Major Changes in SAT Announced by College Board
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
I took both the "old" SAT (the one that they discontinued around 2004) and the "new" SAT (the one that they're now discontinuing). I actually thought that the structure old one was better in many ways - for example, the analogies were often terribly written, but the idea of testing analogies as a reasoning tool is very powerful, and much more so than just doing passage after passage of reading comprehension.
Furthermore, this is the exact same language that they used to justify the decision to change the SAT 10 years ago. Coleman isn't saying anything new when he's criticizing the SAT today; he's just recycling the same PR language that they used a decade ago.
Of course, perhaps they really are genuine. I'd love to be pleasantly surprised. But reading this gives me total deja vu from the news stories I remember reading in 2002.
One could make a strong argument for plain-English analogies, absent the $10 words. If every test taker understood most of the words, then we could test for reasoning ability on a more normalized basis.
That's not to say testing vocabulary is totally invalid. Opinions vary. But if we assume vocabulary is worth testing, then we should test it independently.
In re the value of analogies, there are some computer scientists and philosophers who believe analogy-drawing is the irreducible core of higher cognition. I'm not sure I'd go that far, but Douglas Hofstadter has come close:
http://www.amazon.com/Surfaces-Essences-Analogy-Fuel-Thinkin...
Here's a little more about the partnership if you're interested:
http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/05/khan-academy-gets-major-par...
Now how do we get the schools to actually do that?
Disclaimer: I have no actual idea if this is what they're doing, I'm just saying that it could be done this way.
Here are specific tests from some large states (the first I found via google):
http://www.nysedregents.org/Grade8/Mathematics/20100505book1...
http://www.nysedregents.org/Grade8/EnglishLanguageArts/04261...
http://www.cde.ca.gov/ta/tg/sr/documents/cstrtqmath7.pdf
How do you make scores on these specific tests go up to any significant degree without making students learn the material? Please explain the techniques in detail.
1 correct answer, 1 or 2 close but not correct answer, and 1 or 2 obviously wrong answers.
Now that format makes thing significantly easier to get the correct answer than simply presenting the problem and asking the student to solve the problem. I'd imagine some of you are thinking "Well hell, they would still need to know the formula", but they also give you formula sheets with the tests. Since they give you a list of possible answers and a list of applicable formulas, you can pretty quickly plug in some numbers and determine the correct answer. Does it still require some base understanding? Yes. But I can tell you with absolute certainty that my grades would not have been as high had I not known how to game the testing system in such a manner.
I'm only a few years removed from high school, so I cannot imagine things have changed too much, especially for the better. For reference I am from South Carolina, albeit I went to one of the more performant/richer public school systems in the state.
Same thing for taking a reference work (e.g. a formula sheet, a wikipedia page) and figuring out which piece of information you need and applying it.
Remember, I'm not asking if the tests could be better. I'm asking what you do to make test scores go up without making understanding go up.
I'd be at least moderately convinced if you could even show me two teaching techniques, A and B, where A is superior for test scores but significantly inferior for understanding.
You can learn to take tests - I did that for the GRE, got a 99% but hadn't ever studied 2 of the area tests I took. There's a logic to test questions, you can learn it.
There was no understanding involved, I can assure you. Just a recognition of what is considered a 'fair' question, which lets you eliminate answers that are too convoluted.
It would be far more convincing if you actually skimmed the NY Reagents test and presented a teaching strategy which you believe would raise scores but not increase understanding.
Note that if such a strategy does not exist for the NY test but does exist for every other test, then we have a solution to all the complaints about testing - use the NY test for everyone.
It's basically "Write a generic 5 paragraph essay using memorized argument flow."
The secret to standardized testing is fast reading comprehension. I've always been a fast reader (without sacrificing comprehension). It frees up time to go back and really spend time on the tougher questions that just isn't available if you have to spend a long time just reading the question (it's more than just in the reading comprehension section, since you have to actually read every question to get through the test).
"Does test preparation help improve student performance on the SAT and ACT? For students that have taken the test before and would like to boost their scores, coaching seems to help, but by a rather small amount. After controlling for group differences, the average coaching boost on the math section of the SAT is 14 to 15 points. The boost is smaller on the verbal section of the test, just 6 to 8 points. The combined effect of coaching on the SAT for the NELS sample is about 20 points. The effect of coaching is similar on comparable sections of the ACT. The average score increase on the ACT math section probably lies within the range of 0 to .4 points, while the coaching effect on the English section is about .3 to .6 points"
[1] http://nepc.colorado.edu/files/Briggs_Theeffectofadmissionst...
Most likely, a correlation is not causation thing -- people for whom success on the SAT is most important are likely to spend more money on test prep, but also be best generally prepared. As ueqirat points out, the research that has been done on SAT test prep utility hasn't actually born out a real effect.
I think the waivers for low-income students are also pretty great. When I was in high school, taking all of the standardized exams cost me hundreds of dollars. I went to school in a place with a lot of gentrification, so a lot of my classmates could barely afford to get their high school transcript (let alone pay to take tests). There were many efforts to get the school system to subsidize standardized exams, but they were all unsuccessful.
And not just the money -- the time investment in preparing and taking the SAT/ACT is massive. High schoolers in low-income areas or ones forced into situations where they need to support their family with home care/employment are at a huge disadvantage (though the same can be said about other college admission aspects as well.)
Anecdotally, I'm seeing a substantial number, if not the majority, of CS students who can't code worth a damn, but got into the department solely because they did well in a small number of unrelated subjects.
While I'm not terribly concerned with the changes in the SAT, I am concerned about it adding more momentum to this trend.
I developed a love of etymology from spending many long hours poring over dictionaries as a child, including the bits about word roots and so on. When I see that things like this are being dropped from the SAT, it's like being told that that knowledge and the effort to acquire it lacks value.
I certainly agree that 'maudlin' is harder to figure out etymologically, but on the other hand I don't think it's all that unusual either; one would certainly have come across it if one had read any amount of literature from the late 19th/early 20th century, whether than was something by Dickens or a bunch of Sherlock Holmes stories.
I personally think the fact that everyday vocabularies are shrinking is a terribly bad thing, and a trend we should be resisting rather than accommodating.
I didn't grow up with a silver spoon in my mouth or as the offspring of professional educators, incidentally - indeed they went through a phase of trying to discourage me from reading material that was too advanced or adult-themed. My parents read to me when I was small, my mother enjoyed crosswords, but the main thing they did for me was tell me to go look up a word in the dictionary rather than supplying a definition whenever it was asked for. I enjoyed reading enough to find the dictionary an interest in thing to browse in its own right.
Better keep opening Old Nassau's gates to the upper echelons of society for anybody who can ace this sort of trivia.
I'm not sure what you're trying to say here, but I'm not holding my breath for an invitation from Princeton.
It's a good thing IMO that people have to learn 'SAT words', it filters out the ones that are able to put in the effort to expand their vocabulary, and also retain this new knowledge.
Isnt that argument for more relevant testing? If the current selection picked up people with poor aptitude for programming or whatever, then it makes sense to change it.
Engineers needs ability to think hard and solve complex problems. So, lets measure those instead of how many arcane words they memorized, how great are they in writing self promoting essays, how much irrelevant facts they memorized or how fast they are in solving simple memorizable math problems.
There is nothing wrong with adjusting expectations to current world.
What is really interesting to me is that while the rhetoric against the SAT (and similar tests like the MCAT and LSAT), have increased over the last few decades, in practice the tests are more important than ever. In the last 30-40 years, median scores at the top 10-15 schools are up about 100 points adjusted for recentering in 1995. In practice, SAT scores are almost entirely determinative for college admissions. High schools pump out so many 4.0+ students, that 100-200 point differences on the SAT dominate differences in admissions outcomes.
And apparently, even companies are asking people for their SAT scores these days: http://www.businessinsider.com/goldman-sachs-bain-mckinsey-j.... Without taking a position on either side, I have to wonder why the rhetoric and the practice are so out of step on this issue.
So population growth explains part of it, and much of the rest can probably be explained by improved financial aid causing applications at Yale to go up by a higher percentage than the overall increase in number of test-takers.
What's really telling is that, despite all the criticism of the SAT, Yale responded to the increasing number of applicants by using the SAT more aggressively to filter applicants. In other words, when faced with a larger applicant pool, Yale decided to reject students with SAT performance that it had previous deemed adequate, because it couldn't think of any better criteria to use to distinguish the additional applicants.
[1] Yale's data: http://oir.yale.edu/sites/default/files/W032_Fresh_SATs_5.pd.... Tables for calculating recentered scores pre and post-1995: http://research.collegeboard.org/programs/sat/data/equivalen....
[2] http://www.collegeboard.com/prod_downloads/highered/ra/sat/S....
Population growth -> Naturally leads to more people willing to criticize the SAT because percentages. Especially if there remains a similar or greater level of exposure to it, which there has.
Population growth -> Larger applicant pool, and assuming Yale or whoever is unwilling to drop the SAT as a filtering mechanism, naturally means they'll raise their various bars, including the SAT score cutoff.
Apparently, the number of applications at Yale have gone up by 2.6x since 1976, and the admissions rate has gone down by 3.5x. So Yale needs to raise its various bars to let through 1/3 or 1/4 as much of the applicant pool, in totol. The fact that it has raised its SAT bar from top 4℅ to top 1% suggests that all the increased stringency in the admission standard comes from the SAT criterion. Indeed, to achieve that increase in SAT median with only a 2.6x increase in apps, Yale probably had to make some criteria less stringent.
That's the crazy part. Not that SAT went up, but that it seems to have been the primary tool to filter the additional applicants, to the exclusion of other criteria.
* how did the distribution of SAT scores among applicants change during that period?
* how did tuitions change over that period?
* what's the GPA distribution versus the SAT distribution? At some point we went from a 0-4 GPA scale to a 0-5 GPA scale, and IIRC, the SAT's numbers have moved around as well. Can the preference for modifying the SAT bar be related to finer granularity being available? You sort of allude to this in your original comment. GPA may not have gone up simply because it's a worse metric than even the SAT.
* did the rise coincide with all standardized tests, or just the SAT I? SAT II? AP exams? IB?
* was the applicant pool affected by accepting transfer students or affirmative action type of deals?
* what does "top X%" actually mean in this case? Is it a stated admissions policy? Or is it it just that students below a certain SAT score virtually never qualify on some other criteria?
Sorry if some of these would be answered by your links. I'm less interested finding the answer and more just giving you a sounding board.
It's pretty hard to be dumb as a post and score 1500+ (excluding the short-lived essay). It may not be the most predictive factor for college success overall, but as the top schools have become increasingly competitive, they can afford to use higher and higher scores as a baseline. If they miss some diamonds in the rough who test poorly, they still won't have any trouble filling a class. Test-taking wizards with little else to recommend them will get filtered out through other methods.
On the other hand, if you're a mid-tier school trying to choose between a pair of otherwise similar applicants with scores of 1000 and 1200, it might matter to you a great deal how predictive the SAT is vs. the ACT or some other metric. Meanwhile, no matter how confident you are in its predictive power, at least it's an objective metric. One that, for better or worse, also has a marketing impact, since average incoming class scores show up near the top of college survey data.
I think most of the controversy about the SAT and other standardized tests centers around the predictive power of results near the median. Especially since re-centering, the test doesn't try hard to distinguish the top 1% from the top .01%, but it's very important that it correctly distinguish the 60th percentile from the 40th.
Without a penalty, guessing is just a chance for free points. Not really a measure of any skill aside from test taking (of which the SAT already suffers from enough). But I guess if all of your tests at a university are similar to the SAT, it might be a good measure of your potential success.
EDIT: Said the penalty, meant no penalty
That's not saying that they are not valuable skills on their own, but at age 16, they are far more associated with test prep than what the SAT purports to measure.
Lower income people do worse. Or perhaps people who are "worse" have lower income.
Making the test harder to hack by acquiring shallow knowledge (like memorizing "SAT words" without actually being well-read enough to have seen or used them before) is a good thing, because it will make the test a more accurate predictor of the applicant's general level of knowledge. But simply making those test-prep tools more affordable and easier to find will only have the effect of compressing the distribution of scores, making the SAT a less discriminating test in the technical sense and thus a less useful measurement.
Rather than making test prep widely available, the College Board should strive to design a test for which the only effective prep is getting a solid well-rounded education, and they should pay no attention to the complaints that some of the questions are too hard for almost anyone to answer.
However, a nationally standardized test must have consistent scores to be useful, and currently the best way to do that is to keep the general format and content consistent. That means that a student can discover and prepare for the test's general format and content in advance, which is definitely advantageous.
A truly ideal SAT would have a different format and test wildly different skills every time it's issued in order to defeat the idea of test-specific preparation, but still produce meaningful scores. I'm skeptical that such a test can produce sufficiently consistent scores, though I'm very willing to someday be proven wrong by some clever test developer. That'd be pretty neat.
So, until we create an SAT for which test-specific preparation is meaningless, it's important that test prep resources are distributed evenly so that students with good educations won't have artificially lower scores due to unfamiliarity with the SAT's standard format and content. It's an unfortunate but necessary compromise :/
What you are advocating amounts to intentional "handicap" for those who find test-prep tools expensive. Yes, you are getting higher distribution of scores. If you would single out brown eyed people and denied them access to those tools while giving them everybody else, you would get high scores distribution too.
Both tests would be just about the same useful. If the childhood leaves some less prepared to do well in college, then you do not need to add another handicap to them. They are more likely to fail even with access to those tools. If the access makes them perform better, then your "it is fair cause they are not prepared" goes out of window.
Note: I'm not saying they should not sell test prep. It is business and it is ok business to try to earn money. Just that the more expensive materials are, the less you choose on actual aptitude.
Not to mention all the junk in the background. What do the dotted lines even mean? Tufte would have a heart attack.
It doesn't affect me at all, and I'm not complaining, but that's what ran through my head.
Again, I don't care about how this affects me, it's just the most interesting and relevant part to me.
As if math requirements for American students aren't low enough already.
I think probability, in particular Bayes' Theorem, and basic number theory should be covered in a high school curriculum for the college-bound as well. Including converting numbers between base 2, base 10, and base 16; solving linear congruences with small moduli by trial and error; finding gcd and lcm; prime factorization; determining whether a pair of numbers is relatively prime. Teaching the extended Euclidean algorithm in high school would be on my "nice-to-have" wishlist, but there's only so much classroom time available.
Personally, as an engineering student, I'd rather take most of my math classes here at my university because they tend to all be tied together (both with the math department and engineering department courses) well and I know that where I leave off in Ordinary Diff Eq, I will pick right back up from in Ord. Diff. Eq 2. Coming from having taken calculus and calculus 2 in high school and having entered straight to calculus 3 in university, I didn't have this comfort and in fact ended up missing some content between the classes as a result. There is also the issue of choice, and the limits of it within the context of high school curriculum.
Just my 2 cents against teaching additional stuff in high school (or probably addressing the wrong point within this comment). Also, I'm not sure (obviously) what its like across the nation, but at my high school at least these topics where all covered and taught to (nearly) all students: > Basic algebra and geometry: Order of operations; simplifying expressions; solving quadratic equations by factoring; finding area and perimeter of shapes; the classic "garden problem" (maximize area of a rectangle given fixed sum of 3 sides); naming the Platonic solids; adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing complex numbers; logarithms; solving exponential equations. [...] solving linear congruences with small moduli by trial and error; finding gcd and lcm; prime factorization;
It would be great if we could switch from content to teaching actual mathematical reasoning. You can read a famous essay called "Lockhart's Lament" for more about this subject. But that's not something that's happening right now either in classrooms or on the standardized tests.
My point is that you have to teach something in high school, and it doesn't feel like the new SAT tests anywhere near four years' worth of content.
> linear equations; complex equations or functions; and ratios, percentages and proportional reasoning
"Linear equations" are a topic that can easily be taught in a month or less. "Complex equations or functions" is unclear, but I assume this means quadratic equations or maybe basic trigonometry -- probably a semester's worth or less. "Ratios, percentages and proportional reasoning" is really middle school level math -- or even elementary school level. It doesn't belong in a high school curriculum, except as review or remedial material.
So all of this content consumes less than a year of high school. I agree that maybe four years of intensive math coursework may be the wrong bar to set for the SAT, but is it setting the bar too high to expect college-bound seniors to know more than a single year worth of math content?
For that matter, only the best students should be expected to get a high score on the SAT; otherwise, the SAT score becomes meaningless. So I should re-phrase the question:
Is it setting the bar too high to expect the best math students among college-bound seniors to know more than a single year worth of math content?
Understatement of the year.
If you run into a word you don't know, look it up.
We're not going to teach test-taking.
As a native english speaker, my instinct is to emphasize the essay part - but I realize that's idealistic. Still, I think essays and writing are critical for showing one's ability to synthesize (there's that word) and organize one's ideas or those of others. I think writing should be emphasized and multiple native languages supported... but that's work for the next revision. This one is certainly welcome.
Evaluating whether it is worth it to take a guess is a test-taking skill, and the SAT is trying to shift away from test-taking skills.
This article: "Sometimes, students will be asked not just to select the right answer, but to justify it by choosing the quote from a text that provides the best supporting evidence for their answer." "Going forward, though, students will get a source document and be asked to analyze it for its use of evidence, reasoning and persuasive or stylistic technique."
CCSS CCSS.ELA-Literacy.CCRA.R.1 Read closely to determine what the text says explicitly and to make logical inferences from it; cite specific textual evidence when writing or speaking to support conclusions drawn from the text. CCSS.ELA-Literacy.CCRA.R.8 Delineate and evaluate the argument and specific claims in a text, including the validity of the reasoning as well as the relevance and sufficiency of the evidence.
We had computers back in 2005, and almost all students typed their school essays out, but the college board hadn't got with it. Since it took me so long to handwrite things, I didn't have a moment to think about the topic. Instead, my strategy was to prepare an extremely formulaic essay, and then furiously write as fast as I could. Hey, it worked, except I was already stressed and tired by the end of the essay with over 3 hours of test to go.
To backtrack a bit, I've always assumed the SAT to be about aptitude for reasoning, not about throwing "real life" challenges at you.
But you knew in advance taht you were going to have to write an essay when you took the SAT, no? And while it may not have happened to you since, I can think of numerous examples where people have to do exactly that - lawyers, managers, doctors...
I'm sorry you find it hard to write things by hand, but that's something most people learn to deal with in junior school. I was a very slow writer myself, and I overcame it with...practice. Indeed, when under time pressure to write something I often find it easier to write by hand because I don't have editing facilities available beyond basic crossing-out.
The problem is that speed of writing is irrelevant in almost all contexts and training it ridiculous waste of time - unless you need SAT. Which is reasonable complaint about SAT. If they would be measuring how fast you run, then you could prepare for it by running a lot. It would not make it the best possible test.
Mangers and doctors do not write essays on random topics. They write texts about their work on topics they supposedly know well.
Reversing the watering down of the exam ... that's pretty hard to imagine for the foreseeable future.