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Replacing SAT with LEGOs
A reader writes "The Denver Post has a story about Colorado College, in an effort to attract minority and disadvantaged students, is dumping college-admission exams in favor of a Lego-building test, but only for a handful of applicants. 'The Lego test helps identify initiative, leadership and an ability to work in groups - qualities that hours-long ACT and SAT tests never quite get at.' " The college is working on this as a pilot program, along with eight other schools. Bet I could have gotten a better scholarship if they would have let me build a space station.
You attract the poor people by basing your exam on how much practice you've had with an expensive toy, the handicapped with a test of manual dexterity and the "disadvantaged" with a complex spatial relations test.
This isn't going to go down well...
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Perhaps we should drop attendance requirements as well, since the children do not 'really want' to go to school everyday. You know, to attract more minorities. Perhaps not.
In an era when job competition is becoming more intense everyday, our schools should strive to emulate countries which are far ahead of us, and send our children into the work place with a firm foundation of knowledge. Or we can just baby them and continue the recession into stupidity.
Perhaps.
First, it's excellent that universities are finally, after over 100 years of this, beginning to understand standardized testing is a poor indicator of value/intelligence/leadership. It's been known for a long time that there are many varieties of intelligence - the IQ test only tests one - basically math and spatial visualization. Wuzzah. So if you know 13 different programming languages - from LISP to C++ and can pick up new ones within a few days.. well, sorry - that won't show up on the test.
It's still a nice idea - give college kids some legos and see what they build. However, if they're still bent on using tests (an ultimately doomed approach) instead of interviewing potential students, may I suggest giving potential candidates an objective (which varies from person to person) and see how they solve it? In my opinion, it's more important /how/ you solve it than /whether/ you solve it. After you give the same problem to a few hundred people you'll know what solutions are typical and be able to spot the innovative and/or unconvential people in a group. What you do with this information is up to you, as an administrator, but you all know who my money's on.
Like it hasn't been dumbed down enough already.
What's next, orgami skills as a determining factor?
Seriously, though, the problem I have with this is that there is more than one test for entrance. And you don't get to choose which test to take. One is easier than the other. Isn't this unfair?
I really think that standards are declining if people use legos to get into college. I actually wanted to take the ACT test to get into college and I feel that it was worth it. I can't realistically believe that anyone who can build with legos can actually be on par with someone who has actually shown a knowledge of the material through a standardized test.
Slashdot social engineering at it's finest
I would think that minority groups would feel insulted by having tests that have lower standards then the average white kid. Doesn't just say that they are stupid? I know I would feel insulted if someone game me a test that was not as challenging as someone else. I am willing to say that all people despite ethnic or cultural background are smart enough to handle a challenging education and tests. I am going to go off on a limb here but I would bet that these lower standards are not needed. Rather keeping all students accountable to a higher standard in the class room no matter who they are.
So Linus, what are we going to do tonight?
The same thing we do every night Tux. Try to take over the world!
Hey, didn't some oragami guru find a way to fold solar panels for spacecraft in a way to take up less space than what a bunch of engineers thought was possible? I think he even out-did a computer program that had been tried.
Do really dense people warp space more than others?
If school and life was based around LEGO tests, I would have been supreme overlord when I was 10.
-lou
Now only if they could move the drivers license test to Bob's GOKart downtwon.
I am a little disappointed that colleges would only let 'disadvantaged and ethic' students participate. Are they implying that they are not as smart as others.
Truthfully, it doesn't matter who you are, some people are intelligent but can't take tests like the SAT's and such.
I hope that this will soon be available to all students and adapted by more colleges.
i can just hear it now...
some lady in screaming because her child didnt
have legos when he was growing up because the
family was too poor. now all of a sudden, this
test is biased against the poor minorities of
the country.
let's get serious here. the ONLY people who
complain about unfair tests are the people who
didnt do well (or the family and friends of said
person).
my parents didnt even graduate high school and
were not wealthy (the two biggest predictors) and
i got a 1350 on the SAT.
there will never be a perfect test. the only
"good" alternative is to base it on face to face
interactions with the candidates (something few
colleges could afford to do)--and then there would
still be the argument that "the interviewer was biased".
bah
A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God.
I hope people respond to it in the nice way that they should, and agree that this is a positive step, helping minorities and the disadvantaged as it is intended to. I know that Mensa certainly has 'culture fair' test which rather than
requiring a good knowledge of the subtleties of English or Maths as many IQ tests require, uses spatial awareness as the basis instead - in a direct attempt not just to get the stereotyped arrogant British toffs that might be the only
ones to get good scores on old style tests.
A little bit of grammer check (this really gets on my nerves) 'maths' is not necessarily proper grammer. If I want to talk about math in the plural form I say just math or mathmetics. How exactly if I actually *read* the books does my race have anything to do with getting accepted to college. If I am black does that make me unable to learn? If I am "disadvantaged" how does it prevent access to information? I was rather poor through my childhood and was still able to gain access to public libraries (ever heard of this new thing called the "free" library started in the 19th century and Carnagie). Somehow I doubt that everyone and their mother wants to get into MENSA anyway. It might look good as just another feather in your cap but that dosn't mean much.
I'm all for alternate testing techniques, especially if the courses that this is being used as a requirement for are technique based rather than courses that do require prior knowledge (of literature, for example).
We really do not have that much of a problem at least in the US of getting information to people. The public school environment will at least produce a basic level of information that can be used to create more information and generally be allowed to give a better result. Alternate testing techniques could be employed under the ADA or something similar however college is usually for people who went to HS. High School education or GEDs are not exclusive as they were in times past.
Slashdot social engineering at it's finest
I know many people who can build with legos AND have shown a knowledge of "the" material through a standardized test.
Ok I should have been a little clearer. I meant to say that if all you can do is build with legos then that is a poor indicator of intelligence. I have a younger brother who was able to play with legos in the 4th grade. Does that mean he can get into college? I didn't think so.
Slashdot social engineering at it's finest
Based on your performance in our Lego Application Process Demonstrating Aptitudes Needed for College Entrance (LAPDANCE), [name of school] is pleased to inform you of your admission to the College of Engineering.
Due to your particularly anal-retentive use of color you were passed over by the College of Arts and Sciences, Department of English. However, this same aspect to your creation was considered a strength by admissions specialists for the School of Computer Science....
Yadda - yadda - yadda ...
"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong."
My office has been taken over by iPod people.
Okay, let's assume for the sake of argument that there are "multiple kinds of intelligence" (certainly not implausible), and that standardized tests are really testing only one or two of them.
Item 1: College, in general, is *AIMED* at those one or two kinds; these tests measure *ability to do well in college*, for the most part. Giving people a test of something else just sets them up to fail later.
Item 2: Why is it that these people are assuming that the minorities "can't" do well on standardized tests? Isn't that sort of like saying they think the minorities are "stupid"? Frankly, I don't know whether or not racial groups have differences in brain structure, or whatever - but if they do, we'd damn well better start facing it head on, or we're going to wreck a lot of people's lives trying to push them into something they aren't. (Admittedly, it's no better to assert that an entire group will behave in the same way.)
Item 3: Why don't they give *EVERYONE* the lego test, and see how it pans out? If you give it only to the students you think won't do well on the other test, you aren't learning much. Let's be fair; make *EVERYONE* take the lego test, have their results graded by people who don't know which color people did which projects, and find out what the lego test tells you.
Item 4: "Kinds of intelligence" is probably meaningless anyway. "intelligence" is supposed to refer to the generalized set of "kinds of intelligence". Sure, the tests don't measure them all, but the lego test doesn't *MEASURE* anything, it just gives you a platform to balance your prejudice on.
Honestly, I think it comes down to this: There uexist people who are not "disadvantaged" in any way, and who feel guilty about this, and who will seek out "disadvantaged" people, and try to "help" them, in a way that makes it absolutely clear that the people doing the helping are in charge, and the "disadvantaged" people oughta be grateful for the help. These people are just as racist as the overt racists, they've just found a better way to sublimate it. Better for them, anyway. Not sure it's any better to be talked down to than openly hated.
This is a joke. With any luck, they will realize it, and start trying to do something useful - for instance, if the "different kinds of intelligence" thing pans out, start building a real curriculum for them, not just excuses to shove them into a curriculum that doesn't match them.
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Tests are imperfect at best and misplaced at worst, but reducing admissions to the level of "job" interviews is far, far worse than even the most poorly designed and executed test.
A test has at least the possibility, and if adminstered correctly, probability of giving objective results. The criteria may be misplaced or imperfect, but the results will generally stand on their own, all imperfections aside.
An interview can never even aspire to be resonably objective. Subjective prejudices in terms of personality, appearance, gender, and culture are intrinsic to any interviewing process. The result will not be some utiopian "fair deal" for those who score poorly on tests but would have made good students anyway, but a system so completely weighted by the personal opinions of admissions interviewers that fairness of any kind will not be even remotely possible. Ultimately it will no longer even be expected, or strived for.
Standardized testing, for all of its flaws, at least eliminates the worst of the cultural and personal bias of the admissions process, by stating more or less "you are required to know a modicum of the following, if you don't, learn it and come back for another try." Far more fair, even for the disadvantaged (however one defines the term) than an interviewer commenting "You really aren't State U material, sorry kid" become some arrongant jerk doesn't like your accent, your nose ring, your hair style, or your skin color. Or worse, they've simply had a bad day and just feel peaved enough that playing God with your future makes them feel better. (If you don't believe both of these happen quite often in the private sector, I suggest working for a time in the personnel department of any large firm.)
No system is perfect, but your proposal amounts to throwing the baby out with the bathwater, then chucking most of the nursery out the window as well.
As to the notion of using legos for colleges admissions, I can only cringe at the value a college education received in the United States will have fifteen or twenty years from now. All of the arrogant posturing by Europeans with respect to the American system of Higher Education will become appallingly accurate if this silliness continues.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
First, it is incredibly expensive. Look at the time and number of judges required.
Second, it is much more subjective and will consequently have a lower test-retest reliability.
Third, given the limited range of scores (and lower reliability) it is very doubtful it could ever approach the predictive validity of the SAT.
What's even weirder is that there's no evidence that minorities would do relatively better on this test than on the SAT, so the whole project is suspect.
Ludicrous.
Look. College is many different things; I'm not going to argue that. But its primary purpose is a place of study. If a student can't perform well on a test (which requires that one exercise a reasonable amount of study skills), that student simply isn't going to do very well in most collegiate enviornments.
The bit about testing leadership and other types of intelligence is, I suppose, a valid concern. But do it in addition to the tests, not instead of them.
Personally, I always saw racial preferences as one of the more wacko ideas. A person's race doesn't determine how well they'll do in a college environment at all. Religion might, depending on the tenets of the given religion, but that's exceedingly rare and a student whose religion might affect college life is very likely to choose a place where the two won't interfere with one another anyway. Sexual orientation doesn't affect study skills, or gender, or anything else along those lines. So why even put them on a college application at all? Statistics?
Statistics and such are of interest to statisticians, but in the end they're not really indicative of very much. Personally, as I see it, if you want to make college admissions fair across races, don't make all kinds of special treatment. Make the process race-blind (and gender-blind except in the case of single-sex colleges, and such). Completely eliminate the race question on the application form; if you feel you need the statistics then send the students a survey after the admissions decisions have already been made. I don't think anyone here will argue against the assertion that race and such has no place in the decision whether or not to admit a student. So why even ask the questions until the decisions have been made?
But I'm ranting again, so back to the subject...
A college is a place of study. I fail to see how objective merit is an invalid concern. The SAT's and ACT's are meant to be a measure of the skills a student needs to succeed in a college environment, namely study and reasoning skills. I think the ACT tends to do a better job of measuring this than the SAT's (since the ACT's test a broader range of skills), but both do well in their given fields. The rest, such as leadership, are of course very nice skills to have. But they have little to no effect on how well the student does in classes, and can even hinder the student in some cases, as they get involved in more activities than they can handle and their grades suffer as a result (I've seen this happen to far too many students).
So attacking merit isn't the way to go. Replacing onjective tests with subjective ones only adds the potential for more racism and bias than the terminally insecure claim exists now. Combining the two is actually something of a good idea, so long as you're careful about how that's done.
Oh, one last thing. Someone talked about the idea of interviewing prospective students. Most colleges already do that. I went through a bunch of interviews, as did my sisters when they went off to college, as did everyone I know who went to or is currently at college. It's an important tool. But all tools are inherently flawed in some manner or another (even a simple hammer is flawed: it can miss the nail or worse, hit your finger); that's why only rarely can any one tool be used to get the job done well.
But I didn't get enough of the flat rectangles!
EOF
A close reading of the article reveals that the school is not "throwing out" the SAT, but allowing kids who flunk the school's SAT benchmarks to take a battery of alternative tests, including this lego test. The battery will apparently include a traditional interview. That thought, however, is too complex for us mere mortals to grasp. Watch as our friends in the media helpfully simplify the story for us over the next few days to: "SAT thrown out for Legos!" Dan
I believe that aptitude test should be devised using an "open source" methodology. Lest you think I'm just trying to drop the phrase "open source" for karma points, I'll explain:
Aptitude/intelligence tests are typically devised behind closed doors. A small committee gets together and creates questions. The questions are then tested on students. Questions with a high miss rate are considered "hard". Questions with a low miss rate are considered "easy".
This methodology has very real flaws. First of all, the elite group which gets to create the questions is too small. They are very rarely questioned. The fact is that SAT questions have been proven to contain questions which could be misunderstood. Sometimes, the "correct" answers are just wrong. Lawsuits have been filed over this and ETS (the company who creates the SAT) has been forced to change scores. This is kept quiet, of course. We can't have people questioning the almighty SAT.
Since the elite group is too small and closed to rule out the possibility of group error, we should open up the question-writing to everyone. Let educators from around the country create the questions. We have the technology to do this right now.
In fact, it should go beyond just the educators. The process should be open to students, as well. How about a pilot program where Slashdot members devise an aptitude test? I have no doubt that the combined intelligence of this site could produce a far more informative and perceptive test than anything in use today.
-- In the future, everyone will code Perl for 15 minutes. --
I can tell you for a fact that, at many larger schools (including the one I attended for undergraduate and graduate work) there were no interviews during the admissions phase (this includes colleges for which I applied and did not attend).
I had numerous interviews for various scholarship "competitions" but those typically took place after I had already been admitted (got early acceptance in Nov. of senior year of HS).
In fact, to provide a counter-example to yours, I know of no one who had interviews as part of their admissions procedure, but that may have to do with the fact that almost everyone I know went to one of two or three large, public universities.
As a side note, I don't exactly believe that outstanding performance on standardized tests is any better an indicator of future performance in college that poor performance. I know of several people who went to my high school who made outstanding scores on the SAT/HS GPA/etc. but, once at college and out from under Mommy and Daddy's control, took to too much partying and ended up failing/dropping out of college. Likewise, several "marginal" students went on to excellent college careers. However, I am not advocating the "dumbing-down" of admissions standards. As a graduate teaching assistant, I encountered far too many students lacking basic mathematical and communicative skills. I actually know of a student who wrote the following on a physics lab report: "It is would be much more actual in percent difference. And much more correct to[sic]."
Eric
Actually, some of those sound almost as interesting, if not more, than the Lego test. Public speaking, in particular, strikes me as a good test, given that, in many, many surveys, people have consistently rated "speaking before a group" as their number one fear, above even death. Conflict resolution is going to be increasingly important in society as a whole, and on college campuses in particular. And other messages in this thread have suggested that personal interviews be used in place of "the Lego test"; it would seem that they're actually being used alongside it.
Some other things to note about the article:
- CC "has long been an innovator in higher education." Somebody's got to try these ideas first...
- CC is not the only college using these new tests; eight other universities are doing this, too (four other private liberal-arts schools and four state universities).
- Very few students are going to be admitted as a result of these tests, at least at first (it's a pilot program). CC and the other liberal-arts schools will be admitting four students each under this program; the four state schools will admit 20 students each.
- Researchers will be keeping track of these students; to see how well they do in relation to students admitted under "normal" policies.
- The intent of all this is to maintain racial diversity in college admissions without resorting to "affirmative action" programs (which are in the middle of a whole slew of political firestorms right now). This is important for CC, since (according to the article) "Colorado public colleges and universities are required to show continuous improvement in minority recruitment, retention and graduation."
Naturally, the "Lego test" gets the headline because it sounds outrageous. Nonetheless, the overall program sounds both interesting and worthy of investigation, and I hope that it works out. And, even if it doesn't, they'll have learned something as a result.Eric (Denver, CO)
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Didn't read the article, huh?
Where is the evolution then?
I wasn't aware that low-scorers on the SATs were fed to the wolves.
On the same note, if you believe that a set of tests designed and produced by a private company are at all objective, you may wish to spend some time with the great segment of the American population which has almost 0 representation here on Slashdot-- namely African-Americans, Hispano-Americans, anyone who's Gen 0 or 1 American (i.e. a new immigrant or their child.) If you haven't taken a standardized test (like the SAT, ACT, or my personel bane, the MEAP (a test given to grade, middle and high schoolers in MI), you should maybe order a few sample copies from ETS and give them a look-see.
Look these objectify metersticks of knowledge over and ask yourself: What would this mean to me if I were born after the Cold War? What would this mean to me if I grew up to a single parent in the middle of City X and have never seen an open body of water or a forest? What would this mean to me if English were my second language (N.B., children, that the US has no national language-- we take all comers, here (in theory,) unlike snooty old European nations.)
We'd do better to release this delusion of having aquired objective judges by simply moving people farther away from the process. I'd rather sit in an interview room and know that a white man was seeing me as a black girl, then sit at my little desk and think that some machine somewhere didn't notice or care.
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The Lego test helps identify initiative, leadership and an ability to work in groups
I don't remember Lego being a team game. I'm the youngest of 3 and I remember mostly playing with Lego alone. OK, sometimes I built something with my sis, but then it was more about cooperation than leadership.
Lego was/is more about creativity and engineering than group interaction. For me, anyhow ...
Regards, Ralph.
As in "reading the article." Looking over comments, here are a couple of things most posters seem to have missed:
- The lego test is only one of a series of twelve workshop tests performed.
- The schools are looking for tests that are better predictors of college success. These workshop-based tests are an experiment to find such tests--they are only being used for a highly limited number of admissions, with the outcome carefully tracked. Maybe they'll work, maybe they won't.
As alluded to in the article, the dirty little secret of standardized tests is that they correlate better with socioeconomic background than they do with ultimate college success. And that's to be expected--kids from more affluent families went to better schools, got more help from their (usually) college-educated parents, and so forth. Most of us who have been through college know people who aced their SAT's but royally screwed up their coursework. These schools are looking for something better, somthing that measures ability to succeed as well as general knowledge.It's worth a try, in any case.
Well, as some of my posts undoubtably underscore (spelling in particular), my rather high score on the ACT was NOT due to the English portion of the exam. :-)
The standardized test (and later the net, with it's emphesis on typing and not writing by hand) also enabled me to do well despite my appalling handwriting.
Standardized tests do work pretty well, albeit imperfectly. Smart people with significant failings in other areas can and do do very well, with those weaknesses hilighted by their respective scores.
As an aside, the fact that two private firms came up with two competing, national tests (the ACT and the SAT), and their subsequent success, clearly shows there was an unfulfilled need for a national standard whereby colleges could judge the relative educational level of prospective students coming from diverse backgrounds and school systems of widely varying quality. These tests may be imperfect, but they are far more functional (and useful) than building with legos.
The only real "argument" with respect to national standards tests is not whether or not they are needed, but whether or not they should be designed and maintained by private companies or by some kind of public (government or acedemic) institution. As stubborn Americans we may steadfastly refuse to learn from our European and Asian neighbors (who have had standardized testing on the national level for a long time), but we can hardly ignore our own free market, which we hold in such high, almost religious, regard, and which has very unambiguously demonstrated a need for the same kind of national standards right here in the good ol' US of A.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Legos are not cheap toys, Legos cost money to buy. How likely is it that the disadvantaged minorities that they're trying to test wll have had a chance to play with legos when they were younger? So it seems that even as they're trying to give disadvantaged minorities a boost, the better off kids (those whose parents bought them legos) will have an advantage.
Armed with a number of pre-programmed lego mindstorm control modules, he not only duplicated the robot in the other room but activated it. Once activated the robot began attacking all of the other entries, destroying a large number of them before being turned off. Ken stated that he got the idea from watching Battlebots on pay-per-view as well as a recent SRL performance.
Although banned from Colorado College, Ken is not disturbed by the results of his actions. Both CalTech and M.I.T. are offering him full scholarships.
-----
No Zen is good zen
I'm all for alternative testing to get into college, but it's only a step in the process. Jusrt getting disadvantaged students into college does not guarantee their success. Traditional curricula also need to be adjusted.
Getting "disadvanted" folks into college is a laudable goal, as long as you aren't throwing more qualified applicants out to do so. If you are, then you are at best merely substitutied one unfairness for another. More likely you have chucked a reasonably fair and objective system for a very unfair one, which happens to favor whatever disadvantaged group you are wishing to promote at the expense of everyone else.
Indeed, if you substitute arbitrary standards (or worse still, subjective interviews) for reasonably objective standards, you eliminate any degree of fairness whatsoever from the system and replace it with an economy of favors and influence.
If there is a group of "disadvantaged" people who can't cut it in academia as it now stands (due to "test paralysis" or whatever), feel free to establish an alternative university with different standards and metrics designed for that group. But do not deny those of us who are capable of excelling at academics a good education to do so by dumming down our existing universities, or so slanting entrance standards to such a point that they become meaningless.
What is next? Getting rid of exams altogether (after all, if you can't pass an entrance exam what makes you think you can pass the first semester's mid-terms or finals)? Social promoting? ("It just isn't fair that someone with a BS makes a better living than a high school graduate, so everyone gets a BS!") Some other nebulous notion of achievement based on some administrator's completley subjective notion on how well a student did (and how do you document this "performance" to insure even a modicum of fairness?), as opposed to imperfect tests which at least strive to be fairly objective and which, for whatever other weaknesses they possess, can at least be referred to, reviewed, even regraded if necessary)? That might actually fly in areas with a great deal of subjectivity anyway (e.g. some of the Arts and Humanities), but in areas of hard science such an approach would be absurd in the extreme.
As for objectivity being a myth, or unattainable, as another poster suggested, that is simply hogwash. Perfect objectivity may be unattainable, just as a perfectly (i.e. 100%) effecient engine isn't possible to build, but high degrees of objectivity and fairness are achievable (just as highly effecient motors which run quite well, if not "perfectly", are). The effort to achieve objectivity is certainly not something to be discarded in favor of selection methods which are fundamentally subjective and completely unfair altogether (as the proposed "interview" approach would be), or simply so off-target as to be meaningless (as the "Lego" approach is).
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
You seem to assume that standardized tests are perfectly objective, which is not necessarily true. When a test is designed, it will invariably reflect the cultural biases of those who design it.
I still haven't figured out exactly how you can bias a standardized test. Nobody has offered an actual example yet. I've heard this claim many times in articles or on the radio, but have never heard of even a single example.
Aren't the tests based on what the students are supposed to be taught in school? If they are being taught these things in school, then shouldn't they be able to pass the tests?
It seems like if there is a problem with students passing the tests, then that problem is probably with the schools, not the tests. Are the tests unreasonably difficult or what? I'm just looking for some actual examples here.
Here's a bit of my background, just in case it gives any insight into why I can't seem to understand this. I went to public schools in Texas from 3rd grade to graduation. They weren't very good schools. The classes were too big. Discipline was spotty at best. Real teaching was eschewed in favor of the teacher writing notes on the board, copied straight from the book, which the class was supposed to copy for themselves. Why we sat around re-writing the textbook instead of just reading, discussing, and using the knowledge, I'll never understand. I still managed to pass the standardized tests (and actually did quite well on them).
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
*ding* *ding* now entering the ring, The Liberal
If I am "disadvantaged" how does it prevent access to information?
Lack of books in the home. Lack of transportation to information. Lack of well funded education.
I was rather poor through my childhood and was still able to gain access to public libraries (ever heard of this new thing called the "free" library started in the 19th century and Carnagie).
I grew up working class one of (if not THE) poorest county in Illinois (hmmm...15% unemployment. Things are looking up.) I've been to the libraries back home. VC Andrews and 1978 National Geographics Circa 1986 non-ficition books? Not a chance.
But these are the city libraries. What about great repository of learning that is the school system. Encyclopedias from 1982. History books that stop at the Seven Days War. Science labs that are out of date. Physics teachers who go around saying, "I didn't do well in physics in college. So I'm not going to teach the physics in the book. I'm going to teach 'Conceptual Physics' instead. (Basically physics with no math. Amazing, but true.)
After survivng this wasteland of banality, you go to a Big-10 university and are forced to compete against Buffy and Tad who complain about their schools junior varsity swimming pool being outside, unlike the varisity swimming pool; or something equally decadent. They complain in calc based physics about the fact that this was just like high school. While some people sat there and said, "Calculus in high school?" Damn I had to take that this summer at community college.
Now imagine how this would be worse if my parents couldn't have afforded to send me to geek-camp, or give me vacations to view museumes in major cities.
That is how the "underprivlaged" are not given access to information.
We really do not have that much of a problem at least in the US of getting information to people.
I was so proud of my SAT score when I received it. But I got to college and found that my awesome SAT scores meant absolutely nothing. I almost failed out during my freshman year in college. I don't understand why colleges still require these antiquated, useless scores. When I went to an info session at West Point, they said that SAT scores are the only common denominator among people across the country so that was what they used. SATs I guess are meant as a way to judge a student against the rest of the nation, since High Schools differ so greatly in quality, but what good is measuring a student against the rest of the nation if the measuring tool itself is broken? Really, I know people who got in the 1100s who are doing much better than I am.
SATs are simply another way for the College board to rip high schoolers off. That and the $75-per-exam AP tests -- which most colleges don't even care about anyway.
My first reaction to this Lego thing was scorn, but after thinking about it, almost anything would be better than the SATs. Then again, why doesn't the college just prepare its own comprehensive entrance exam? How do you rate a Lego creation?
With this Lego test, I probably would have gotten into college when I was 12!
___________________
rooooar
Now, how do they plan to teach them?
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No Zen is good zen
I disagree even more strongly with white people designing tests that don't take into account the way non-white people think - a way which, while equally effective in the real world, does not add up to success on those particular tests.
People keep saying that minorities think differently or that the questions are biased based on quirks of language or some such thing. I'm just asking for an example or two to back these statements up. Right now, as near as I can tell, the fault lies in the schools for their poor teaching, and the government for its poor support of the schools. Education should be #1 in this country, but it seems that we just don't want to make the investment.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
That test grew into the classic Stanford-Binet test, which is still in use. That's a one-on-one test, usually given by psychologists. It has more range than the more popular paper-and-pencil tests, which lack resolution for the bottom and top 5% of the population. It's expensive to give, since it takes hours of psychologist time. It does test non paper-and-pencil skills, like this proposed new test. But the Stanford-Binet test is individual.
Scoring an individual acting as part of a group, as that new test tries to do, has reliability and bias problems. But it's a concept that's been made to work by the U.S. Marine Corps. The Marines have a scheme called the Crucible for testing recruit group problem-solving skills. The Marines do it the hard way; they get the troops hungry and exhausted, then test them. It works for them.
A recent book on the measurement of intelligence, The G Factor, is worth reading. The big "g" controversy revolves around whether it's meaningful to have a single measure of "intelligence". The answer from research in the field seems to be yes, in that different measures of "intelligence" are strongly correlated, but the results are so politically incorrect that desperate attempts are made to avoid accepting this fact. Here's the problem, as a reviewer on Amazon writes:
Indeed, much of the opposition to IQ testing and heritability would probably disappear if it were not for the stubborn and unwelcome fact that, despite extensive well funded programs of intervention, the Black-White difference refuses to go quietly into the night. Chapter 11 of The g Factor fully documents that, on average, the American Black population scores below the White population by about 1.2 standard deviations, equivalent to 18 IQ points. (This magnitude of difference gives a median overlap of less than 15 percent, meaning that less than 15 percent of the Black population exceeds the White average of 50 percent). The difference between Blacks and Whites in average IQ scores has scarcely changed over the past 80 years (despite some claims that the gap is narrowing) and can be observed as early as three years of age. Controlling for overall socioeconomic level only reduces the mean difference by 4 IQ points.
That's the basis of the controversy.
Perhaps the questions on the tests should be reviewed more carefully. Maybe they should have a bunch of kids who did poorly on the test come in and explain why they missed each question. Maybe that would clear up some of the problems. Either way, we deal with other people's biases every day. Until we all have the same life experiences and background, that's the way it will be. Given that everyone is biased in different ways, I'm not sure what measurement you could use and be even remotely accurate.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
I don't know about "thinking differently", but certainly there are differences in vocabulary and usage between socioeconomic groups, and these groups correspond strongly to race.
One example that I saw in (IIRC) a study guide based on old SAT tests was something like "Regatta is to boat as..." That's one's not just culturally biased, it's geographically biased - how many people living in landlocked Iowa, compared to costal Maryland, know what a regatta is?
Another one, that I read about in an article on standardized tests, involved the word "buttercup". Imagine that you live in the ol' concrete jungle, where wildflowers are not exactly common. You might just think that a buttercup was perhaps some sort of a kitchen implement, whereas suburban kids like myself used to pick buttercups for our moms.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
The article clearly states that only 14% of the people in the program were "American ethnic minorites." This is for people who teachers/counselors/whoever know are smart enough to contribute but don't do well on tests. I for one would welcome a lot more people in college who are not as "book smart" but have leadership capabilities or think at right angles to other people (to steal a phrase from a former teacher). Just because somebody doesn't do well on the SATs doesn't mean they should be dropped from society or unable to continue their education. This test recognizes that there is more to being intelligent than just being able to fill in bubbles correctly on a scantron sheet.
I agree that quality primary and secondary education is the larger issue - which, given current funding models boils down to a class/ecomomic issue.
But since you've asked here are a few examples of race/class/gender/regional bias in the SAT:
In the vocabulary tests, like analogies, there are often words that have a distinct social class bias, such as regatta. Now, crew is a very expensive sport so poor kids are far less likely to know what a regatta is, even if they are extremely well read. But even the dumbest kids at my prep school knew about regattas. I think I've seen saling examples as well. I remember reading about one for castleing, and guys are far more likly to play chess, yet playing chess isn't a great college admissions standard. There have also been arguments about words w/ a regional bias, some kids never experience a snow drift or a breakhead.
To take it to an extreme, think about what would happen if football, hockey, stockmarket, basketball or sewing vocabulary, or words related to different music genres were on the tests. (guitar is to pedal as:)
- bridgette
OK, for starters:
What's worse are the so-called solutions to the "problem" of the SAT's supposed "cultural bias".
Oh, cultural bias does shave a few points here and there, but not as much as economic bias. I used to run a non-profit test prep service where we charged 5 bucks and the book at our cost. We mainly wanted to help disadvantaged kids. We saw modest improvements, it's been a long time but I remember something like 15-20 points on each side being typical. If you walked into the SAT and I gave you a chit saying that we were going to take 40 points off your combined score because of the school you came from, you'd howl like a stuck pig, because unless your combined score was north of 1450 or so this would put you out of the running somewhere. That's essentially what happens to poor kids who are stuck in a dead end school, unless they can find people who are willing to tutor them for practically free like we used to. And remember -- we did nothing to improve the chance of the kid's success in college -- only his chance of getting in. We didn't make them smarter, only better test takers.
There are genius an dolts among us.
Yep, and there are genius-dolts too. I knew quite a few people who had 1600 combined and, you know what? They weren't always as successful as people with combined scores in the 1400 range. Intelligence tests like the SAT measure very narrow capabilities, and not necessarily every capability you need to succeed in life, or even as a student.
Intelligence tests are inherently imprecise, in that unlike measures of distance, mass and time they cannot be corroborated by anything but other intelligence tests. As such, they are engineered to confirm our personal biases. SAT scores went through a long period of decline because they were engineered to do so -- the test is checked and recalibrated every year. This is justifiable, because it should have declined over the last several decades because of demographic changes in college bound seniors -- but it's good to remember this when reading breathless media accounts of the dumbing down of our student population. Great story, from Steve Chorover's book From Genesis to Genocide: When the Stanford-Binet test was first translated from French, it has a peculiar quirk: women on average scored five or ten points higher than men. The "researchers" then recalibrated the test, throwing out questions that women did good on and adding more of the sort men did good on until the test was gender-neutral. If the initial results had gone the other way, how much do you want to bet it would have stood?
IQ tests DO have their place, but they aren't enough. Getting to know a student by watching him in action is a great idea, and a great way to find the kids who have the balls to succeed even if they're starting from behind. Not mention to weed out the people who look good just on paper. I recently fired somebody with an engineering master's degree, because while he said he could adapt to our technology, he didn't have the drive to learn and succeed when things weren't handed to him on a platter.
Instead of trying to give extra help, lowering requirements, or inventing new tests for low GPA HS grads who can't get into colleges, you should really be looking why they aren't up to snuff in the first place and go fix that.
Changing the requirements to measure poise, leadership, ability to cooperate with others is not lowering standards, it is changing them. For some people, these changes would represent considerably more stringent requirements. Combined with standard IQ testing, this will give a better picture.
Fix the educational inequities where they form so that there are no problems that need special tests and special admissions rules to address.
How is a college admissions officer supposed to accomplish that? His job is to do a fair a job as possible at finding kids who will succeed at his school -- not to fix the world. For that matter, how do you propose we as a society are going to give every child equal educational opportunity? Improving education is like self-improvement. There's no magic formula, just a long, hard road with lots of failure and disappointment at the outset but hopefully leading someplace better.
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Here's an interesting fact that might be a little less off topic:
Studies recently reported in Science News suggest that students at charter schools do not do any better than at their counterparts at public schools on standard measures of acheivement. Parents, however, express much higher degrees of satisfaction with charter schools.
It isn't clear whether charter schools really are better and the tests don't show it, or whether they aren't really better but parents are somehow bamboozled.
What remains clear is that the time tested formula for producing higher test scores: select the best students (or population of students) and spend a lot of money on them.
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Go watch the olympics and see that the records are in the various events where there are mens and womens competitons (100m sprint, weightlifting, etc.). Also, go to your local school and look at the list ph physical fitness requirements (i.e., how many pull-ups boys have to do to pass vs. for girls).
Go to the maternity ward and watch women and men attempting to give birth.
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For any student that is even marginally literate, niether of the examples should pose a problem regardless of the test-taker's "socioeconomic background"!
Ths simple fact is that *anyone* applying to enter *college* should be well read enough to know the trivial facts that a regatta is a (sail)boat race, and a buttercup is some kind of flower. There's no cultural bias at all here - most of us have never participated in a regatta, yet it is quite reasonable to expect that we should at least know what one is. There is, on the other hand, an entirely appropriate bias toward literacy in the examples you cite.
In fact, it seems that it's your comment that contains the subtle racial bias, by implying that somehow, certain races can't be expected to measure up, so we'll have to cut them some slack. This is surely the most vile and corrosive form of racism possible!
The answer isn't to dumb down the tests, the answer is to make sure that our children can escape having their lives ruined by educrats who are more interested in hoovering dollars from Washington and making illiterate kids feel good about it (they call this "self-esteem") than they are in graduating literate, functional, citizens. (We actually graduate a non-trivial number of people in this country every year that can't read their diploma - There is no excuse for this! With any kind of proper teaching, children (with very few exceptions) can and should exhibit survival-level reading ability as they leave *first* grade!)
If you're interested in actually fixing the problem, I highly recommend the following two books to become somewhat more literate on the educational problems we face: Doug Wilson's "Recovering the Lost Tools of Learning" (which includes mystery novelist and solid thinker Dorothy Sayers' excellent essay on "The Lost Tools of Learning"), and Susan Schaeffer Macaulay's "For the Children's Sake".
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
Ths simple fact is that *anyone* applying to enter *college* should be well read enough to know the trivial facts that a regatta is a (sail)boat race
- ----------
Actually, whether the boats in the race have sails or not has no bearing on whether or not a race is called a regatta. The Head of the Charles in Cambridge MA is also referred to as 'The Regatta' and none of the boats in it have sails.
-----------------------------------------------
Funny, I seem to recall quite recently a number of people quoting Martin Luther King, Jr. saying that he was for judging people by the content of thier hearts (and presumably thier minds as well) rather than the color of their skin.
Sorry, but if you *really* think skin color matters, then *you* are a racist.
Anything but a truly level playing field (in either direction) indicates a racist position. Any special patronizing adjustments only serve to promote and extend racial bias and hostility. We cannot (and should not try) to ensure equality of outcome - we should ensure equality of opportunity - and do that without attacking the integrity of our educational and other institutions.
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
That's why I put "sail" in the parentheses. Although a regatta does not necessarily imply sail-powered craft, the word seems to be most frequently used in that context, at least in my experience.
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
Here's the problem:
... when preparing for the SATs, high school students from solidly middle-class to upper-middle class families with white-collar, college educated parents have a HUGE advantage. Make that several:
First of all, race makes a handy metaphor for class in the U.S. since anyone talking about the "lower class" must be a dirty Commie (everyone's middle class, and all the children are above average, blahblahblah). So enough with the racism complaints (not directed at the previous poster, but at the thread in general). "Non-white" seems to be the only way to describe "dirt-poor" that will make it into public discourse.
This, of course, creates a problem. Namely, the rich non-whites are getting into college just fine, and poor kids (white and otherwise) are left to rot.
Next problem: As others on this thread have already pointed out, the SAT questions are biased towards the upper-middle-class suburban life. Someone from Appalachia or from the "concrete jungle" is going to have a serious problem with those questions. One example that's always stuck with me (not an SAT, but another standardized test for younger kids) that I saw back in my days of work-study work for an educational consultant was this:
You were playing with your friend's ball and lost it. What do you do?
1. Buy him a new one and pay for it (answer worth 2 points)
2. Look all over for it, try to find it (answer worth 1 point)
3. I'd just cry; say I'm sorry; apologize (answer worth 0 points)
Um, do we see a slight problem here? The damn test is using "throw money at the problem" as the right answer! That's NOT going to work for kids that have no money.
Speaking of throwing money at the problem
1. The parents have probably had to go through the standardized testing process at some point, and can sit down with their little wannabe college students and grill them.
2. They can also afford SAT prep courses.
3. They can also (sometimes) afford private schools, and/or to live in places where the public schools are good.
4. In some cases, there's a difference between merely getting into a specific college and getting into said college with enough money to go there. The kids who got (at most) 1200 on their SATS and come from rich families are a "level playing field" for the kids who got 1500 and are on full (or nearly full) scholarship.
I know a lot of this from personal experience. I was homeschooled from 3rd-6th grade, and every year I went to take the Iowa tests with the kids in school. The first year, I ran into a severe crisis on the math section that can best be summed up as "lots of problems really fast." All my other scores were in at least the 75th percentile (most were in the 95th plus), but this one was somewhere around 38th percentile. Mom thought something was strange about this and asked me what was going on. I explained, and she started drilling me on fast-paced timed arithmetic tests. I think I jumped up to 97th percentile on that same section the following year.
And as for the concept of the SATs et al testing "what you need to know to succeed in college," they do no such thing. Again from personal experience. I was in Johns Hopkins University's Center for Talented Youth program. A prerequisite for admission to said program was scoring at least 430 on the old Verbal and 500 on the old Math SAT at the time I participated. Some of us did fabulously well in life. Some of us who were big fish in small ponds in high school got to college and realized that we might be intelligent, we might be brilliant standardized-test takers, but we didn't know how to study! I was screwed the first time I had to write a research paper in college. Didn't know what in the H-E-double hockey sticks I was doing. I also tested out of (or nearly so) classes that I really should have taken, and the holes in my mathematical, scientific, and music theory background came back to haunt me again and again in college.
One of my friends from CTY summer camp? She got a 1500 on the SAT when she was 12 years old. She received early admission to the same college program I did, then transferred to Alfred -- and flunked out. Last time I talked to her, she was working fast-food. So much for high SAT scores predicting success, huh? She wasn't the only one in a similar situation, just the most drastic example I can think of to show how completely the SAT doesn't predict success on a damn thing other than taking standardized tests.
And yes, I know that a poor and hard-working kid can beat the odds, study on his/her own, and make it into a good college. (I went to school with quite a lot of them.) I also know that, again, the playing field isn't level. They worked a lot harder to get where they are than those of us who had money and/or parents in an educational field.
This issue is so incredibly complex that writing off any one approach as "laughable" is, itself, laughable.
"Somebody exploded a letter-bomb today
(I wonder why I'm even bothering with an AC...)
You do know that DC's schools are some of the best funded in the country. Similarly, you know that DC has one of the best transportation systems in the country.
DC is just one city. We're talking about a systematic problem. Or in poker-lingo, "I'll see your Washington DC and raise you Detroit and Indian Reservartions."
Lack of books in the home I'll give you. If you asked nicely, I'd also give you "parents who don't give a s*** about their children's education."
Come now. The poor family that doesn't give a damn about their children is a horrible stereotype. The majority of poor families are just trying to make through life. Of course there are those that don't give a damn, and so we should just write off all poor kids because one was raised by an utter fuck.
Unfortunately, you probably wouldn't understand the concept.
What the hell does this comment mean? You're just shooting flames with out any reason.
"After survivng this wasteland of banality, you go to a Big-10 university and are forced to compete against Buffy and Tad who complain about their schools junior varsity swimming pool beingoutside, unlike the varisity swimming pool; or something equally decadent. They complain in calc based physics about the fact that this was just like high school. While some people sat there and said, "Calculus in high school?" Damn I had to take that this summer at community college."
Yeah, so what. I (and many others) had a similar experience at one of the Ivies. It's meaningless class bigotry.
This is not meaningless class bigotry. It underscores the fundamental flaw in how the public schools are funded; property taxes. Somehow society has gotten it through its head that this is somehow equitable (as opposed to a central fund where the state dolls out an allowance per student). Until the schools are funded differently, there will NEVER be any real improvement for poor school districts.
"That is how the 'underprivlaged' are not given access to information."
Underprivileged US citizen is an oxymoron.
Do you go to that inner-city library with your eyes closed and your hands over your ears or what?
I hate to offend people, but vocab questions like "Regatta is to boat as..." or one involing buttercup, can be solved by any idiot who HAS A GOOD VOLCABULARY! honestly, in my everyday life, regattas tend not to come up, but I know what it is, because I pay attention in class and I study my vocab.
Now, a question like "All bears in the north are white. My friend from up north saw a bear, what color was it?" would be unfair to some nomadic asian people, because they DON't think like that. But vocab is vocab. You want to do good, you STUDY THE DAMN VOCAB. And thats that. Meanwhile, I think its more likely the "ghetto" attitude of "I Don't care, because everybody wants me to fail" that leads minorities to do worse than the majority. They don't study and then do bad.
Or then there is the possibility that the majorities have an advantage due only to their larger sample group.
Opinionated Law Student Strikes Again!
A little bit of grammer check (this really gets on my nerves) 'maths' is not necessarily proper grammer.
Well, you are displaying a cultural bias here. In the UK and Ireland, for example, we call mathematics, maths for short, and find the word "math" that americans use strange. Are we "right", or are you "right", or is it just a cultural difference? Do you mark someone who spells "colour" as "color" incorrect? Or vice versa?
(Also, it doesn't look to good to correct someone's grammar, when you spell the word grammar wrong yourself!)
This is not meant as a flame, just a comment that what you regard as "wrong" could, in different circumstances be correct, and what you regard as correct, be regarded as strange elsewhere. There are no absolute wrongs or rights in language, just differences in usuage.
Personally, what I find most annoying is people who think that their way is "right" and any way is "wrong", when it is basically comes down to personal preference/culture. (be that vi/emacs kde/gnome colour/color maths/maths etc etc)
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Commonly quoted, but not as accurate as they like to make it sound. SAT's, etc., have fairly strong correlation to college performance. They *also* have correlation to your "socioeconomic background".
This doesn't mean "ah-hah, they're really measuring your background". It might mean "your background and your chances in college are related".
If you were a social darwinist, you'd claim that poor people are poor because they're stupid.
If you believe in nurture over nature, you might argue that the majority of poor kids were *ALREADY* denied a good education when their parents didn't read to them enough.
Either way, the tests *do* correlate to your chances of doing well in school. Someone's gonna try to offer a "counterexample".
That's not how correlation works. Correlation measures *tendencies*. Not absolute causal relationships.
SAT scores are a pretty good indicator for future college performance. Doesn't matter if they're measuring intelligence, or amount of exposure to books in the home, or what - they measure how well you are likely to do in a specific, relevant real world situation, and that's the end of the story.
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>The color of one's skin certainly has nothing to
>do with how intelligent one is.
We'd better hope so. If it *does* matter, there will be riots.
On the other hand, let's try a few variants on that statement:
>The color of one's skin certainly has nothing to
>do with how tall one is.
Any takers?
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>The term "disadvantaged" refers to a lack of
>finances, not mental acuity.
That's still insulting, to claim that being non-white has the same effect on your college preparations that not having books as a kid does.
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Ummm, if you really don't want to offend anyone, you might want to back off of attributing a "ghetto" attiude to minorities. There are white, non-white, homogonous and diverse ghettos and there are bad attitudes in every economic class.
:)
The study in the article was looking for ways to provide opportunities to disadvantaged and minority kids. One's economic class and parental education level are the greatest indicators of one's success on the SATs. There are many reasons for this, but the greatest infuence is quality of your schooling. Generally this is determined by the neighborhood you live in (schools are funded by property tax), mom and dad's ability to pay for private school and/or the education level of your parents (figure out how to get you into a better school against the odds, or homeschool you).
Moreover, in a really good school, the teachers and advisors tell you how important the SAT's are and how you should prepare, college educated parents would also inform their kids. In lesser schools and with uneducated parents, kids often have no clue about college or the college admissions process. Some kids know to explicitly study for the SATs and others don't.
But the big issue isn't the really smart kids with a good vocabulary who study really hard . They will get very high scores anyway, even if they do miss a few biased questions. Kids with 1400+ SAT's and high GPA's probably won't suffer from 20 points here or there. It's the kids in the 900-1200 range who could miss out on something if they miss a few extra questions.
Are you joking about the advantage of a larger sample group? It's not like only 5 black kids take the SAT on any given year
- bridgette
Maybe this college is trying something different and attempting to give their students a more well rounded experience? You're not going to deal exclusively with people who did well in school once you leave college and knowing that different people have different skills in life that are aren't all learned in university studies is very important.
They didn't claim that it has the same effect, just that both can have a negative affect.
An upper-middle class black kid will have many advantages over a dirt-poor white kid in the college admissions game. But given a white and a minority kid of the same economic class, the white kid might be better off in some ways. Having been one of the few brown faces in mostly white schools, I can tell you first hand that being in the minority gets you noticed, for better or for worse. If you do well they notice right away, but if you slack off, that gets noticed immediately too.
- bridgette
I didn't say that there was no correlation between SAT's and college performance. What I implied was that there is room for improvement.
I'm old enough to be well along in my career, and I've been fairly successful at it. The challenges I've faced have had little to do with what's tested in the SAT. Granted, the challenges I had in college were more like the SAT--specifically, the multiple-choice exams I had to take. But those wound up being less that half of my grades, and an even smaller--much smaller--part of what I now find valuable from my college experience.
Standardized tests are a multi-billion-dollar industry, an industry with a lot of political clout and a large marketing budget. I won't deny that such tests have a useful correlation with future success (though I think there is at least some element of self-fulfilling prophecy in that fact). At this point in time trying to come up with something better is a courageous act, in my opinion. I wish them luck.
But that's beside the point. If one person has to be marginally well-read to have encountered a word, while for the other it is part of ordinary experience, that's bias. Any person trying to get into college now should know what RAM, gigabyte, or microprocessor means, but a test with many questions along those lines would be biased towards geeks.
Horseshit, and insulting horseshit at that. I was clearly speaking of cultural, social, and economic factors.Read what I wrote: "there are differences in vocabulary and usage between socioeconomic groups, and these groups correspond strongly to race." Do you disagree that the typical vocabulary and usage differ between poor urban people and rich country-clubbers? I think a few minutes casual observation will demonstrate this.
Do you disagree that people of African, Hispanic, or American Indian ancestry are more likely to be amoung the urban poor in this nation than are people of European ancestry? I think the stats are pretty clear.
Do I therefore think that people should receive some sort of preferential treatment based on race? No. If we want to "right the wrongs", we need to look at the real causes, at the socioeconomic and cultural factors that put some students at a disadvanteage. If we are to apply some remedial preference to college admissions, it should be based on factors like the parents' educational level and income, the availability or lack thereof of good schools and libraries, and so on. We should imagine a world of, say, 50 years hence, where race is no longer an issue, and ask if our policy would still be helping disadvantaged students.
The process should not be "Student A and Student B both ran the course in the same time, but Student A has darker skin so we'll prefer him." It should be "Student A and Student B both ran the course in the same time, but Student A was dragging a ten-pound chain behind him. If we invest a little extra effort into breaking that chain, he'll be damn fast. We'll take Student A for our team."
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
I was also in the Johns Hopkins CTY program. I had the highest math score in my state (NH: 720) but couldn't really afford the actual summer camp, so I didn't go. I did well on my actual SAT scores a few years later, and got accepted to WPI. Your big-fish comment certainly holds water (forgive the pun): I'm typically acing my CS and technical classes, but often the tests are hard because I can't study too well. Also, now I have a huge research paper to do and I feel horribly lost.
Our education system is a tad screwy, I'd say.
And the reason they are a tad screwy is that EVERY CLASS is taught on the level of the dumbest person in the class and they aren't allowed to filter out the idiots or those unwilling to learn. And even if they were allowed to it would be ineffective because the teachers are 80 or 90% idiots as well. So why should we learn to study when we can sleep through the entire class and ace all of the tests for a nice round B? If the school system refuses to challenge the intellectual elite then we will become LAZY, and it will hurt us later in life. The people who usually TRULY excel aren't the most intelligent, but the middle ground intelligent that work their asses off. Maybe some day the school system in this country will be revised to more properly educate the intelligent.
Kintanon
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(Apologies if this is a duplicate; browser's acting funny.)
I don't know about "thinking differently", but certainly there are differences in vocabulary and usage between socioeconomic groups, and these groups correspond strongly to race.
One example that I saw in (IIRC) a study guide based on old SAT tests was something like "Regatta is to boat as..." That's one's not just culturally biased, it's geographically biased - how many people living in landlocked Iowa, compared to costal Maryland, know what a regatta is?
Another one, that I read about in an article on standardized tests, involved the word "buttercup". Imagine that you live in the ol' concrete jungle, where wildflowers are not exactly common. You might just think that a buttercup was perhaps some sort of a kitchen implement, whereas suburban kids like myself used to pick buttercups for our moms.
Ummm, I have never heard of a Regatta before, but I'm 90% sure it's a subclass of boat, and I would figure it out for sure if I were given the rest of the question. I couldn't tell you one flower from another, but I've READ enough to know that a buttercup IS a flower. Are these inner city kids all illiterate? Do the people in Iowa not have libraries?
There is no excuse for ignornace.
Kintanon
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But they're not as good as all that. It's possible, even EASY, to be a good test-taker who has no motivation.
In my completely unscientific experience, the correlation between (old) SAT scores and college success falls apart at about 1300 or thereabouts (at least for those I knew who took them in 11th-12th grade rather than 7th or 8th; the correlation falls apart a bit sooner for those of us who took them young). And it wasn't just lack of success, it was crashing and burning in a BIG and spectacular way in more than one case.
As it is, I'm trying to go on to grad school with less-than-stellar grades and only a minor in my chosen field, and I'm hoping that my excellent showing on the GRE general test and what I hope will be a considerable improvement from 62nd percentile on the subject test will be enough to make up for my "nontraditional background."
I could also mention (from my experiences taking the GED) that standardized tests tend to be biased toward mainstream matters of opinion. "The United States has a nearly classless society" was the "right", factual answer on the GED test I happened to take. Not even an SAT or GRE, a GED of all things! Most folks who are taking that test aren't smartass teenagers like I was who are trying to go to college a little early rather than sit around in high school
I know, nobody's come up with anything better yet, and I'm shooting myself in the foot by complaining (since I am a highly skilled standardized test-taker), but the standardized testing system is horribly broken.
"Somebody exploded a letter-bomb today