cases. The numbers I hear tossed around is that a substantial fraction (20% to 40%) of school kids in some of the elite public and private schools have IEPs. Clearly there are kids who need the extra time. But that many?
ADHD is the reason that I hear the most. The extra test taking time is not reported to colleges.
Combine 50% extra time with adderall. 1500+ SAT scores are not uncommon.
An IEP is a catch-all term for anything that requires special adjustment for a student. What the adjustment is varies depending on the situation--there's a reason it's called individualized.
Having gone to one of those "elite public schools", it wouldn't surprise me if that large a fraction of kids had an IEP (hell, I did). However, in my experience, not one kid had an IEP that allotted them extra time to take tests. The only specific test adjustment I'm aware of was one kid who was so blind he needed the exams to be large print to have a hope of reading them.
There's a difference between the IEP that the school uses and the accommodation request for standardized testing. It would be pretty obvious to you if a student in your class were given extra time for in-class tests, but much harder for you to know if that student qualified for extra time on the SAT. If you knew when they were taking it then perhaps you could figure it out, but people who bend the rules to get extra time tend to not go around advertising when they're going to take the SAT, or at which test center, since that might out them as receiving extra time.
All this to say: I'm not so sure a classmate would know if a fellow student received extra time on the SAT.
If kids were getting extra time on standardized tests, we'd know.
Sounds like a very different experience than what I had. SATs were on Saturday, at a different HS. There were various HS's to choose from, depending on where you lived. I went to a magnet HS (sounds like you did too), so kids were from all over, and they took tests at whatever school was near their house. Within each test center, we were then broken into rooms based on last name, IIRC. I typically knew only 1 or 2 kids in the room I was in (the rest were from other HS's), and would have had no idea whether any of my classmates had extra time.
Even in your situation, you wouldn't have known that a kid who took the SAT with you didn't also take it again, at a different test center, with extra time. Lots of kids take it more than once, and you can choose where to take it. Kids tried to keep this stuff on the down-low, either due to shame (because they actually had a disability) or to hide their undeserved accommodation (because they didn't have a disability).
The College Board also granted her accommodations so she gets 50% longer on the SAT and AP tests. April will be her 1st attempt at the SAT. She has taken a few AP tests.
ADHD is not considered a specific learning disability so should not qualify someone for an IEP or accommodations from the College Board.
Guidelines for ADHD: https://accommodations.collegeboard.org/request-accommodatio...
That's not a great take. If you want to complain about overprescribing, go ahead. But Adderall is meant for people who need it to get closer to baseline. People abusing the prescription is not a good reason to criticise IEP adjustments.
What is the baseline? Would anyone consider it cheating if they took extra or changed their dosing schedule to maximize their test score? I think most people would consider that rational behavior, not abuse. But it does call into question whether that's "fair" to people without the drug.
Currently, a GPA and a few test scores (SAT, ACT, etc) are the most in depth view into a student's high school performance that colleges have, but in the future, we hope to see continuous tests throughout high school that don't just show a single letter/number, but a holistic view of a student's progress, effort, etc. (Obviously the data should be controlled by the student) These could also help a student decide where to focus their study efforts.
How does AutoMark account for disparities in quality of education?
There are already some great quality resources online to learn subjects like math, history, and science, but we believe the missing piece is grading - you're never actually evaluated whether you learned something online.
We think by giving students unlimited practice and feedback, along with quality learning materials, we can work on chipping away at this issue. AI will allow scaling access to quality tutoring, practice, and exams, all of which significantly improve eduction (currently, this costs $40-$X00/hr, but will cost much less with AI assistance). It's definitely not a quick fix to solve the issue of instructional quality.
Your business is selling an advantage to the rich students coupled with increasing student stress throughout school. Your "holistic" view can't account for "students grades are slipping because they were sleeping in their friends basement after their parent killed another parent" or "students grades are slipping because they are working 40 hours a week, illegally, at 14", but it will holistically show "student got a B+ so their dad who makes $500k a year hired a tutor for 10 hours a week".
All I get is that if you start from an extremely unfounded point you'll get to the wrong solution. But that doesn't say anything about the points people are making here
You really don’t need any more resources for SAT.
Being on this site, you're probably someone who values education. And you probably raised your kids to be capable. Or maybe they just lucked out and got the correct weights to succeed in that particular scenario, but you can't assume that the situation for everyone is the same as you!
Many people simply can't learn by just doing practice tests and watching videos. If it were so easy, then we wouldn't need teachers or schools in general. Mentorship and guidance are important, and it's the reason why so many people want to get into universities in the first place.
Essentially, yes you can do without, but having it helps. Overall, that would create a disparity that favors more wealthy people.
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, and a benchmark that anyone can understand and prepare for is just going to be replaced by something more opaque. You think a standardized test is biased? Do you think the application committee at most universities is going to be unbiased when they have nothing to go off but a student's essay and zip code?
It's incongruous to me that the same people who I think have a deep understanding of unconscious bias also seem to be the same ones wanting the standardized tests gone. I don't think it's going to help the people they think it will.
Anything that seeks to further widen the rich / poor gap like this is in my mind, completely unethical.
We’re already in a mental health crisis for students. I do not think adding more surveillance is going to do good there.
I may be wrong, but I hope the founders have thought a lot about this and considered what negative impacts, if any, this will have of students.
How would it go about monitoring the students?
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 of creepy, but if that’s what you meant that’s the only way I see this done more effectively.
In your experience, what other ways or ideas have you heard?
This is the heart of the concept, yes. We should be attempting to make in-classroom assessments as trustable as standardized tests which would allow them to continuously implemented during instruction. The quantity of data will provide a significantly more robust representation of a student's abilities today, and over time, compared to the infrequent snapshots of the ACT/SAT/etc.
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.
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 anything like that.
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.
I don’t know what we’re trying to finesse either, can you explain what you mean by finesse?
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.
Higher education roughly correlated with higher salaries which roughly correlates with higher status.
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.
Western students have the highest suicide rate in the world. People are quick to blame social media, but never look at the pressure we put on them.
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.
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.
Ranking and benchmarking between educational environments would require an additional psychometric evaluation layer. This would not a Day One function, so the tool would focus on maximizing utility as an assessment assistant tool for instructors. There is a bridge to be built between formative and summative assessment. If this thing doesn't make them better instructors, it would be dead in the water anyway.
Everyday, all across the country - we pay teachers to teach and assess their students. Those assessment results aren’t trustable for benchmarking and ranking students, so we have standardized testing.
Obviously, yes - one intention of this concept is that it serves the same function as standardized testing, but it does so while eliding the externalities of cost and single, high stakes exams by allowing classroom assessment - made and proctored by the instructors during their standard lessons - to become trustable.
Apply an AI agent to the sum total of student output? Can't wait for the entrenched racial bias to leak into the AI and a host of other issues.
If you could get an AI implemented that didn't involve reporting to the greater regulatory bodies, I can see that working, but that's the issue with things like that: management wants to see them and then the stats rapidly get watered down to meaninglessness.
It would be crazy to see if an AI can start diagnosing home issues, abuse, etc from student output and performance. I can see a lot of benefits, as long as the AI output is private.
The vision is not as grand as your last paragraph.
> "Today's students, they do a lot of their living digitally, they do a lot of their learning digitally and they do a lot of their test taking digitally," says Priscilla Rodriguez, who oversees the SAT for the College Board, the organization behind the test.
How do kids work out math problems these days? Do they draw equations with their finger on a tablet/phone? Tablet pen on tablet? Are they learning math typesetting at a young age?
I used to use huge amounts of scratch paper, in college I had a convertible laptop/tablet that I used for taking notes in class, sometimes handwriting everything, sometimes LaTeX & import the generated pdf into onenote where my handdrawn figures were.
But I never used that setup for scratch paper, scratch paper was something sacred and always paper + pencil.
But, now paper is nonexistent and I use a wacom tablet with OneNote when I need scratch paper. So there's been a huge revolution in my life and I'm curious what today's kids do.
I assume kids will use scratch paper with the SAT, along with calculators.
> Are they learning math typesetting at a young age?
My kid loves doing LateX on AoPS, for some reason. I guess it will be useful if she's still doing online math when she gets to higher levels (it's not really necessary for prealgebra).
Anyway, I just got excited because I hadn't heard of anyone else doing that, I hope it remains a useful technique for your daughter for her classes.
>Good luck with your upcoming test!
Thanks for the kind words! When I heard that the test would be digital, I rushed to sign up for a paper section, and was lucky enough to get a slot (and a good score). I'm only now taking the digital because my school is offering it on campus, and that's just too convenient to pass up.
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.
I don't see how hard it can be to keep organizing SATs once a year - plus it really does generate a shared identity, which is something we are all sorely lacking. It was a big event to go to a different school to take the SAT.
Pandemic: occurring over a wide geographic area (such as multiple countries or continents) and typically affecting a significant proportion of the population; characterized by very widespread growth or extent
Endemic: characteristic of or prevalent in a particular field, area, or environment; a disease or outbreak of disease that is typically present in a particular region or population : an endemic disease
COVID doesn't even really qualify as endemic based on the dictionary definition, but it's certainly not a pandemic.
How does it not fit the dictionary definition of pandemic?
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 across a large geographic region among a small percentage of the population with relatively little impact.
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?
98.5% of ED visits are for something else. What would that number have been in 2020 or 2021?
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.
People who want to cheat will always find a way to cheat. All you need to do now is go to the bathroom and lookup answers on your phone.
How does this contradict the GP? This doesn't necessarily seem inconsistent with standardized tests correlating better with academic success on its face. Because I would expect that such people tend to have not just worse standardized test scores but also worse academic success (because of the advantages that wealthy people have that these people lack).
If someone with a high aptitude but low academic performance is put into a situation where they have more access to resources, they will perform better than someone with low aptitude that has the means to make up for it in their academic success.
For instance, the popular college prep hack is take the SAT three times. Study for a different section each time, and colleges will take your highest score of each section. That’s not possible without the moderate financial means to take the test multiple times.
Your average high school student does not have thousands, let alone tens of thousands, of dollars at their disposal to cheat on the SATs.
You're not going to be able to take this with an iPad on your couch (or with a friend/parent nearby). Likely just as draconian as today, except no pencils required.
When I was in HS, we had IB tests that were much longer, and were seen as grueling tests of endurance. And after law school, I took the CA bar exam, which was at the time the only 3-day bar exam. It was (in)famous for endurance.
But do people think the SAT is measuring endurance? I don't, but perhaps others do.
One thing that won't change is any effect on pacing. The SAT previously had sections, and it will continue to have sections. You still have to pace yourself through each section. But there was never a way to pace yourself across sections, through the entire test. You had to wait until one section was done before starting the next.
[1] https://satsuite.collegeboard.org/sat/help-center/students/p...
"you are not allowed to bring any electronics into the testing center (except a computer that you own, possibly running a VM)!" isn't likely to deter cheaters.
I wonder if colleges will begin differentiating between at-home and trusted-facility scores.
What about cellular-enabled watches? At my kid's school, they don't allow kids to wear smartwatches on standardized test days.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/16/education/sat-at-3-hours-...
1. The highest value exams (like lawyer licensing) can only be in-person proctored, not remote which can’t reasonably stop even moderately clever cheaters, and where any suspicion of cheating undermines the legitimacy of the entire exam.
2. No exam-giver wants to be responsible for the complaints they will receive if they provide the computers, since some number of people who do poorly will seek to blame the hardware, so exam-takers must be responsible for making sure the software works on their own machine.
3. Essay exams (like the bar exam) have to be the same day for all takers, because it is trivial to share meaningful information about the questions sufficient to give late takers a huge advantage. It is possible to use different questions on different days, but this creates major challenges for calibrating the answers fairly.
4. Large exam halls where thousands of people can take the exam simultaneously don’t have good enough wifi to hold all those connections, and even if they did, any blip would be a nightmare, so the software has to be able to work offline.
I remember walking into the classroom to take the test and I recognized a student who ranked in the top of the class. So I sat down next to them. We didnt know each other. We were both taking the test and through "random" peripheral vision I noticed that none of our answers were lining up. So I continues on with the test. I was on the math section with which I am quite confident so I didn't even consider questioning myself and just assumed we had different tests. Then I started my English section for the second half of the exam. Now this is the only language I can speak but I am still terrible at all those words whose definitions mean to lookup another word (is there a word for that?). But again none of my answers lined up with theirs. I started to doubt myself but it's at this point I noticed all my first math questions are lining up perfectly with their second section... No way I think. They don't make multiple versions of the test? No way I think, it can't be this obvious. Then I start checking every English answer I am undoubtedly sure about with their first half and they all line up perfectly. Needless to say I took a "gamble" and if I didn't know all the stupid words in the analogy I just put what they put.
This long, verbose story later, I cheated my sat got 300 points higher than my pre-sat and it's all because they made 1 version of this terrible test.
If I would have had to take it digitally I would of probably cheated it in some other way. It's absolutely no way to determine intelligence. Simply test "taking" skills.
You earned your score in my book.
A completely different word, or one with the last few letters changed?
For the first one, that's just a bad dictionary. Or someone trying to give you a very fast and rough definition.
Loathe: [0] "to dislike greatly and often with disgust or intolerance" Abhor: [1] "to regard with extreme repugnance : to feel hatred or loathing for : loathe"
Basically any word that means exactly the same as another word.
The SAT liked to do questions like Abhor is to Loathe like X is to Y.
[0] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/loathe [1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/abhor
Man oh man, do I wish I could convince my high school self: the particular college you go to matters much less than you think. The SAT matters much less than you think. Grades matter less than you think. Pursue friendship and genuine interests, not standardized tests!
But friendship and genuine interests don’t have a billion dollar organization behind them, alas. (https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/210...)
Not to say MIT isn't a good goal to shoot for, of course. But doing so primarily out of financial interest isn't just heavily discouraged (I'm sure any MIT recruiter would tell you this) but also probably not worth it (particularly if you have to pay!). At least, not for software engineers, though I wouldn't be surprised if the same applied to other fields.
Nothing can or should replace tests or writing on paper and a (cleared) HP 4x because Erable is the superior CAS.
It was honestly fine. They made me use an HD webcam, show my drivers license, and pan around the room to ensure I was by myself and didn’t have an easy way to cheat. They also made me share my screen on Zoom and open up the Application Monitor to ensure I was only running Firefox. They didn’t let you take notes on paper, just using a portable whiteboard that they watched me erase before leaving.
I’m not saying it’s impossible to cheat, but I would say it’s probably roughly as difficult as cheating in person. Presumably the SAT stuff would be comparable.
Could someone do some kind of hacked video driver (or something similar) to fool screen sharing, or have a fake ID made so that someone else could take the test in their place? Of course, but that's difficult enough to where fundamentally a vast majority of people simply won't do it. I don't think most cheating deterrents have the goal of eliminating 100% of cheating, but rather the 95+% of potential cheaters who would do the easy stuff.
I mean, if you're willing to put in a lot of effort to cheat on a test, at some point it's easier to just study and pass it legitimately.
Still relying on the test being taken in a monitored environment, like at school or a test center. They emphasize that this new digital delivery means questions are less likely to be taken out of the test environment and published.
Folks are talking about how you have to install privacy invading software that monitors down to the OS kernel.
What prevents someone from just using a VM for the exam and a VM for cheating?
Ultimately if malware doesn't think it's a VM, then test taking software isn't going to either. Malware is trying to resist analysis by trained professionals. Test taking software is just trying to sell to the next test; the sale is made by the company that takes the testing committee to the best sportsball game, not by how well they detect being in a VM.
(Interesting corollary; you should probably ALWAYS run inside a VM. There is so much malware that tries to detect it that it actually helps you; the malware will just shut itself off out of fear of being analyzed by a security researcher.)
> 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.
In theory, it should actually be possible to make the test harder than it was before, using this framework.
Most of those universities have flipped flopped into requiring the SAT/ACT again because the other indicators (GPA, class ranking, extra curriculars) were actually even worse for equity reasons.
Yeah, good luck with that. If there's one thing remote teaching during covid taught me it's that you can't stop someone from cheating during an online assessment.
I'm sure it's possible, but that seems just as secure as a random highschool teacher, which was the only anti-cheat of decades past.
I wonder when they changed that. I was there around 2014, and back then you either had to install their anti cheat software, or go to a local testing/proctor center.
I'd thought "never trust the client device" was the golden rule to prevent cheating. A background process that reads the display and fills in the field when you start typing would be difficult to detect.
HDMI out into splitter from graphics card or tablet, whatever. Use secondary box to ingest video and spit out answers on an alternate display.
This won’t protect against somebody who is willing to open the device up and probe the embedded DisplayPort (or whatever standard) pins, but that’s probably beyond the ability or interest of most people.
I don’t like any of this; if I were asked to install some school spyware I would refuse. But it looks like the plan is for the schools to also allow the students to take the tests there. People should do that instead. Hopefully some parents will be super pedantic and require schools to provide accessible testing space and not use the “you can test at home” option as an out.
Much easier: a webcam with a telephoto lens hidden in a lighting fixture.
I can also personally attest that the app will run perfectly happy inside a Windows virtual machine, even inside the ‘secure testing mode’, as this is how I personally took the 11th grade PSAT a few months ago.
To get around this, I theorize a more subtle overlay could be fashioned (imagine some sort of screen reader that speaks chatGPT-generated answers through the provided earbuds). However, at that point you could spend your time studying for the test in the first place.
This won't end well.
This changes who ends up at elite institutions, and effectively who makes decisions in society.
Does it? Seems to me that wealthy bankers still control society.
That's the exact question asked by the above poster.. any sources?