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Cal Schools May Nix SAT In Admissions Process
An unnamed correspondent writes: "The University of California school systems is considering to stop using SAT scores in college admissions. Story at Yahoo." The usual double-edged sword here: the SATs, ACTs and similar tests may be close to worthless, but other factors (like how GPAs [?]
are calculated and weighted) varies wildly from school to school. (What might a GPA of 3.9 at Stuyvesant High be worth elsewhere, for instance?)
you could inflate the persons score but put a star beside their name indicating that the person has an inflated score because they have some learning disability.
i really think our society is too worried about making people feel good about themselves. do you really want the person with narcolepsy driving the bus so the bus company can say they are an equal opp. employer? plus they didnt want the guy to feel bad.
use LaTeX? want an online reference manager that
-- john
I noticed it too when I graduated... my class was always considered to be the best to have ever gone through the school system. It showed in the numbers too... a couple of people at my school got 1600 on the SATI. But the classes that came up after us were horrible... one of them set the building on fire and others picked fights with a number of seniors.
:-)
As to seniors failing basic skills... that's a failure of the school system and the parents and I would say society at large... I mean, look at how little basic skills are emphasized in our culture! Now, it is more important that students feel good, enjoy school, and think differently... sure, that stuff is important, once you get the basics out of the way... reading, writing, and 'rithemtic still form the core of society's knowledge, however painful it was to learn it. I hated school but I accepted that it was something I needed to go through to succeed in life. It gave me a foundation from which I could do things that I actually enjoy... like program computers and write nice little essays like this.
Humorless sig goes here.
I'm going to give you all my particular case.
I have a pair of rarish learning disabilities. One is called Dispraxia, the other is called Disgraphia. When combined, they make it utterly difficult to concentrate on hand-written material (due mostly, but not entirely to illegibility). I was allowed to dictate my SAT exams to a teacher. The time I took the SAT by myself, I had issues with the test. Noew that I'm at college, I never have to hand write anything ---everything is on a computer. So, why should I be penilized for a condition that is not going to affect my college performance?
------- Oh damn.... the Sigfile escaped... -Great OM
oops. should be "their" not "there"
Yeah, but the whole idea of studying for a single test in order to get into college is wrong. If the SAT were a true aptitude test, like the LSAT (law school test), in the vein of an IQ test, it could accurately measure students abilities. Colleges, however, prefer to know how much students have learned, so they use an achievement test like the SAT. The UofC prez is right when he says that this leads to inequity. Schools that teach to the SAT will put more kids in college - and colleges don't want kids who can show how rain:drop as snow:flake - they want well-rounded people. Your point on studying is a good one, but really, studying is way overrated. Personally, I took the SAT and ACT both once, without studying. Though I did pretty well, I probably could have gotten a perfect math score on the SAT and a 35+ on the ACT had a studied a bit (as it was, I came pretty close). I did look at some ACT questions to see what it was like, but had I taken a single practice test I would have done way better. I had no idea that the test is based more on speed than knowledge, but I found out in a hurry. If I were a college, I'd rather give myself a scholarship than the kid who took an SAT prep class and studied day upon day learning all of the previously used SAT words in lieu of more important things like hobbies, friends, work, etc. Of course, I'm a little bit biased in that respect :) - Ideally, I'd prefer that colleges looked at how many times someone took a test and weighted their scores down using some formula based on average score improvement, but potential enrollees seem to prefer colleges that take the highest score for each section, regardless of the amount of test opportunities, so that's what the colleges do.
The trend in high schools and lower is to increase
standardized tests in order to hold them more
accountable. This drive is being led by
conservative voters.
Some colleges such Berkeley are going the opposite
way. Liberal administrators accuse testing of
discriminating against the disadvantaged.
Stuyvesant is one of the top public high schools (if not THE top) in the country. A 3.9 at Stuyvesant would shows that you are an excellent student. A better statement would have been, What is a GPA of 2.1 at Stuyvesant worth elsewhere? or What is a GPA of 3.9 at Southampton High school worth at Stuyvesant?
__________________________________________________ ___
rooooar
Finally, one of the states is doing something right. These tests are worth absolutely nothing as far as real knowledge. Some background:
My parents were very enthusiastic about me getting good grades, and so they naturally wanted me to do well on the SAT. As such, I took it once in 7th grade for the Midwest Talent Search(1160), once in 9th grade(1350) and once in my junior year(1590). I missed the sum total of one math question the final time.
Now, what changed between those years? It certainly wasn't preparation in school -- our school had none of the "SAT prep" nonsense that others seem. What changed was the fact that the final time I actually bought one of the stupid SAT prep books and used it. Wow. That's a real proof of intelligence -- being able to drop $25 on a book and get a good score because of it.
However, good numbers don't mean much in the college application process today. I had a 4.0 in AP classes, got the abovementioned score on the SAT, and a 34 on the ACT,plus 700+ scores on my SAT IIs, and MIT and Caltech both turned me down. This was probably because my essays were really bad, and I didn't have enough research credentials, but the point remains -- numbers are NOT everything.
However, I'm very happy where I ended up, so I think it's for the better that we're seeing the end of a very artificial system that causes needless stress and redirects attention from those areas which really are crucial(learning in school).
PS -- for the trolls talking about racially-biased application processes. Yes, I am a white male. Do I think this affected my chances of acceptance at schools? No -- mainly because they're not looking for statistics, they're looking for good people. Talk to the applications selectors at a college some time. It might teach you a thing or two about the process.
Have you ever heard of the Chitlin's Test? It was an intelligence test designed for black culture, using questions and scenarios which were more likely to be familiar to them. On that test, blacks tended to outscore whites.
Was that test racist? Or are the usual tests, written by members of the majority culture, racist? Is it even possible to write an intelligence test which does not favor some parts of society over others?
Anybody who is interested in this subject should read Stephen Jay Gould's Mismeasure of Man.
What do you think of the exams for grad school? :-).
I'm not American so I didn't take the SAT. However, in my undergrad university we had to take a similar test to be admitted. I assume is similar to the SAT 'cause I've seen the questions.
Now, what about the GRE? The general GRE test is just a "harder" version of the SAT and similar exams. That's one of those things where good native English speakers can get a 700 and barely-understandable-one-syllable-speaking Orientals can get an 800. (verbal part). Don't get me wrong, I've nothing against orientals, it just shows how the different cultures take different approaches. (Somebody from China, Japan, Korea, Thailand, etc please correct me if I'm wrong). They study for this verbal part (the hardest for them) for months on end.
I for one, got a 500 or so, but I can speak, write, read and understand better than most of them. (No, english is not my native language).
Does this show that the effort that they put into studying english is their norm in studying? Frankly, I couldn't say, but I've seen them study/work a lot.
Let's move on and consider the GRE advanced test, or subject. This test is specific to one area. I only know about the Computer Science test. Even though it was only on CS, it did try to cover "all" of it, or at least, all the basics. This, in my opinion, is definitely a good test in evaluating how much you know about CS. (If you haven't taken or seen the test go and get yourself a practice exam and see how 3l33t you really are.
The question is, does the fact that you know a lot about CS prove that you're going to be a good student? I don't think so, but I can say that normally, if you are a good student in CS, you'll (is this obvious or not?) know a lot about CS.
Anybody with GRE tales, experiences or adventures?
Cureless
--
Reply . . . let's get it over with.
OR, is it the kids whose parents pay for $900 Kaplan courses who will do better? There's a huge industry around preparing people for these tests, and it's not at all fair to poorer students who just can't afford that sort of resources.
No, I'm not saying that smart kids can't do well without such courses - that's how I was myself. But the existence of high-priced prep courses definitely does bias things towards people who can afford them.
There is no easy magic bullet when you come to testing. Every test is going to be unfair to some group or other, and you will have to take that into account. That said, there can come a time when it becomes clear that a certain test's flaws outweigh its utility, and you should ditch it.
If you want to have a standardised test, you've got to draw the line somewhere; there's only so much you can fit in a year. As for changing the math program, that sucks, but it's probably a good idea. The year before I graduated calculus was knocked out of the provincial math program. Since almost all universities outside of BC assume some knowledge there, my first year of university in Ontario was total catch-up. It would definitely be a good idea to put calculus back in. If it screws everyone in grade 9 up, too bad, but it's for their own good.
Yes, this is how it should be, I agree. However, for truly tremendous state school systems like the UC, which admits on the order of two hundred thousand students a year, they tend to decrease the complexity of the model. From what I've heard, the undergrad admissions process at UC really is a big equation into which they plug your test scores and GPA and about three other factors, and out pops a "yes" or "no". The current policy relies on standardized test scores *way* more than it should, and that's what they're looking to fix. Whether they need to completely drop it in order to stop over-relying on it is a seperate question, but I do think it's good that they recognize there's a problem.
Two problems, both from personal experience:
What happens when an exceptional student goes to a poor school? Where I'm from, the state gives scholarships to the top SAT scorer at each school. In previous years at my school, that was usually in the 1300s -- one year it was 1180. My year was different. I got a 1560 and most of my friends were over 1300. Should my 4.0 (perfect) GPA have counted less than that of someone at another school just because the average student at my school didn't do well in previous years? Why should I have been punished for not wanting to go the the expensive and snobby private school were I live? I liked the people at the school I went to and it was very convenient to go there. Even if you evaluate it on a yearly basis (before application deadlines are due?), you still have the problem of a really good student in a really bad class.
The second problem comes more from college experience since I went to a small school (hence the lack of an exceptionally high student or two every single year to keep the top score from being so low). What happens if your GPA is lowered because you happened to get the shaft teacher that time around? It's shouldn't reflect on you that the two Biology teachers in your high school grade so differently. Student in one class would tend to have lower average GPAs while students in the other one would have higher average GPAs. This cannot be easily corrected due to new teachers arriving each year and teachers getting stuck teaching a class one time due to staff contraints. It would be a nightmare to track this nation-wide and couldn't be done correctly. I know that in college my GPA has gotten hit a couple of times from being stuck with professors that graded extremely harshly compared to others, who simply didn't teach the material they tested on, etc. In short, you can't accurately weigh the entire school because the data isn't fine-grained enough.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
I agree with the parent poster. I also have one other point to bring up: The SAT is adesigned as a measure of how well you will do in college. dyslexia certainly makes colleghe HARD, so dyslexia should make the SAT HARD. Why correct for the desired result?
--matt Cowger
Although we don't have SATs, there are other academic factors besides marks that determine if you get admitted to universities or not that could probably be used in the Unites States:
-Some universities run contests for mathematics, science and engineering. For example the University of Waterloo runs a math contest every year. You have to write it and PASS it if you want to get into their faculty of mathematics. A pass also helps you (but is not required) for science and engineering. I failed it (by 1 point) and still was offered admission into engineering.
There's a similar contest from the University of Toronto for engineering, and another one from Waterloo for chemistry.
The contest allows universities differentiate between students with aptitudes for specific subject areas without having to wonder what a 90% at XYZ high school is worth compared to some other one.
-The Drop factor: Most universities, although they claim that they're not doing this, have some sort of a factor, usually called the "drop factor" which tells how many percentage points your average drops from what you had in high school. High schools with better drop factors are treated more favourably when looking at high school averages.
-Information forms. When applying for admission for university, you usually have to fill out some sort of information form telling them about your interests, extracurricular activities and why you want to do what you want to do. I actually had to write a (max 6 page) semi-essay for one of them.
Don't get me wrong, high school averages are incredibly important in Canada. I'm just saying that there are other ways for prestigious schools to scan for really bright students without having to worry about SATs (which are, IMHO, so easy to pass that they are insulting.)
O'Toole's Commentary on Murphy's Law:
I (formerly) attended a posh Canadian private school. If you know the Canadian educational system, you'll know where I mean. We were told when we started applying to colleges that it wasn't so much of a question of if we'd get accpeted, it was more a question of how soon. We were told (quite accuratly) that any grade we received would be taken into account by the admissions people in light of the school we came from. It's not fair - I agree with the guy who pointed out the issues with a multiplier - but it happens everywhere. Face it. Saying it dosen't and it shouldn't is like beleiving that merit is the only way to get promoted at a company, or that life s fair.
Cue The Sun...
Good point, but if the tests are directly causing the students to come to college less prepared, and there are other measurement factors that can replace test results, why keep them? Admitedly, they are quasi-useful at this time, but if UofC takes the initiative to start a wave of test result non-reliance, other schools will follow. It only makes sense that some students would choose to apply only to schools that don't require SAT scores. This could eventually eliminate the SAT and, thankfully, reduce the power of the College Board in determining whether students land on Go in the college process. I just finished up the whole college application process and it completely disgusts me how much power the College Board has over my future. Looking over the past couple of years, they have run the PSAT, SAT, AP tests, and their Profile financial aid application. The fact that they have opened a for-profit branch specializing in selling test study materials is even more ridiculous. This president is on the right track - if standarized tests of academic "achievement" are eliminated it will lead to a better pool of students that won't have wasted months of their high school lives studying for a bogus test.
Also, I'm not particularly biased in this area. Having been named a National Merit Finalist and having scored well on the SAT, I imagine that the College Board has helped further my status quite a bit as far as acceptance/scholarship goes. I'd still prefer to fight it out with other applicants based solely on my academic achievement, community involvement, and character rather than my test scores. If all schools were to replace the test score criteria with a short phone interview, they would be far better off.
>Blanket regection of standarized tests is stupid, for the simple reason that they provide a useful predictor of the likely success of a student.
... though worse than most measures, including GPA, when these measure have been compared to success in college.
That's part of my point too. You can't accurately judge it, and if you don't, you punish exceptional student either at bad schools at good schools or at both.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
My Calculus, English, and Physics teachers are mong a select few in the state of Oregon developing a program called PASS. It is going to be used in the next 5 years for all of Oregon's universities, and will be more influencial than either GPA or SAT scores. One part of the PASS program is that you turn in samples, and in the end an actual portfolio from which you are marked as proficient, exceeds, and some other things I forget. There's a failing of course but they probably use some nice word for it. Anyway, Stanford looked at Oregon's PASS program and REALLY liked it. I wouldn't be surprised if California adopts something like this.
charging racism is easy. it doesn't require the accuser to change anything about themselves.
... and on and on.
there are legitimate reasons why the scores may be different.
let's face it: many minorities live in poorer families; minorities have a higher percentage of single-parent homes; a high percentage of minorites live in areas with more crime;
all of these things create problems for minorities to be able to focus as much on school and the school itself has to worry about a lot more than school.
none of these situations means that there is racism present, and to correct them in a way that would be more favorable to minority races would be racist.
Errr.. well, except for the fact that the best way to do well on standardized tests is to study the *test*, not the material. Check out the (fantastically successful, and effective) test prep courses. They don't teach the material. They teach how to take the test without knowing the material. They work *really* well, and the "High Standards" craze which is sweeping the nation is forcing teachers to adopt the same method -- it's either that, or they lose their funding or their job.
You end up with people admitted to university without understanding *at all* the material the test is supposed to assess. Woohoo!
They perform the "nez rouge" test, much different than the standard American ones.
*** Work like a king, command like a slave, create like a dog.
The argument is that they ask questions like : polo is to horse as soccer is to ______. It assumes that the reader knows what polo is, and that it requires a horse, etc... They are considered racist because a minority may have not heard of polo while a nonminority would have. AT least thats the argumeant.
--matt Cowger
'Leveity' is to 'weightt' as 'doolerousness' is to ??.
Until recently, any org that primarily provided education could get a .edu. However, the .edu domain is now restricted to American not-for-profits that provide a bachelor's degree.
All your hallucinogen are belong to us.
Will I retire or break 10K?
This doesn't matter. The test is designed to be a valid indicator of how well (as defined by grades) a person will do in college. If it asked about yak farming, because that was the best indicator of future performance, then that would be a valid question.
This all might seem silly, and no test can capture all of the complexities of an individual, but that is not the point. All of these personal, anecdotal exceptions to the relevancy of SATs don't matter.
You can disagree with the philosophy behind the following statements, but right now they reflect the situation in education as it exists: Currently colleges must do something to limit who can come in and who cannot. Colleges consider successful students to be those who go on to graduate from the college with high marks. The best indicator of how well somebody will do in college is a combination of their high school GPA and SAT or ACT score.
Now, as for the anecdotes, of course these statements don't apply exactly to you. This is where college admissions boards have an extremely difficult and possibly impossible job. They are trying to apply broad statistical principles to individuals, and many of them get it horribly wrong. I have seen lists of applicants with a (literal) cutoff line drawn at 1200 (or wherever). This is completely the wrong way to go about it. There is no valid reason that an 1190 with a 3.8 gpa is worse than a 1210 with a 3.7 gpa. The problem with the lines, is that somebody is always on the border. It is easy to see that a 900/2.1 might not be suitable for a particular institution, but what about the people between 1200 and 900?
I don't think the tests are worthless. Granted, they gauge a very limited area of knowledge and are not be all and end all evaluations of intelligence. I think eliminating the SATs entirely is a mistake. They should include other tests in other subjects as well as other types of testing rather than "multiple guess". This will allow universities and colleges to get rough assessments of a person quickly while giving students who may not perform very well in certain conditions the opportunity to demonstrate that they can excel in other situations.
Humorless sig goes here.
To me, by saying that standarized tests are biased against minorities, the NAACP is basically saying that how well I do on the SAT depends on the color of my skin. And then since I'm a minority, I must be stupid (so that the SAT hurts me compared to white people). And that is racism. It makes me mad that just because I'm a minority I am automatically deemed to need special treatment to compete against white people. I thought we wanted a color-blind society, not one that treats me different on account of my skin color.
As a Hispanic, I don't see how the color of my skin affected my SAT score. Now I can see how poverty and a broken home might affect an SAT score. But saying that just because I"m a minority the SAT is biased against me is racism.
SATs obviously aren't favored against minorities (or more precisely, people who are non-asian and non-white).
But they are definitely favored against students coming from poor families and bad schools. Unfortunately, that describes a large percentage of black and latino students and is the reason why some choose to interpret the SAT as racially biased.
I was reading through some of the comments and I was wondering how the Univerisies are able to discriminate on the basis of race?? I am from Australia where a request from a university or school to identify your race would never be allowed under anti-discrimination laws.
It would be pretty challenging to get As yet get a 12 on the ACT. Her ability to retain information over a long term must have been unusually weak.
I dropped out in the 10th grade - the day after my 16th birthday - with a GPA of about 2. I took the GED and passed, which I could have after 5th grade. I worked for five years, took the SAT, scored a 1480 (old scale) and went to college (as a 'hardship' student) and excelled (Phi Beta Kappa/Magna Cum Laude). I've since earned two MS degrees and am a systems architect and university instructor. If I had it to do all over again I would have dropped out after the 2nd grade.
I loved to learn and hated school. For me the SAT was a way to avoid some of the time-wasting and unlearning that is high-school.
There's an interesting discussion of the SAT on the show Think Tank on PBS. The transcript is available.
Many teachers give abudant "partial credit" for incorrect answers in math/science/etc. subjects... thus extending the opportunity to be arbitrary well beyond writing assignments.
I agree with the previous poster.
I knew a guy who was mentally damaged, but if he took two classes a semester, he got straight A's.
I knew a girl who got a 12 on the ACT. A 12!!! She was also getting straight A's. How? She literally spent all of her days in her room studying.
Both of these people are in college, and their GPAs blow mine out of the water. Quickness of the mind helps, but perserverance helps far more.
Later
ErikZ
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
But saying that just because I"m a minority the SAT is biased against me is racism.
Don't be a moron.
All the NAACP is saying is that the test is biased, and that this means that a minority test taker is likely to do worse on the test because of the bias not because minorities are less intelligient. So a minority who did just as well on the test is more intelligent.
You don't see how the color of your skin affected your SAT's. Well, it didn't, and the NAACP isn't saying it did. In this country, there is more to race than just skin color. It's about culture, biases inherant in the system, and assumptions those in power make about you. It's about social power. All of these things and more are the reasons why the NAACP made its statement. I can assure you that they do not think minorities are inherantly stupid.
A color blind society would be nice, and should be our long term goal. But is is not color blind right now, and by pretending it isn't we don't make any progress. We make progress by eliminating barriers to the social, political, and economic power that differentiates the races in this country.
Me, I'm a Puerto Rican, and you'd probably only know it if I told you (and I just did). I'm not very dark, I have a white name, and througought my life I have culturaly been a white person, in effect. I did well on the SATs, and certainly I wasn't affected by my race.
But I'm an outlier. Maybe you are, too. If the only impact your race has had on your life is your skin color, then you are. We aren't the ones that are being affected, and we aren't the ones the NAACP was talking about.
Maybe a little more though before going and accusing the NAACP of being racist towards you.
The enemies of Democracy are
Okay, I'll go through this slowly.
Yes, things were bad when Jim Crow-style laws existed. Then those laws were abolished and things were getting better.
Then affirmative action came along. The poster you were responding to was not disputing that things were worse during Jim Crow. He was disputing the idea that things were worse before affirmative action.
And since you hate "Jim Crow" (institutionalized racism encoded into law) so much, why don't you explain to us all what is so great about "affirmative action" (institutionalized racism encoded into law)? I'll be waiting.
Finally, I notice it is common to claim (as the original poster did) that "things got better because of affirmative action". The corollary to this claim is the belief that, without affirmative action, blacks would be worse off right now.
Anyone who is saying "blacks are better off now" is essentially saying that "blacks could not have succeeded or advanced without affirmative action".
What a condescending, arrogant, racist attitude. Blacks in this country were making great strides and joining the middle class in record numbers before "caring" white "liberals" came along to save their day with their Glorious Affirmative Action programs. Which just drives home the point that affirmative action is the modern-day version of Jim Crow.
As someone who had a shitty high school gpa but very high SAT/ACT scores I was pretty happy that college I went to looked at the scores. I did not have to play the good student game in high school or college and was allowed to enroll in the interesting classes I wanted to regardless. I know I got breaks due to it. Very efficient use of a few hours of my time.
The biggest problem with what you suggest is that you're aiming at a moving target. Each class going through a high school is different--in some areas, it's all dependent on how many kids were born that year. [More kids having an effect on how classes interact, etc.]
The thing that I've always chuckled about with the SAT is that ETS realizes its a moving target, and they normalize the test scores every once in a while [two years?]. My SAT score would probably be higher if I'd taken it when my brother did, back when the test studies weren't as complete.
Hell, I own a high [1510] SAT score, but it hasn't done me much good in college [roughly 3.0 GPA]. It's a measure of roughly how smart you are and how lucky you are on a particular day. I took the ACT five times, and only once did I see a significant [3-point] jump.
--
-- Geof F. Morris
I'm amazed at how little know it is that the Princton review SAT prep books PROVE that the SAT/GRE is completely defective and also PROVE that you can get a good score without even reading the questions. I could go into the theory here but wont, just go to the bookstore and read the first few pages of any one of their books. Its also not well known that the questions arent carefully crafted and designed with built in levels of difficulty but are actually written by a motely crew of students, secretaries, and other employees and their worthiness and difficulty are actually determined by how well they test in trials- any easy question everybody gets right, a difficult question is one that a high percentage of test takers that got more questions right got right. Actually knowing this process is how you can take the test without reading the questions. So basically, the tests are composed up of questions that are carefully crafted by professonals to judge aptitude (or acheivement) but are actually thrown in to a Question Galapagos Islands where they are selected for by statistics generated by how trial testers handle them. There's a lot more evil to the SAT, like how the company that makes them lies about their effectiveness, and the fact that they actually have a monopoly on all scholastic testing. I wish I could remember the names of the books on this subject, especially one written by an investigative reporter, but its been a while.
Sneakemail is to spam filters what an ounce of prevention is to a pound of cure.
Maybe this is a matter of you and I having different definitions of the words involved. But if I'm a college administrator, what is the use of a test which measures students' "intelligence" if it does not answer the question, How good a college student will this person be?, i.e. if it does not measure the student's aptitude?
If you are right that the SAT does a better job at measuring aptitude than intelligence (and, I think you are), then it seems to me that the SAT is perfectly appropriate for colleges to use when assessing potential students.
Actually it is quite high. I don't have the statistics handy, but the SAT is basically an intelligence test.
The SAT is not even a particularly good predictor of good grades in college
This may be the case, but there is nothing better.
good grades in college is a pretty bad predictor of success in life
Success in life is a bit harder to define than good grades in college, but if "success" is measured as salary and responsibility, then there is not much better than grades in college to predict future success.
(re: all of this good and better business, just because something is the best, doesn't mean it is good, there is simply nothing that is closer to perfection. i.e. all operating systems suck, some just suck less than others.)
If we had a good test for intelligence
There are good tests for intelligence, people just don't like what they measure. Intelligence is one of the most reliable psychological characteristics that can be measured about a person. The correlation between a test given to an individual at one time point, and at a later time point is about 0.80, which is very high for psychological characteristics.
This is getting back to the point of the original post, it isn't that intelligence tests are bad, it is that people don't like what they say, which is that not all people are the same, some are smarter, some are much smarter, and there isn't much that anybody can do about it.
Do you see comprehension and intelligence (not common sense) as arbitrary? I hope not. It's a decision that only the truely dedicated will make. As a college student in the California University system, I don't want my classes to be held to a slower pace due to the few who are just attending college because mommy and daddy say so. Don't give me the bull about the underprivilaged not getting a chance either. In our system anyone can make their way into the best colleges, they just need the drive to do it. (Hell, that was me 10 years ago.)
my school only has one req. for those classes... a 2.0 gpa. if you can't hold a 2.0 - whether in accelerated, mainstream, or ld - classes...don't bother with the sat at all.
They didn't make it easier, but simply recentered the scores, thereby making it far easier for people to get scores at the top.
These days, it is now possible to get an 800 in math or verbal and still have mistakes. Discrimination (in the sense of selection,
not racial discrimination) at the top level of intellect became far more difficult, though many would argue that it is not
needed at the highest levels of "intelligence" or whatever the SATs measure.
Ad hominem. Heck, I'm an anti-testing radical produced by a system in which I tested very well. I was 1550 on the combined SAT (pre-inflation) and scored perfect on the GRE (I can't remember if they went to 800 or 900 any more--it was 15 years ago). I even got a 600 on the Spanish ACT, though I can't read a Spanish newspaper much less carry on a conversation.
What I learned from doing very well on tests was that they didn't test anything that meant anything. I never studied or prepped. I'm just a naturally good test taker. It's a skill. But not a very useful one. You're right in that it certainly does correlate with college academic success; of course, I did better in courses which based the grades on tests than I did in courses which required essays or lab work.
The whole school system should be setup to push each student to the maximum of their potential, regardless of how high or low it is. Sucks if my kid isn't as smart as that other one, but don't stop teaching calculus in high school, just because some of the kids won't do well in it.
In the grand days of computing, before domain names cost money, and InterNIC become a fuckedcompany named NSI, edu addresses were available to any institution that provided education. (duh!)
Now, it is restricted to American institutions that provide education on a four-year degree basis.
Ever lovable and always scrappy,
Ever lovable and always scrappy,
kawaii
What varies even more from school to school than the GPA?
Class Ranks. While the SAT's are certainly a flawed system, they're also constant in what they test. The value of GPA's, as Timothy noted, varies from school to school. A GPA, however, is at least a general indicator of average grades (hence the name).
A class rank, on the other hand, merely shows where a student is in relation to the rest of his or her graduating class. I'm in a "gifted" high school. My GPA is 93.3 out of 100. And my class rank is 73 out of 120. In a case like mine (which is not really that uncommon), the class rank is more damaging to the student than helpful.
Of course, maybe I'm just being bitter here.
it sure wasnt an engineer. the math is pathetic at best. the gre only test up to geometry. when i started studying for it i was dumbfounded. like most of my classmates, i hadn't had geometry since 9th or 10th grade. i was really disappointed that they didnt have any differential equations or at least integral calculus.
now the verbal was also pretty bad. they had words in the english language i had never even seen before. as a grad student i met people from china who scored almost perfect on the verbal but couldn't speak or write an english sentence to save their lives. essentially they did the equilivent of memorizing a dictionay.
the analytical was the best part. it actually tested your ability to think and solve problems.
so who is the gre for? engilsh/liberal arts majors.
they had a subject exam for engineering. i took it the last semester it was offered. it was really too broad. it covered basic math (for an engineer), process control, thermodynamics, chemistry, circuits, physics, statics, mechanics and materials. it had something for almost every engineering field (except civil and industrial). there was really no way to prepare for this and it sucked a big one. it was so pathetic that the one offered last december is supposed to be the last enginering subject exam the gre folks are going to give. i must say that future engineers are lucky for that.
use LaTeX? want an online reference manager that
-- john
My university, ranked #1 in America by US News two years ago, has a standing policy of testing entering freshmen because professors have found that many students can't write proper English.
This is from a school whose median SAT score is 1550 (I'm not joking).
Think about that.
Last I checked the specific requirements of a .edu were that it could only be approved for a higher education institution (2-4 colleges, technical schools, etc.) I'd never heard of a high school getting a .edu? how might I go about getting one for my high school? we currently use conradweiser.org/.net but .edu would be awesome.
Thanks for any help.
--- May this post be indexed by spiders, and archived for all to see as my internet epitaph.
May this post be indexed by spiders, and archived for all to see as my Internet epitaph.
While it may not be a very good test overall, I believe that it is a crucial and necessary element in the college admissions process because it is the ONLY way that colleges can compare students from different backgrounds and schools. I know many people from other schools, and the grading systems can vary greatly. I personally know the salutatorian of my local(zoned) high school from two years ago. He had a 97(out of a 100) or so average, and something like a 1200 on the SAT. A student from Stuy with a 97 avg most likely has above a 1550 on the SAT. How else can you possibly compare them?
Of course, the SAT is only one out of many elements that the admissions officers consider and I happen to think that the current admissions process is relatively fair.
Don't sell yourself short. You write and reason more cogently than a good share of the morons I've seen in American colleges - even some of the best schools.
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
Huh? Of course that has an answer -- an admissions officer at any top school can look at a transcript from Stuvesant, Exeter, Punahou, Beverly Hills High and size the student up instantly. Although the 'multiple regression model' they're using is purely inside their heads.
But what about a student from Gerald Ford High in Haystack, South Dakota? By what standard is that transcript supposed to be judged? To my mind, the students who benefit the most by standardized tests are the ones from poor or rural schools.
Anyway, as a product of a UC, I think I can state confidently that what they're trying to do is sneak racial preferences back into the system by removing absolute criteria that might embarass them.
According to my Princeton Review book, they changed it again to just SAT. It no longer means either of the above.
You're telling me that there are public schools prepping kids for the SAT's four years before they'd take the test?!? Are you kidding me?
My school didn't prepare us for SATs at anytime; I got the impression that it was entirely our business to prepare for it.
--
I can only speculate as to the politics of this, but keep in mind that President W. introduced lots of standardized tests in primary and secondary education in Texas. The Republicans like to say that this has improved the quality of education there significantly. Democrats see the issue another way of course, and Dr. Atkinson seems to be among those.
While Atkinson isn't referring to these issues specifically, I just wonder as to the effect politics has here.
There are good tests for intelligence, people just don't like what they measure. Intelligence is one of the most reliable psychological characteristics that can be measured about a person. The correlation between a test given to an individual at one time point, and at a later time point is about 0.80, which is very high for psychological characteristics.
Huh? Correlation over time is totally beside the point. I think that typical intelligence tests merely test the ability to solve intellectual puzzles under controlled conditions. That's not intelligence. It's a small part of intelligence, granted, but it's not intelligence itself. Correlation over time proves nothing.
Do we really want to determine people's options largely based on whether they didn't give a damn when they were 15 years old?
Good point. When I was 15 I thought high school was pointless. I still think that.
College on the other hand, was great; you'd actually learn real subjects, not watered-down, sanitized propaganda.
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I agree... My parents made me sign up for Kaplan when I was applying for college, and though we're not upper crust, we could afford it and my dad didn't want to take chances - especially since as an international student (I'm Canadian), my SAT scores were all that American schools could really judge. I don't think they helped one bit, in fact I did 20 points better on the diagnostic test I took (a real SAT from 1994) than the real thing, *after* having taken the class.
;).
BUT, my sister took Kaplan, and raised her score almost 300 points over her diagnostic score - she took Kaplan before me, and *that's* why my parents made me take it
I realize that both of us definitely gained an advantage from being able to afford the test, but I don't think that the tests are even the first place to start looking if you're gonna be bringing up economic advantages of education - I mean consider that even if many lower income bracket folks *could* afford to have their kids take Kaplan and other prep courses, how many of them even know about such opportunities? There are countless studies on such subjects, e.g. in low income areas with overcrowded underfunded school districts, it's not worth the school's resources to offer AP classes since most people won't take em, but it's again this type of vicious cycle that the parent poster has pointed out.
You need a real magnet school! Try Montgomery Blair. Blair competes with the likes of Stuyvesant in things like the Intel Science Talent Search, (we both had two finalists), as well as a student whose unofficial score was much higher on the American High School Math Exam than their top scoring student. Blair has a class of 100. Stuyvesant and other magnet schools have classes of 1000 or more.
Sheepdot: Open Source good, Closed Source baaaaaaad!
As is 1500+..
I Haven't Lost My Mind -- It's Backed Up On Disk Somewhere
My rantings, only longer and with better spelling..
I went to Stuy, and I know kids from Thomas Jefferson, Bronx Sci, Brooklyn Tech, and then I graduated HS from U of C Lab School in Chicago where I met kids from other (in)famous magnet schools like Whitney Young, and Lincoln Park. It's not for nothing that kids went there, on average kids from those schools are brighter than the average doornob. And actually, its the non-robots that always acted like they owned the world, the soulless math/sci robots stared at their feet to much to communicate any ego they might have developed.
Anyway, the whole idea of grade inflation at schools like that is to get other colleges to recognize the fact they they had to be relatively intelligent to take classes at those schools, without having to understand the cache of the school itself. So the whole argument goes out the window if colleges know about the HS's and start looking at 3.9's from Stuy as being better than 3.9's from Crenshaw. Unless Crenshaw is inflating... So now things get more complicated. Stuy sucks cuz as I'm surprised more Stuy ex-pats havne't pointed out, its on a 100.00 (and those decimal places do matter to far too many Stuyvies) scale, so 3.9's aren't possible. A better system is one like Whitney Young in Chicago, a 4.0 system that adds 1 point to the system for honors classes and 2 points for AP classes. That way any of the 'giftedness' is accounted for directly in the grading system.
The entire system needs an overhaul, but then again when hasn't a governmental institution needed an overhaul? I guess that's why we have a fascist for a president now, those private school waivers are looking mighty tempting...
-rt
Why should public universities even have admissions standards at all? (hear me out)
They were meant to provide educational opportunities to those people who wanted an education, but weren't the scions of some inbred Bostonian merchant family. Does allowing someone who may not have the ability really hurt the school that much?
So they can't handle it, they get bad grades, they drop out. It's not like incompetence is contagious, and those who can handle it will do just fine.
--
I was a "bad kid" my first two years of high school. For various reasons, I got very poor grades - I was a classic underachiever.
In my junior year, my attitude changed dramatically, but my GPA was still a piece of crap. I got straight A's the last two terms of that year. My high school suffered from tremendous grade inflation, so I ranked very far down in both GPA and class rank even after getting my act together - something like 20% of the kids had 3.9 GPAs or higher.
Fortunately, I blew the lids off the standardized tests. I don't think I would have been able to go a respectable college if I didn't have a standardized test score to save my ass. From there I was able to throw myself into a CS curriculum and transfer up in the world after two semesters.
Do we really want to determine people's options largely based on whether they didn't give a damn when they were 15 years old?
I have some first-hand knowledge on this. I have a role in admissions at a UC and a role in assessing whether these admissions criteria work or not.
There are two problems with SATs:
1) SAT scores correlate very strongly with ethnicity and with income. Income matters because of the presence of Kaplan, etc. which offers intensive test preparation for $400-$600. Not every parent can afford this for their child, and as a result, lower income students are at a disadvantage. Consider that a 20% improvement on SAT over 6 months in not uncommon. Now tell me that that student is 20% more likely to succeed as a result... uh huh.
Race matters because there have been some very well executed studies which show that, for example, the perception that african americans do more poorly in standardized tests actually results in african americans doing more poorly. The mere presence of that knowledge appears to cause students to second-guess their abilities, resulting in lower scores. In controlled situations, every ethnic group could be caused to underperform in this manner. Caucasian students told that asians did better on a test would essentially meet the expectations laid before them.
2) It's *absurd* that we place equal value on the results of a 3 hour exam relative to results built over 4 years of classroom study. Aptitude helps in success at college, but far and away responsibility, perseverence, diligence, and simple interest have more to do with success.
I know for a fact that verbal SAT correlates very poorly to retention in science majors and that math SAT correlates slightly, but hardly enough to justify the level of attention given to it. High-school GPA and SAT-II (Achivement Tests) correlate much more strongly.
Now, as to the issue of quality of GPA scores...
Not every 4.0 is created equal. UC *unweights* high-school GPAs to some degree - reducing the amount of extra credit given to honors courses. Not every high school offers these courses.
What people need to understand about the UCs is that their charter is very different from many universities. UC is responsible for servicing the top 12.5% of high school graduates in California. Cal State serves the top 25%. Now, how we measure who is in the top 12.5% is a matter of debate and changes over time. Right now, the trend is moving toward admitting the top 12.5% of each high-school in the state regardless of relative quality. The thinking here (which I agree with) is that students shouldn't be penalized for where they live. I live in a city with extremely well regarded high schools. Students here have a wide assortment of honors courses and go to college in amazingly high rates. Just one city away students will never see a calculus course, a latin course, physics, or any one of a few dozen honors courses offered in my city - this is just 5 miles away!
Now, there is no question that the students in my city will start in more advanced courses, but a top student in the next city over is NO LESS LIKELY TO GRADUATE COLLEGE AT THE SAME LEVEL AS ONE IN MY CITY. That is, students there will be just as competent as students here after college, but they may need a few extra courses to catch up (probably no more than 4)
So, in my experience, I've found that students that are motivated and work hard do well. That's pretty much it. The question is how do you assess that? 4 years of high-school coursework seems as good a measure as I can think of...
I work in the Admissions office for a small private college. We have an option for anyone who can't/doesn't want to submit test scores, or who has problems testing - submit a personal portfolio of what you can do, and what you've accomplished in your life. It doesn't reduce your chances of getting in; if anything, it may raise them, because the committee has to actually look at an evaluate those applications on their merits. It may take longer to get an answer, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. (Our application is also shorter than some, and doesn't have to be typed. ;>)
Les McBride
What is this "hardship" status you were able to qualify for? I'd love to go to a university someday (evem soon perhaps) - I share your feelings about high school but would like to teach (at a uni) someday.
There are 11 types of people in the world: those who understand unary, and those who don't.
Right.. How many middle-class white kids do you know that play polo? I think the only exposure most Americans get to polo is when it's used as a backdrop in a movie to show how obscenely rich the characters are.
Currently, I attend a Liberal Arts Magnet public school in Georgia. Ever since 9th grade english, we have been nailed with SAT prep analogies, vocab, all that jazz. I was encouraged to take Latin for the root words (not to mention in "Foundations," a mandatory class for freshman, covered Latin roots). Math classes drill on probable SAT problems. Heck, we even have Math and Verbal SAT prep CLASSES. By the time I graduate at the end of this year, I will have taken 5 AP courses (2 English, 2 history, 1 math).
What's the point of all this? To impress the hell out of colleges. Before I hit high school, I was in a rural area school system that, for lack of a better term, F-ing sucked. There were kids there that were incredibly bright, but trapped in a educational system that just wanted to pass their kids. Because I was drilled constantly in my new high school, I scored a 1420 on my SATs (not even in the top 25 of my school). From an old friend, I heard that the highest SAT score of my old school was 1250.
People, that kid with the 1250 was far above me in mental aptitude. I remember him as being quicker than myself in class. Due to my new elitist school, I was able to beat around the system a little better.
Maybe the SATs aren't biased, but there's something screwed up when kids with the same intelligence as others in another school system can be hindered by poor teachers. Maybe they should take this into consideration, as well.
The SAT was designed a long time ago to be a test that leveled the playing field, where rich didn't have an edge over the poor students. Why dump it? I took my school's after school test prep $25 US.
When this has happened at other places, you could still optionally send in your SAT scores. The result was that only people with good SAT scores sent them in. The result is that the Q1, median, Q3, and average SAT scores all appear higher, which results in the school having a higher ranking in publications like US News. I bet this policy will be tested at a low-performing California school long before it is tested at, say, Berkley. As someone who took the SAT's just last year, I have to say that the talk about the numbers not meaning anything isn't so true. I correctly predicted all but one of my friends' scores (within about 50 pts.) The exception, btw, was one of those people who greets people with "wazzup biatch". His score: 1590.
So... the claims that the test is 'racist' are really just people pissed that it actually works?
It's not as easy as you think. College admissions officers literally have to figure out whether or not they want some kid on campus or not, without ever meeting the kid to begin with. All they have to work with are a bunch of numbers, essays, recommendations and stats on the student with which they must judge the student as a PERSON, not just a GPA/SAT-production machine. Long applications are one way of filtering out the students who don't have the patience to sit down and do an application. You can be sure as hell that they don't want a perfectly uniform student body- that would be dull. That's the argument for diversity, not only with race, but with interests, academic and otherwise, as well.
I'm bored, lets go break something.
I don't know if this is still the case, but when I went to stuyvesant we got grades from 0-100 (people knew everyone else's GPA to two decimal points, but that's another story). Anyway, the UC schools would calculate your equivalent GPA by converting grades above 90 to a 4.0. Since probably more than half the students had averages above 90, it was really easy to get into the UC schools provided you had good SATs and achievement scores.
i could not agree more, but for a different reason. all the ap classes i am taking this year (5) are "taught to the test." the teachers don't even try to hide the fact, the first day of class the ap US history teacher told us all we would learn only what will be on the ap exam.
and i hope to god that colleges do not read too much into my gpa or class rank, i have a 3.75 and i am ranked 40/300 in my class. at my highschool ap chem has the same weight as "cooking and you" (a actuall class).
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so i says to mable, i says
Stanley Kaplan has a pretty good reputation for increasing SAT results. It is not free. Is it better than the prep course offered at your school? I don't know. But it does have a curriculum and teachers aimed straight at the SAT.
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so i says to mable, i says
kinda hard for me to agree with you being that i am a white male and all. it's difficult for me to take a broad view of affirmative action considering how it directly affects me.
use LaTeX? want an online reference manager that
-- john
Don't get me wrong -- narrative evaluations are valuable, but my experience with them as a student at UCSC was poor. Either they were glowing, or they were "Test A was excellent. Final was good. Overall was good to excellent.", just as you say. The move to have letter grades automatically in all classes (in addition) is an acknowledgement (in my mind), that no matter how much we'd like to all just be friendly, holistic, and generous in our appraisals, in a world with limited academic resources, we need a platform to compare students from diverse backgrounds. This, of course, is another advantage of the SAT, not mentioned in the article -- it is standard to all students. An "A" is not always an "A", as it were.
Putting your SAT score on your resume sounds to me like a really good way to get laughed at.
Oh gid, QWhat cxan I say about BCs testing system. Those provincal exams. WEll first of all they completely f--- up your year because in almost every class, the teachers like ok I would teach this but the provincal doesn't require it, so out it goes. Plus they are completely changing the math course next year for the grade 12s, and because most schools teach towards the 12 provincal from grade 9. They are gonna be so pooched. This is just what I think
Theres one problem with reflecting your reality, sometimes your reality starts to reflect you.
The SAT seems to be the new scapegoat for a lot education problems now a days. It is certainly not a perfect test for predicting a person's undergraduate performance, but is not worthless either. Whether there's a meaningful difference between a score of 1200 and 1000 is debatable, but a person scoring 700 will almost certainly have a harder time in college than someone scoring 1300. So it is measuring *something*, and this something can be a useful predictor of how difficult university-level studies will be for someone. Like many things in life, predicting someone's success in college (as measured thru grades and graduation rates) is difficult and depends on many factors. SAT scores and GPAs are the easiest to measure and compare, and in fact do a decent job of predicting undergraduate performance during the first year (after this, other factors come in to play such as social relationships, peer pressure, family circumstances, etc. that cannot easily be predicted during the admissions process). In truth many other factors such as personal drive, time management skills, the ability to learn new material quickly, as well as cultural expectations can be just as important in determining how well a student will do in college. But, alas, these are not really measurable. Essays and extracurricular activities may indicate some of these qualities, but that's about all they can reliably do. Dropping the SAT without replacing it with some other kind of objective test, is in my opinion a mistake. Even if it's 'arbitrary' test (as some critics claim), it's a nationwide 'arbitrary' test that allows students' scores from different high schools (and decades!) to be compared. This is an advantage to students from rural or non-standard high schools as it gives them a chance to compete head-to-head with students from well-know prep schools. Another reason for not dropping the SAT, is that without an independently administered objective test, it's just too easily to fool yourself as to where your skill levels really are. You may think you're the greatest wrestler or trumpet player in the entire country. Your parents and coach may even agree, but until you play a match or a recital, that's no way to really know. Likewise in academics, if every high school student is a B+ or better student every year, there's no way to know how schools are doing and which ones are in trouble. In general problems that can't be measured, can't be fixed and you certainly won't know it when you have.
In 1997, when I took the SAT, you could miss 2 questions on the verbal (not just skip, but actually answer incorrectly) and still get an 800. However missing a question on the math section got you a 790.
I read applications for my university, and basically, I don't know how the systems has worked this long to begin with.
You'd be amazed how little an idea of a student's abilities (to say nothing of personality!) you actually get from reading his or her application. It's entirely a crapshoot, as far as I'm concerned. I'd say with the state of things as they are, we might not want to eliminate pieces of information that can be used to further evaluate prospective students.
Of course the SAT is subjective, doesn't measure a student's self-worth (or even intelligence, for that matter), and it's far from perfect. But then again, so are grades. In high school, my GPA was barely above a 3 (with 1400+ SATs), but in college (taking "real" classes in a demanding double-degree program) I ended up with a 3.9 something. I got rejected (and rightfully so, for the most part) from a lot of top schools, though I think my performance indicates I could have done as well had those schools let me in. (The school I ended up going was a fine school, just not top 10.)
My point boils down to, there's no way to accurately judge a student based on what's a very limited dataset. Sure, there are some fairly reliable indicators but in the end, there's really nothing that can definitively prove how a given student will perform at college. If we're going to eliminate SAT's, there's a whole host of criteria we also might as well get rid of. (And if you want to talk about sheer uselessness, don't get me started on letters of recommendation. Christ.)
-tf
Hi, I'm a pretentious cock who will make some gay comment about ignoring AC posts here.
Of course, I knew people who put the cart before the horse and arduously prepared for the SAT's.
I remember people like that. Somehow I doubt that all that memorization helped them. If you don't think rationally to start with, analogies will seem an arbitrary puzzle disconnected from daily life.
There's a paradox here, somehow related to the fact that people who got into programming for the money aren't making the best money.
Anyway, I'm sad to see the SAT losing ground, as it's one of the few standard objective measures in education. But clearly the rulers of the education establishment want 'diversity' rather than academic quality.
It doesn't matter if the school has a good rep or a bad one, or whatever...the tests are all the same for the finals.
What are you afraid of, whitey? Being a white male myself, I am in favor of affirmative action. Why, you might ask. Look around you. Do you really want there to be a great socioeconomic divide, with race being the dividing line? Because that's what we've got right now. And that can only breed discontent.
Use the opportunities that you've been given, which may or may not include more and healthier food, better schools, safer streets, and an absolute lack of people in high places who distrust you due only to the color of your skin. Since you don't have these obstacles to overcome, you should on average do better, in fact much better, than the aggregate of people whose lives have been disadvantaged. If you haven't, then your insecurity only masks your laziness.
political_news.c: warning: comparison is always true due to limited range of data type
There's no way to compare high school to high school. That would require individual evaluation of every teacher in the country, and it's simply not happening. The SATs are the best way to get an idea of a student's ability to do easy math and english. That's why they're used. The best way to reform this would be to simply change the type of questions on the SATs each year.
Why Stuy? Yknow what? I'll be honest with you. It DOESN'T mean anything. It's what you make of it. Same goes for every school. Personally, I think what makes stuy special is the fact that the students want to be there, and the fact we commute to the school each day. It takes me 1.75 hours to get to school, but I know when I get there that I won't be made fun of for being a nerd. Yes, you can inflate your grade and take comparatively easy APs like chemistry. In fact you can buy into all of that crap, and you can do that in every school. Grade inflation is a problem all across the nation, not just at stuy, and if you think stuy's classes are pathetic, perhaps you haven't known people who've gone to other NYC schools. One english class? Did you really go to stuy? You can't graduate out of here without having taken 8 terms of english. Where in the hell is Grinnel College?
I'm bored, lets go break something.
The decision can be quantified, but the factors that are weighed (or that SHOULD be weight, anyway) are qualitative (i.e. character, diligence, motivation, etc).
I got rejected at 80% of the colleges I applied to and I had a fifteen something on the SAT. I was indignant and got what I deserved. A good school knows how much leveity to give to the SAT's.
"Could this be a way for admission people to work for diversity?"
The answer is yes.
I'm not so sure. Looks like a way for the UC administrations to evade an objective standard. This increases their own discression and power, to the detriment of out-group students.
As I understand it, a big problem with the current admission practice is that some of the schools (UC Berkley for example) give extra points for "advanced placement" high-school class grades. Students who take them and do well can easily get a much "better than perfect" high-school grade point average. This is cranked into the "objective" formula.
These classes are available in the highschools of rich neighborhoods, but not poorer ones. And even when they ARE available, each school's AP classes are given an individual weighting factor. AP points from "good" schools count more than those from "mediocre" scools. "Bad" schools needn't bother.
The result is that a student from a ghetto school can ace every class, including any AP they might have available, blow the top off the SAT, and STILL be below the "objective" cut-point for admission to California's premier colleges. They go to a lower-tier college if they get in at all.
(Then hi-tek execs can hire only grads from top-tier schools - UCB, MIT, etc. - for the plum positions. This gives them a licence to perpetuate the state-sanctioned discrimination.)
This isn't just academic (so to speak). Exactly this situation happened to the daughter of one of my neighbors.
The solution is to eliminate the AP classes from the admission process. This eliminates the crypto-racisim and crypto-classism, and lets students in the door on an equal basis. Once they're in, they get to sink or swim on their merits.
But that doesn't mean eliminating them from college entirely. An EXCELENT use for an AP class from a qualified school program would be as an equivalant of a prerequisite from the 100 or 200 series of classes. Those who passed AP classes could get to the meat of their higher education a bit earlier.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Minorities historically get lower scores on these tests than whites.
Using the perverse logic of modern victimology, the only conclusion certain folks can reach based on this is that the tests are racist. QED.
One of the biggest bugs up my Psych professors ass is the major assumption that tests administered by the state and other educational institutions are the be-all end-all of intelligence tests, and when someone fails no one bothers to check and see if maybe the test is only testing the test takers ability to take a test, ie many confounds can be involved.
After I have received the wisdom of good teaching, I will untiringly teach all people. - The Teachings of Buddha
His point was that British Columbia has standard provincial exams. The course content is laid out by the Ministry of Education and all students write the same centrally-marked exam.
"Could this be a way for admission people to work for diversity?"
The answer is yes. A couple of years ago, Californian voters passed a proposition (Prop. 209), that, among other things, essentially forbade affirmitive action in Univ. of California entrace requirements.
The year immediately after Prop. 209 was implemented, acceptance rates for blacks and latinos across the system plummeted. As a specific example, I recall that Berkeley law school admitted one black person that year while the year before, something like 20 were admitted.
Since then, the UC regents have sought out ways to increase the acceptance rates for blacks and latinos. Since the UC system uses SAT scores as a primary factor in determining admission and since blacks and latinos have always scored lower on average on it than other groups, I'm not surprised that the regents are looking into getting rid of (or at least demphasizing) the SATs.
As an aside, the UC system uses the following formula as a factor in determining admission:
1000 * GPA + SAT I + SAT II(a) + SAT II(b) + SAT II(c) = x out of 8000
GPA is unweighted and the three SAT IIs required are Math, Writing, and a science.
The number out of 8000 is the index score. If get a high number, you are almost guaranteed admission.
There's an extraordinarily simple solution to this - standardized exams. No, not the SAT/ACT kind, but honest-to-goodness exams for each subject of importance. Yes, just like your school's final exams, except everyone across the province is taking the same one. It's really not complicated, though I'm not sure how many Canadian provinces are doing it any more.
Peter
You know what I hate? Wait, what do you like? I hate that!
When I saw this, I SWORE it was going to be a Jon Katz article.
The question then is, will colleges start reimplementing their own admissions exams as they start dropping the SAT/ACTs? **Might** help get rid of some of the script kiddies in the world, you know.
We don't need no Net Explorer We don't need no Thought control
In my psychology class I learned about a fascinating experiment. Black and white students of roughly equal accedemic background were given standardized tests. One group of students were told that the test was just for fun and didn't matter, the black students scored equal to the white students. Another group of students was told that this test would determine their chance for success in college. In that group, the black student's scores were significantly lower while the white students scores were unaffected.
I tried to find a reference, but I couldn't find it in my text book.
> The whole school system should be setup to push each student to the maximum of their potential, regardless of how high or low it is.
Things used to be that way, but times have changed. For example, check out some questions from the 1901, 1926, and 1999 exams.
I find this quite interesting, but it makes sense with everything else I have read about the progression of the education system - more and more schools are teaching children not to think critically, examine facts, compute, and reason, but just give them "job skills" and train them to pass the standardized tests.
Here in British Columbia, Canada, the entrance requirements for universities are indexed against scores on the final exams for various required courses (english, science, social studies, mathematics, etc) in grades 11 and 12. Therefore, in order to qualify for university admission, one has to master the subjects being studied, not "lists of analogies"...
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My experience with tests was similar; I've always been a strong test-taker, because I infer things automatically from the test itself. My math education in high school was extremely poor. I knew advanced algebra in 6th grade, but learned very little beyond that. I had to infer what f(x) was while taking the SAT (I went back and changed an answer ;)). But what you may have experienced was simply that the SAT does not necessarily solely test knowledge; it tests aptitude, because it is tuned to find for college success. College success is NOT based, necessarily, on a strong knowledge of the material. As it turns out, the SAT, college success, and "intelligence", at least as measured by tests like the Stanford-Binet, all correlate very strongly, whereas grades correlate much more weakly.
I've seen many people, Gould included, who do very well in live, but take tests poorly -- although in his case, he specifically mentions being very apprehensive, etc. However, I have yet to see, "Well, I got a 1550 on the SAT, but I can't seem to get past Assistant Manager at Jack in the Box."
Part of the problem is that, while there is a subset of people that standardized testing under-measures, school administrators tend to be far less accurate still, so for the allocation of scarce educational resources, we should rely on the most accurate measurement first, until we can develop a better measurement.
In a letter Dr. Atkinson sent to the University of California's faculty senate today and in a speech he will give here on Sunday to the American Council on Education, an advance copy of which the
school released tonight, Dr. Atkinson criticized the reliance on SAT's to rank students for admission to schools, saying that they are "not compatible with the American view on how merit should be defined and opportunities distributed."
How will they define merit? Will this "holistic" approach consider test scores and gpa's from highschool take differences between schools into account? By no account will that remove bias. Both the schools that grade students and the ways those grades would be weighted in university admissions processes will be biased. That could lead to the wholesale exclusion of students from certain regions from the best schools, due to a lack of any universal ranking factor that disregards the quality of their highschool educational systems.
Furthermore, stuff like advanced placement tests are not a good solution. It takes money to train teachers to teach administer the yearly AP classes.
Unless the poorest schools, in the poorest regions, get federal money to introduce a better universal standard of measuring highschoolers, lets not replace the one we've got.
Goat sex free since 2001
Just keep in mind that UCSC joined UC Riverside in being the two UCs that accepted 100% of UC qualified students. That doesn't say much about UCSC's requirements for entry.
Could this be a way for admissions people to work for diversity?
Someone just sued Michigan's law school because she was turned down, while a minority student with worse test scores was accepted. I imagine that if you didn't have test scores, the law suits would be a lot harder to win.
I'm a little older than most people here, and I like affirimative action. Things are a lot better than they used to be, and I think affirmative action helped us get there. I'm not trying to bash the people who want to throw out testing. I'm just trying to speculate about motives.
A qualatative solution would take into account the person's past achievements like community involvement, extracurricular activities, desire to enrich the lives of others, and tasks that they have accomplished.
This would not work in all cases because often, people are disadvantaged and do not have the opportunity to show off their abilities in this manner. The selection process would be biased againt these people.
A quantative solution involves associating a person with a number correlated to academic performance.
But then again, some people may be very smart and just slack off in school, knowing that their brains are still functioning. We all know that this is very common, and again, the selection process would be biased againt these people.
You see, since everyone's different, there is no optimum solution, with or without standardized testing. There's no way to summarize a person.
I would suggest, as an alternative, to come up with an evaluation method that combines the qualatative and the quantative...something that would find the most noteworthy aspects of each individual, not favouring numerical marks or letters of recommendation. This idea may not be completely perfectly objective, but it's the best idea that I can come up with.
O'Toole's Commentary on Murphy's Law:
I did above average on my SAT's but just barely. I was a bit upset because I really didn't think that was a good measure of my abilities. My GRE scores after college were higher, in fact, my verbal improved nearly 50%?! There must be better ways of assessing students than a multiple choice exam. It is too easy to use them as the end all. I've met people with perfect scores that are completely, IMO, useless to society and I've met driven people with above average but not perfect scores who excel and regularly make this world a better place.
-Moondog
Stuy is 65-100, everything below a 65 is a special code (if I remember from the back of my last report card correctly). It was a mroe general statement about grades & stuy.
--dave
How much you study as a high school student while living at home, has very little with how hard you will work in college when on your own. What colleges really need is a responsibility test. I watched numerous brilliant students fail to get degrees because they had never had to work at anything. Colleges should look for students who have managed to keep a decent GPA while working 20 hours a week throughout high school. That is what will be tested when they go to college.
Alright, let me expand the statment: "smart people are more likely to wind up in high paying jobs, have disposable income, understand the benefits of savings and investment, save, invest, and therefore become rich." That having been said, you're right; both common sense and personal experience tell me that luck is a far greater factor; being in the right place at the right time does count for alot. I'll also point out that most tests, as well as schools, don't test for, or care about, intelligence; quite the opposite. Real native intelligence can be quite the disadvantage in your average school. And all IQ measures is literacy and spatial awareness.
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Instead, I think that college admissions people should heavily consider transcripts. More than just GPA, the amount and grades in advanced classes and college classes (whether AP or taken through local college) can give the most accurate representation of a student's ability.
This wouldn't be much better, in some cases. I went to a rural high school. Forunately, my senior year, they offered 2 AP classes for the first time, but there wasn't a college close enough to take classes at. (Believe me, I would have if I could!)
les
Atkinson contents that the SAT only tests one's test taking ability and thus has little correlation with a candidate's actual scholastic ability. This idea is incorrect on several points.
While the SAT does not cover history, literature, and other areas of scholastic knowledge, it does cover critical thinking and problem solving ability. SAT preparation classes focus on efficient ways of analyzing and solving problems, which is a useful skill throughout college and one's career.
Furthermore, basing a candidate's scholastic fitness heavily on his or her ability to memorize remote events and facts and write essays unfairly disqualifies many bright students who are strong in mathematics but disadvantaged in English and memorization skills. Many minorities, as evidenced by Asians and Middle Easterners, tend toward this category.
There is little doubt that the ability to communicate is very important. However, communication skills are attainable later in life than problem solving skills. To be sure, the lack of problem solving ability is a larger limiting factor in one's career than one's ability to communicate as evidenced by the average salary of EASL immigrants working in engineering fields vs. the average salary of the general American population.
Ultimately, the SAT really tests one's ability to consider facts and draw conclusions. Knowing specific dates of important events and dubious rules of grammar is not something students should be judged on. Furthermore, many minorities and immigrants have more trouble relating to American history and English than their white counterparts. For example, Chinese-American students are often at a large disadvantage because their education is not bolstered by consistent parental activities.
For example, as a Chinese-American student, I have often found proper English diction difficult having grown up in a household that speaks only Chinese. Should I be measured on such an uneven playing field? I prefer to be measured on a playing field that is universal. That is, one of mathematics, problem solving, and critical thinking.
First that Asians arent considered a minority when things like this come around. Asians score higher than whites on tests often. Wouldnt that mean they are orientated(no pun intended) towards people of Asian descent?
Its the poorer kids that do
This certainly doesnt mean that rich kids will individually outscore poor kids, merely a trend. Its the nature of the test, not the test itself. Maybe if public schools were obsolete messes run into the ground by morons it wouldnt be so bad (residual low middle class public school frustration leaking in).
If I remember correctly (and I only just graduated) it was 5 pt increments 55-85, 88, then 90-100 in 1 pt increments. There was definitely a 60. Getting a 55 or 60 meant you failed. There are no grades that are below 55. There are numerical codes beginning with 0 for things like never showing or medically excused (for gym) such as 04, 07, etc. But those don't get averaged in.
Q:Doctor, how many autopsies have you performed on dead people?
A:All my autopsies have been performed on dead peop
You're telling me that there are public schools prepping kids for the SAT's four years before they'd take the test?!? Are you kidding me?
Eh? This year we had over 20,000 applicants, of which only about 3000 will be accepted.
I don't know where you got that statistic from, but it's not even close to the truth.
Place 30 high school students in a class room. Throw some computers in there. Maybe some books on philosophy, and some beakers, chemicals and a few classic text books. Observe the kids, watch which ones play with the toys. If a kid needs more equipment supply it. Also note the students who complain about the sitution. Ask them what they would rather be doing. If they say i'd rather be outside playing football, they probably don't belong in college.
The students who enjoy playing with ideas, inventing and learning are the students who belong in college.
There is nothing wrong with those who don't belong in college there just differnt and for them to pretend to be something there not would be a tragedy.
Time is Change
It's possible to design a good standardized test. But the test won't stay good.
The problem is that tests like the SAT are based on the idea of correlation - you can find various things, such as the ability to make word analogies, that corelate well with the thing you're trying to measure, in this case, university aptitude.
But the problem is that once you've done this, everyone who wants to do well on your test will start studying the things that are on the tests. Over time, the cumulative effect is that your corelation is distorted.
The SAT has come to the point where teachers focus on it far too much. So, either drastic changes are needed now to the form of the test (e.g. different types of questions), in addition to ongoing periodic changes, or another method of identifying aptitude is necessary. It appears that the University of California (the Santa Cruz campus of which I am writing this from) is taking the latter approach, perhaps because ETS was unwilling to take the former.
Oh, and third, there's no standard way of communicating learning disability situations to universities... there's no little black circle to fill in for dyslexia or attention deficit disorder, for example. And if you decide to send a note to every school you apply to so that they'll know and adjust for it... their adjustment will probably be more like not letting you in because they know you'll cost them more money and time than, let's say, any of the normal alcoholics attending colleges today.
Depends on where you're trying to attend. A big public college, more than likely this will happen. A private college (which actually tend to give out more scholarship money) with a low student:teacher ratio probably would - they hve the time, and usually even the motivation to work with the student.
les
at least the SAT's put us through the same worthless arbitrary standards. I would like to see us eliminate grades and GPAs instead of standardized test.
In sports would you let coaches help determine the score of their own teams? Teachers should not be grading their own students except broadly by giving them recommendations and the like. Standardized tests are the only way to judge against a population of students. Grades and GPAs are always relative to those in the class and should only be used within schools.
The system is corrupting.
If a high-school student cannot "buckle down" and endure a three hour test, then they are going to have troubles in college. I see it as the first of many "weeding out" classes that are ahead for them. Not to mention that if a school's own academic standing is not up to par, ALL of the students are going to suffer for it! It doesn't matter that 17-year old Sally gets a 4.2 cumulative GPA, if Sally's high school may not be ranked in the top percentile. Dropping the SAT requirement may take the initial weight off of the student's shoulders, yet, it's going to hurt more students in the end.
parents' income
Yep, the single, stand-alone, best predictor of college performance is the income of your parents. That's just a correlation (review: correlations aren't necessarily causative) and if you think about it it makes sense. Of course, you never hear about this because there'd be a riot among those that become indignant easily. Sure, lets scrap the SAT. Instead of getting the college board to send you SAT scores to colleges, you could get the IRS to send your parent's tax returns.
esquimau
I think the "change" that is long overdue is not getting rid of the SAT (or ACT, or any other standardized test) at all. Colleges need some sort of standardized method of comparing applicants. Instead, the tests need to be modified to cover more knowledge, and include an essay section (to help people that are poor at multiple choice tests). The type of questions that the student did good or bad on (science math english history whatever) would also be reported to the school. (instead of just reading, writing and math) Then the school would be responsible for seeing whether the candidate would meet the standards. The problem is that the current tests are much to focused
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In Ontario, most universities keep a record of academic performance of each high school - in other words, they compare the high school marks with post-secondary performance and put each secondary school on a gradient. But it still depends alot on the university - when I applied at the end of high school for Computer/Electrical engineering at several different institutions, I had to have everything from character and professional references to 1500 word essays on why I was interested in enginering.....grades just got me the possibilty of being accepted.
Did a web search on the test. You are comparing a test that tests ebonic slang versus an (admittedly imperfect) intelligence test measuring mathematics, logic, and reasoning like the SAT?
That's not exactly a fair comparison. Why not create a test about (female or) male anatomy, genitalia, and internal behaivor, give it to teenagers of both genders. And score 'intelligence' based on how well someone does.
Math is math is math. It's only one facet of intelligence, but for most engineering/science schools it is a critical skill, one needs aptitude in math to succeed. Ebonics, music, football, kinesthematics, they are all useful skills and intelligences, but inappropriate for most science/engineering universities.
Ebonics or any other cultural slang are critical and necessary to suceed in their own areas. College, which the SAT is used for, is unlikely to be one of them.
I am glad to see them considering this move, and on the whole I think it would be a good thing. However; I think this could have a very bad effect on geeks getting into UC*.
(I know I'm generalizing here, but bare with me.)
Most geeks I know are the type who slack off in High School, but since they're smart they get decent (not spectacular) grades. Then, when it is time to take the ?CT, they kick major ass, beat all the "smart" people at school, and get good chances to go to college based in large part on their test score. That was my story to some extent.
The good thing about the ACT/SAT is that it can give people who are smart but undermotivated a second chance. There are a *lot* of bad things about it (especially how it effects minorities), but throwing it away lessesn the chances of the undermotivated hacker.
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Maybe I'm mistaken,but alot of times those smart kids grow up in college and do quite well for themselves and the universities they attend.
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All we're seeing here is a brazen attempt to deny higher education to to anyone who doesn't attend a school acceptable to the teachers' unions in California. It's quite about protecting the status quo if a broken system--probably time for people in CA to say 'um, no'. If not, maybe the best and the brightest will simply go elsewhere and deny CA the privilege of taxing the hell out of them. :)
In space, no one can hear you moo.
This may no longer apply, but I remember an oft cited example used be how reading comprehension questions might have things like crew and regattas as their subject--something non-upper-middle-class, non-east-coasters (and by extension, most minorities, too) were probably an order of magnitude less likely to be familiar with.
They are starting to cover stuff after 1945 here in CA, but not really well. Also, Economics is a required course, though I don't think they teach how to balance a check book. The other reason I replied is I have a funny anecdote. In my basic US History class (the system decided I wasn't qualified for the AP, so I just got the highest grade in there) we watched movies, and we got to as long as no one: slept, ate, read, or talked (within limits of a high school student). Once, the teacher walked up to the TV, turned it off, and yelled my name because I was reading. Everyone in the class was immediately mad at me. So I apologized, and when the teacher turned the lights in the classroom on, he found out I was reading the history book, because he wouldn't let us do it while he was giving us busy work. Once he had found out, I said I'd put the book away if he'd turn the movie back on, so he agreed because he felt so bad about it. Everyone else just made fun of me. God I hate people.
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Since I was TJHSST class of '00, I'd like to add my two cents.
Off of Stuy's website:
That's just a blatant lie. We beat them regularly in National Merit, and they have what, double our class size?
TJ wasn't a nerd school. That myth needs to be dispelled. I hated it with a passion (although it was better than a normal high school, that's for sure), but not because it was a school for nerds. By far the best classes I took at TJ were in the humanities. The math and science portion of my educational experience there paled in comparison. Sure, Jefferson had its share of nerds, and maybe they were a bit nerdier (and smarter) than your run-of-the-mill nerds, but there are nerds everywhere, and they made up a very normal-sized slice of the population at TJ.
The one thing that I can say about the sci/tech part of TJHSST is that it most emphatically does NOT try to teach you how to "write papers and do research". The great beauty of Jefferson is that it is filled with brilliant students that you can learn from, and teachers who want to help you do whatever it is you want to do. It's a free environment. There aren't any bells, and no one gives you a hard time if you're wandering the halls during class periods. Admissions at TJ aren't just based on test scores. They want bright, creative people who are good at lots of things. We had brilliant artists, great writers, amazing thesbians, and talented musicians. If that meant that we didn't get the "GREAT HIGH SCHOOL PLUG" on /. or that people don't think that we're as competitive in the sci/tech areas, so be it. I didn't have any trouble getting in to a college. ;-)
I can remember studying analogies in grade school for maybe 30 minutes a week... and only for a couple weeks at a time... in other words... it wasn't that intense... I rather enjoyed them because they were easy and a break from the rest of the crap that we had to learn.
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In his speech 2/17/01 Atkinson stated that his long term goal in moving away from SAT scores as one criterion for admission was to "help strengthen high school curricula and pedagogy, create a stronger connection between what students accomplish in high school and their likelihood of being admitted to U.C., and focus student attention on mastery of subject matter rather than test preparation." (see http://nytimes.com and, for greater detail, the print copy of the Times 2/17/01) It appears that he wants to use the power of the U.C. system to encourage schools to focus on teaching relevant subject matter rather than spending too much time on building SAT test-taking skills. I think that if you teach the "three Rs," and then measure achievement on them (not always so easy I admit) you will then have taken a pretty good measure of aptitude as well. If students can't demonstrate good achievement on the relevant subject matter they will have difficulty at the U. of C. Some kids are just not ever going to do as well as others with the "three Rs," et.al., and for these students education should be tailored, at least in part, to building on their particular strengths so that they can maximize their own potential.
SAT is the only unbiased indicator in most college applications. Most people receive help on essays, which favours the person who is able to tap the better resources. Other accomplishments, eg. school president, favour students who went to small schools or schools that encourage such activities. Removing SAT is going to make the process more subjective, thus more unpredictable to prospective applicants. It will also work against foreigners (WHO SPEAK ENGLISH), but that is a different story.
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Makes perfect sense to me...
-Vess
For goodness sake, they're just replacing the SAT I and ACT with the SAT II. The latter is just more comprehensive (see here for an example of what I mean).
It's not that debates over admissions policies are meaningless. There is a real topic for debate there. But what is it about this particular article that got the debate going again (assuming that everyone read it, that is)?
A quote from the article:
That's exactly what happened to me. I recieved rejections from the UCs, such as SantaCruz saying it was explicitly because of my LD. I recieved a 1250 (SAT), decent SAT-2s I guess (don't recall), and had a 3.96GPA at a private school. Friends of mine went to UCSC, lower on all accounts.
My language requirements were waved by my school due to the LD (the spanish teacher recommended I get tested my freshman year). Still, it wasn't surprising since I have a mild case of cerebral palsy (went to physical/speech therapy when I was little). The thing was, I applied to lots of top private universities and the best gave me merit scholorships, the average at around half tuition. I don't get (or have asked) for extra time since I don't need it.. I may be slower at some things but since I spend a lot of time learning it, its okay (ie, I may take up all of the time, but I ace it).
The UCs definately are screwy and not setup well. They used to go on about how they'd change accept the top 10% from any California highschool. Either way, their admissions is fearful of being sued, but will try to get away with a lot (ie, were really pissed when my school called them, and turned down my appeal).
-----------------------------------------
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I'm thinking SATs and ACTs are Good Things [tm].
-Legion
(mostly j/k here, but I'm a little sore that MBHS always gets overlooked).
Sheepdot: Open Source good, Closed Source baaaaaaad!
The UC system already allows the top 4% of students from any California school to bypass the SATs entirely, so it DOES recognize that a 4.0 from a bad school can mean a lot.
Also, the UC system would not ignore SATs under the new plan, it would just make them optional. Students could still submit them to demonstrate potential, and most who did well probably would.
Your statements that Mr. Atkinson "wants to hurt" students like you and "HAS NOT thought through his situation" are unfounded exaggerations.
I attended a high school in an area of Ohio that was mostly rural agriculture and manufacturing. As for the standardized test issue, the students at my school had to take a state-mandated test in order to graduate. IMHO, all these tests do is show students which areas they need help in if they expect to go on to college. Not all students who graduate from high school go on to college, and it was quoted in Dr. David Schwartz's book, The Magic of Thinking Big, that for every 100 students who enroll in college, less than half actually get degrees. What matters now in the Information Age is not what you know. Bill Gates (I know most of the people here hate him, but I feel that he's worth mentioning) never finished college. When Paul Allen showed Gates an article about the Altair 8800, Gates wrote some software that would run on the 8800, and he and Allen formed Microsoft to distribute the software. What got Gates to where he's at today was not his knowledge of BASIC. It was his vision of putting desktop computers into every home, and acting on that vision. In other words, it was what he did. That is what still holds. Employers are more concerned with what a person can contribute to the company's goals and vision, not how many letters that come after a person's name.
I agree with idea that the SAT is good for normalizing the selection of students. But the real problem is the huge differences in school curriculums across different geographical regions. There needs to be more standardization. Even if the standard isn't "perfect" it would add quite a lot to know that a student from school X adheres to Y State standard, or whatever. Until such time that happens I don't think doing away with the SAT requirement is a better alternative.
They are taking a big risk here. You, as many others, see this as a move that will harmfully affect you: "I'm NOT who he wants to help, I'm who he wants to hurt." This is absurd. He's not rying to hurt you. He's trying to help those who do deserve to get in to school get in. The only way to do this is to place less of an emphasis on the test. However, because they see it as an "arms race", the only way to do this is to opt out all together, because if they don't then emphasis will just continue to build on it.
I personally think it's absurd that the writers of the SAT got to choose my curriculum in high school, and I sure as hell don't believe that any one factor should hold so much sway over college admissions, especially not one that only counts for about 4 hours or so on one day.
Also, they are not totally planning on scrapping standardized testing, so there's no worry about those kids like your classmates. As the yahoo article points out, they are keeping the SAT II, which I think is a better indicator (as do the statistics, see the times article.) And there's also this:
They want a new test, one that they're not just going to start teaching right to. A fresh start would be a good thing for the stodgy old test anyways. I mean, if you're not particularly good at English or Math, but you're a chemistry, history, and foreign language wizard, why should you be punished for it?
The goal of this whole move is not to hurt anyone, particularly you! I agree, that you can provide opportunities to those without money. It's called affirmative action, and the UC system is prohibited from doing this via California law, enacted by the citizens themselves. This is a way to extend benefits to those who truly needed it.
Don't worry though, all the people who, like you, didn't work hard but are still smart enough to do Ok in college will still make it there. You may not get the best education there is, but then do you really deserve it if you didn't earn it?
Oh, and by the way, I can guarantee Atkinson has thought this situation through more than you
Not too ignorant of the ins and outs of admissions and standardized testing in my opinion. He is The UC President after all...
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
Wouldn't it make more sense to experiment with this system on grad school applicants which are smaller in number?
I think that the SATs are a fairly decent concept of what a person knows. Unfortunately, the SATs don't have anything to do with drive or laziness or logic and such...a person with a lot of book knowledge can score well on the SATs and not be able to do much of anything in real life.
I personally like standardized tests, I generally do fairly well on them (above 1340 on PSATs and SATs, haven't taken SAT II yet) and i wish that school put more of an emphesis on them, simply because it would help me.
I also have a problem with averages and weighted averages. I am in all honors classes at WAHS and i recieve pretty decent grades (A's and B's) but there are people in the "regular" classes that recieve higher grades than i do. However, my grades might not look as good to colleges as someone from those other classes. Our school does not use weighted averages, and I don't compare favorably to other people that have taken easier classes that I do. I don't know whether weighted averages would solve this or not, and as far as i am concerned..the only thing the honors classes really do for me is push up my class rank.
The anti-salmon
I don't see the double-edged sword here. What is the basis of the premise that "SATs may be close to worthless"? Here we have the one and only nation-wide uniform standard for measuring acadamic ability, and some schools are thinking of tossing it? This makes no sense. And the premise in the story at yahoo is completely illogical. SATs distort the way young people learn? I was in school learning for over a decade before I even saw my first preliminary-SAT test.
This COULD make sense IF there have been studies demonstrating a lack of correlation, or even a negative correlation, between SAT score and subsequent academic achievement at the undergraduate or graduate level. But no such study was cited in the article. In fact, the article did not even say that anyone was SUGGESTING that this was the case, let alone studying it and demonstrating it.
The only "argument" relayed by the article in favor of eliminating the requirement for SATs was that it would increase the number of Blacks and Hispanics gaining admission. Although I am not a member of either of these communities, I suspect that if I were, I would find this argument highly insulting.
I think you're right to a degree, that people are hard pressed to prove someone is smarter, but you have to consider factors that make a person "smart" as well as the tests for that intelligence.
The factors are largely environmental, I think we can all pretty much acknowledge that, especially if all men are created equal. There are some geniuses out there as well as a few mental incompetents, but on the whole our strengths balance with our weaknesses and we balance out (see Hobbes's "Leviathan" for this stuff.)
As such, if a test like the SAT is playing to certain strengths only (math and english skills) does this seem like a good measure of how "smart" someone is? What if they are incredible chemists, but terrible mathemeticians who can't formulate a proper sentence? Does that make them stupid? I don't know the answer to that, but if no one tests those factors you can't make a good judgement.
And let's face it, we may all be born more or less equal, but we don't grow up that way. I know I come from a priveledged background, and I simply didn't have to deal with the things that make school feel so irrelevant. Like my parents being out of work and me having to drop out to get a minimum wage job to support my family. Does that make me dumber? What if the only rich people I see who look like me are drug dealers and gangsters, so I do what I know and do the same in order to survive? Does that make me dumb? Conditions matter, and as such we do not all have equal opportunities. This has nothing to do with how "smart" or "dumb" someone is, but rather the opportunities they have actually been given, rather than the equal (or nearly equal, as you say) that they are supposed to have been given.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
The funny thing is, he scored 700+ on the GRE verbal test. I scored 500+. Why? He was an excellent test taker and fast worker. And I believe he actually studied long lists of English words for the test.
The GRE is a farse! Do away with it.
--
This sort of thing has cropped up before. And it has always been due to human error.
--
This sort of thing has cropped up before. And it has always been due to human error.
HAL9000
As a previous poster explained, Prop. 209 outlawed "affirmative action" (i.e. institutionalized racism) on the part of government agencies. Ever since then the racist baby boomer bureaucrats have been biting their nails trying to figure out a way to secretly keep their Jim Crow-style policies in place without the knowledge of the public or the courts (at least the courts which aren't sympathetic to their holy cause).
This approach is the Holy Grail: black people on average tend to do worse on the SAT, so let's just get rid of the evil SAT!
What will it be replaced with? Why, "activities" and, of course, the "essay". The essay in which one student may write "I faced adversity because I am a minority" while another student may write about their favorite teacher or whatever. And, guess what happens then. The racist baby boomer bureacrats sitting on the committees get to pick and choose and socially-engineer the racial makeup of their campus to suit their pathological fetishes for "diversity [of skin color]", and with no SAT sitting on the student's application, there's no paper trail and no responsibility.
So any talk about hand-wringing because the SAT is "worthless" as a predictor of success is just a smokescreen. Certainly it is not a perfect predictor (neither is anything else); nevertheless it's the best we've got. But the baby boomer bureacrats who are obsessed with "diversity [of skin color]" aren't even interested in that debate in the first place, no matter how much they may pretend to be. They just want to get rid of the SAT because it presents a barrier to their endless obsession with social engineering and tinkering with the lives of other people to suit their private dream world.
Personally, I think tests like the SAT and ACT should be only slightly considered for submission. Many people don't take standardized tests as well as others, but yet have a much better work ethic to be successful in college classes. Instead, I think that college admissions people should heavily consider transcripts. More than just GPA, the amount and grades in advanced classes and college classes (whether AP or taken through local college) can give the most accurate representation of a student's ability. In addition, I think a small essay is important to demonstrate overall language ability, and shows that the applicant is truly interested in getting accepted to the university.
"The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent." --Carl Sagan
> He didn't recieve a lick of scholorship money,
> though, and he needed the money, so he didn't go.
MIT scholarships are entirely need based, so that argument doesn't really hold. I know a lot of people with ~1300 SAT's that have made it into/are going to MIT, thankfully MIT also looks a LOT at teacher recs, which is really the best way to find a student's potential (though it's also the most time consuming from the admissions standpoint).
Whoa, there, buddy...
The reason y'all run Debian is because your IT structure is being handled by a CS guy (or rather, his volunteer squad). Any place worth their salt would've set up something a little more capable of being beaten around a bit (like FreeBSD).
Commuting's annoying, but it's not hard or anything. If you took longer to get in that I did, you're obviously not in NYC to begin with.
And since when did a 95 GPA get hard?
As for demanding teachers, I really doubt that. They're only demanding if you're lazy. If you're already on the ball, there's no reason to be having such troubles.
AP Compsci (not post AP) was also a cinch back in the day, although the classes after it got quite a bit tougher (how many of us in class of '98 had a working renderer at the end of the term?)
And when it comes to being "not taught to pass some stupid test," you're right.
We're taught to pass *every* stupid test. APs (which are barely being accepted at MIT and the like, if at all after this year), SATs, and every single multiple choice test given by most departments. The only classes where we didn't have tests were certain English courses, which of course had papers instead.
Of course, since cutting class is so easy for you (I'll assume a forged program card still takes only a few minutes to make if you really don't know where to hide), I'm not surprised by your attitude toward Stuy. Good luck in the real world, you'll need it.
Class of '98,
Raptor
Raptor
"Procrastination is great. It gives me a lot more time to do things that I'm never going to do."
scrappy indeed, loveable no doubt.
love ya!
-rt
I agree with you completely! I almost cried while reading this article. For me, this is actually my current situation in high school, but I got worried about this happeneing last year, so I'm taking 5 AP classes this year, and Engineering. Hopefully this raises my GPA [I had to stop being sucha a slacker :( ] and colleges look favorably on it. If not I'm doomed.
Twitter.com/TrentonHyatt
I go to Stuy and I have just on question what grade inflation? As soon as Stuy started to get that kind of reputation the teacher quickly became grade nazis. Today your grade is basically your test average (if not lower) just because they want to fight this reputation. As for Thomas Jefferson I dont want to brag but your have you been at stuy? We cant possibly fill the trophy cases with more awards. We also send between 20-50 kids a year to Harvard how many schools can say that! For those that are wondering a 3.9 at Stuy is probably a 4.0 at any other school. The kids here I think are very naturally gifted but over the years have become very lazy because of all the bull shit that every kid has to deal with ie SAT's, clubs charity work etc. The average sat grade at stuy is around a 1450 for those that are wondering call the school if you want more exact figures the number is on the site. Also visit www.stuynet.com for a more inner view of stuyvesant it a great place I have really grown their. Excuse the poor grammar but im at work and dont have the time.
WOW you misunderstand me Stuy isnt hard its just harder then most of the schools in New York. The NYC education system is totally fucked up. Its probably the worst in the country. Now I dontknow about you but a 0-9 schedule isb't easy it means your in school from 8-4 every day plus 1-2 hours of hw. If I went to my local school i would have a 20 minute commute but thanks to stuy its more like an hour 10 minutes on the fucking R train. Have you seen the new ap comp sci case study it isnt hard but they have totally fucked up the class marine biology my ass. I dont know what you know about other schools in the city but how many do you think even teach their kids about linux/unix. Stuy is also a very liberal environment no metal detector and no security guards harassing you every step of the way. Sure cutting is easy but if you cut your a fucking moron. Stuy does what a school is supposed to provide people with a good place to get a good education. You can get from it what you want. If you want to cut and spend 5 years there you can. If you want to take a half dozen ap classes you can. Colleges wont accept AP credit because its their bussiness to suck you dry. My cousin is an economics major at Columbia they made him take a class his sophmore year titled the "Economics of Sports" can their be a more bullshit course. Im a junior and in my 3 years here not one of my teachers has made us go over regents of sat2 questions so can you tell me how are they teaching to the test. Under your old principal Mrs Perrulo stuy got a reputation for grade inflation and bullshit, but Teitel the new principal had changed a lot of the old practices. He is a bit of an asshole but the school is a lot better. Im sorry but to have a decent life pulling a 95 is impossible. Franky in a nerd but I just cant image getting so absorded in all the school bullshit that you have to get absorbed in to get that 95. Im more then happy with my 90 average and I dont even overwork myself to get it. When did I say I was troubled by Stuy? Stuy is a very open place and I have seriously matured in it. It prepares you for college by providing a very college like atmosphere anyone who disagrees is just jealous that they didn't got to stuy. My brother goes to our zoned school lets just say he isn't the brightest apple in the bunch, but he has managed to pull a 95 average with even less work then me so any myths of grade inflation at stuy are highly over rated. Clearly Im very biased but you people shouldn't judge a school you haven't been too. Between the 3 science high schools I think we share a total of 7 or 8 nobel prize winners how many school can say that. In closing whyu would we need to run bsd when we never have more then 2 or 3 hundred kid on the entire network at a given time and the school website gets less hits then my own shitty site?
non-Americans. WTF is a "SAT"? I gather it's some kind of entry test for school or college in the US. But I'd appreciate if someone could shed a little light on this definition and tell me what "SAT" is an acronym for. RTFMs welcome.
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Since admission to an educational institution is a qualitative decision, the use of a quantitative comparison (i.e. SAT scores OR grades) doesn't make all that much sense.
However, judging a person on a qualitative basis is extraordinarily difficult to do, if it can be done at all. Also qualitative comparisons are equally, if not more difficult.
SAT and ACT are necessary, in that they provide a common ground to base a decision. GPAs certainly do not provide this common ground, as I have visited many that are more "GPA friendly" than my former high-school.
However, if a fair, more qualitative means of judging should come to be, I'd certainly be in favor of it. But for now, standardized tests are still important.
Unfortunately there are certain facts you will have to deal with if you do this. The primary fact being, that there are certain people who are not suited for college, whether that means not intelligent enough, not disciplined enough, or whatever. Instead of encouraging them to learn a trade and get a job and earn a living, here you are encouraging them to go to college if they "want" to.
What will you do when they get all F's? What will you do when they realize they have spent four years on their worthless "Communications" degree and are 80 grand in debt and no better off for the trouble? Why, you will pat yourself on the back for being so "progressive" and "caring" that you can make unthinking naive statements like the one above, of course.
You aren't doing someone a favor when you send them to a university where they are likely to fail and from which experience they are unlikely to benefit. Indeed, that is one of the reasons for having standardized tests. If an applicant is simply not suited for Berkeley, and is likely to have a bad academic experience there, it is worse (for the applicant) to say "come on in anyway!" than it is to send him to a less challenging, but more easygoing environment where he can learn at his own pace.
Hire more professors, build more buildings.
Yes, that will resolve the problem I describe above.
By the way, are you volunteering to pay for these professors and buildings?
What happens if you have more applicants than you can admit with all A's, great essays, ideal references, etc. Such is the case at Caltech where this year the median SATIs of the 151 early admits was: 800 (Math), 760 (Verbal) and SATIIs of 800 (MathIIC), 800 (Physics), 800 (Chemistry). Some with many perfect 800s were denied early admission. There are many bright youngsters out there and the competition at internationally ranked institutions is intense. SATs, particularly SAT IIs, provide useful data to complement a students passion for Math, Science and Engineering.
What's past is NOT ALWAYS prologue for the future!
that's what i really want to know. everybody else has to put up with .us or use .org or .com or .net to get a short name. seems fishy to me.
stored on computers from birth to the grave
Now, you tell me. Does the test tell an admissions officer who knows more (or can learn more or reason better)? No. The test indicates that both know the same amount. But, that isn't true. The biggest factor here is the SPEED at which a student works!
But, perhaps the SAT/GRE is supposed to test for speed. Read the literature that ETS provides. Nowhere does it say that the test is an indication of how *FAST* a test-taker works. Everyone universally accepts it as a test of *KNOWLEDGE* and *INTELLIGENCE*!
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This sort of thing has cropped up before. And it has always been due to human error.
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This sort of thing has cropped up before. And it has always been due to human error.
HAL9000
The next time the Doctor says my blood pressure is too high, I will tell him the test is unfair and that he should use an instrument that only produces normal readings.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Regardless of the merits of the Spanish ACT, reading a newspaper (and especially a local newspaper) in a foreign language is typically much tougher than rudimentary conversation. Newspaper text involves a lot of complex and obscure grammar, fancy vocabulary, and TONS of cultural background-- history, geography and political organization of the country in question, well-known figures and organizations of all sorts (e.g. political parties and retired politicians, local businesspersons, etc.), all sorts of abbreviations and metaphors (equivalents to stuff like "GOP" or elephant renderings to refer to the Republican Party), and the list just goes on.
Hell, I'm a native Spanish speaker, and understanding a lot out of a newspaper from another Spanish speaking country can be difficult at times. Try reading local news stories in English from a local paper, and seeing how much knowledge is just presupposed.
If you want to try news in Spanish (which, again, would be very advanced Spanish), the things to read are the reports from international news agencies like EFE-- they are written for an international audience, and thus they have to minimize this kind of difficulty.
Are you adequate?
Trying to test for intelligence, which is what they are attempting to do, is much much more difficult then testing for aptitude, which is what they are accomplishing by means of the SAT tests.
Consider my particular circumstances. I'm a dysgraphic. For the first several years of my shool life, they assumed I couldn't read. Not because I was unable to, mind you, but rather because the method they used to determine if I could read was by making me read something and then write down the answers to questions written on the blackboard. Now I'm sure you're all bright enough to figure out with the benifit of hindsight what was wrong with this method. Yep, I couldn't write. I was later diagnosed Dysgraphic, with related small and large muscle co-ordination problems. I was reading at level, but couldn't write the answers down on the piece of paper. This is an example of the problem of testing for intelligence. They assumed based on my written output that I was not intelligent enough to read. (also wrong, you can be highly intelligent and be dyslexic, but that's another story, and another example of the problems.)
Later on in my scholastic career, it became obvious that my learning disability affected me in a shotgun-like pattern that made little sense. I scored A's in honours english, and history (after we learned that I could type a lot better then I wrote, and thus began my life long passion for computers), but couldn't for the life of me learn a second language. I scored A-Bs in Physics, Chem and Comp Sci but pure math I was lucky to scrape through with a C.
Fortunaly I was born in Canada where we handle things a bit differently, and my provincial finals (standardized over the province I live in) are converted to a GPA and used to make my college entrance info. So I could tailor my class load and therefore the tests I had to take towards my strengths (obviously I avoided things like extra math classes, or any extra foriegn langues).
I doubt my SAT scores would have reflected accurately my intelligence, and probably would have missed my aptitudes too, since I'm weak in pure math and language skills, but strong in applied ones.
--
Remove the rocks to send email
On the whole, I find that I prefer Slashdot posts to twitter ones because I don't get limited to 140 chars before
I went to a prep school for my last three years of high school, where I continued to slack in my classes. I did well in extra-curriculars, but I was a mediocre student. However, I rocked my SATs, SAT IIs, and AP tests. I used this to show schools that I was a capable individual and got an opportunity to attend an elite school.
Does this jive with America's sense of the Protestant Work Ethic and working hard to achieve? Absolutely not. Did I do reasonably well in College? Yes, although a little more effort and I'd have done well. However, my grades alone wouldn't have gotten me in.
I'm a middle-class white student, I'm NOT who he wants to help, I'm who he wants to hurt.
Here is the problem though. I went to a prep school with a decent reputation among many schools throughout the nation. As a result, the entire top 20% of my school attended elite schools. My school's reputation got relatively dumb kids with high GPAs at a respectable school and mediocre test scores into good schools.
Those same kids in a local Public school no doubt would have had high GPAs and low test scores, but not been considered, because the low test scores would show that they weren't that swift.
All in all, this sounds good, right?
No. Without test scores, the only means of evaluating GPA is to look at the schools reputation. While this is fine for Private Schools or elite Public schools (magnets focusing on education in the South, special enterance exams in northeastern metropolitan cities, for example), but what about the poor kids from unknown schools?
Yeah, they'll get a 4.0 unweigthed GPA and rank in the top five or whatever at their school, but do you accept them? At a school you've never heard of in a poor area, you can assume that a 4.0 isn't of reasonable caliber for your school. What do you use, AP classes? If you're from a middle class suburb or attend a private school, AP classes may be the answer. If you're from a poor school area, you don't have that option.
Yes, money helps. You can't change that. What you CAN do is give people without money an opportunity. The kids with the expensive education and test prep have an advantage on the tests, but it isn't a guarantee.
In a scenario without the tests, the kids HAVE a guarantee. They are the only ones from high schools that schools have heard of. Without the tests, your poor kid with the 4.0 but no APs because they aren't offered and no SAT scores to back him up doesn't get in, but the kids from the private schools with 3.6 GPAs with a reputation for excellence do.
That isn't useful.
Admissions already adjusts for background. The UC system is absurd, allowing admission by test scores alone, which reduces their paperwork, but doesn't help. Their admissions process is too numeric, but they are processing too many applications for hands on evaluations. Schools normally have some kind of cut where they reduce their applicant pool by screening out a certain GPA range. Then admissions officers can make decisions. The poor kid with a 4.0 from a crappy school with a 1300 GPA is probably the equivalent of the wealthy kid with a 1400 GPA based upon the extra training and education. They CAN take that into account. They can't take race into account, but they can figure out the student's background. A poor white kid OR poor black kid should have that taken into account. A rich white kid OR rich black kid should have their background into account.
No, test scores don't substitute for discretion. But they allow you to justify things. If the kid with a 4.0 GPA had a 1000 SAT, he probably doesn't get in. But with a 1300, he does. Why? In the first case, you can't confirm his aptitude, in the second you can. Without the tests, you CAN'T confirm his aptitude AT ALL. You'd assume he is a 1000 SAT kid because he's from a crappy school and admit the known candidate from the prep school.
This man HAS NOT thought through his situation. They need to add more discretion, but they don't need to scrap the best means for helping people out.
Not by my personal experience. I recall that I could only answer about 10 of the SAT questions correctly, so I chose to have my scores deleted. I then went to night school and later transferred into a university as a full-time day student (so, I didn't need the SAT scores). I graduated *MAGNA CUM LAUDE* with a 3.72 GPA.
Remarkably well, eh?
--
This sort of thing has cropped up before. And it has always been due to human error.
--
This sort of thing has cropped up before. And it has always been due to human error.
HAL9000
Im currently go to stuy. I was in that assholes (Dr Plass) class during the term he got arrested it really hit the school har. Stuy is a great place. If you leave money in a classroom and comeback the next period their is a good chance that it will still be there. I dont know many schools like that. They say that we are super competitive and that nobody is friendly but thats just bullshit and to be honest most of the teachers arent that bad we have alot of phds in the building and most of the teachers at least have a masters. Excuse the bad grammar as usual.
Social life + 95 back in the day: Easy.
Commute: 1hr 30 minutes.
Homework: a few hours every night.
Solution? No sleep, do your homework between classes, fudge stuff, and for god's sake, you *never* need to take a 0-9 unless you're trying to make you senior year run at a bare minimum (which was never worth the 3 years hassle, Senior year was a cinch regardless).
As for BSD, plain and simple. Ask damn near anyone in the old volunteer squad. Granted, Debian's a step up from an RS/6000 workstation running AIX as the school server, but there could have been better decisions. It's not a matter of necessity, it's a matter of teaching people by using the better product. (And in the 2.0 days, FreeBSD was clearly the better product. I still think it is, but that's entirely subjective.)
Raptor
Raptor
"Procrastination is great. It gives me a lot more time to do things that I'm never going to do."
Check out this Tom Toles comic about SATs.
I adblock all animated gifs.
Blessed be the prime numbered slashdotters
1. I remember having to answer questions about Mayo Angelo, a black woman.
2. We live in America. The SAT and ACT are based on American culture which, last time I checked, is dominated by whites.
As much as I hated taking the SAT, I must say that it truly is a good mark of how much a person has learned and applied himself to during high school. With a plan to drop standardized tests from the Californian agenda, it's no wonder that California has the worst educational rating in America. Ryan, 1290
I think this is a bad idea. As horrible as the test may be, it is still the most objective way there is of gauging ability. (not intelligence!) GPA's, like the author said, are highly subjective, not only from school to school, but possibly within one school as well. Case in point, at my school there are different levels for different students. Career prep, Tech school prep, college prep, and honors. An A in career prep is worth an A in honors as far as GPA is concerned, however, the A in career prep would be worth less AFA rank in class.
The truth about Michael
The purpose of college admissions depends on the intended ROLE for each college/university. Higher education institutions are VERY different from each other, and they do not all share the same goals.
Think about a top institution, that intends to educate the nations BEST talents. Their admission policies MUST choose students on the basis of academic merit. This necessarily entails some discrimination, because the best students (with regard to academic merit) are often NOT minorities.
On the other hand, if a college is to provide edicational opportunity to the poor/underepresented minorities (and I think this is the role that public institutions should go for), then a different set of admission requirements is in order (or you might have NO admission requirements at all).
The point is, no single system of admissions is best for all types of school.
> P.S. Don't even get started on Stuy. My GF > went there and sometimes her arrogance about > it drives me up the wall. > The worst part is > how they act like anyone could go there... How one can from your GF to "them" is beyond me. There are arrogant people everywhere, but what you are doing is simply stereotyping. > The worst part is > how they act like anyone could go there... Yes, how horrible of "them". How dare they. > as if most of us ever had that opportunity. I > hate arrogant elitists who *claim* anyone's > allowed in their little clique. As if most of > us ever got that opportunity. Oh well, I still > love her. =P If you live in NYC, you can take the entrance test. Thats how you get in. Most of the student body is middle or lower-class, and much of it (maybe half) is first generation American. I really don't understand how you can even pretend to call that a "clique", when it really is one of most blind processes I've ever seen. Yes, not everyone can go... but everyone is given the same chance when the test is put in front of them. How can you take issue with that? Especially in light of the fact that the results favor the kinds of kids who usually don't get these kinds of opportunities (most of 'em come from public junior high schools, which are not so amazin' in NYC). People will always find a reason to criticize.... mj
http://www.eviljake.com/
Your GPA at stuy depends a lot on the teachers you get. There are a lot of bad teachers,a lot of easy ones. THere are easy courses, kids who don't take APs, kids who tailor schedules to maximum GPA, minimum work. Stuy has issues living up to it's reputation.
There's a wonderful thing called a UFT transfer. Where a teacher in the system who's been etaching long enough can transfer into a position to stuy, regardless of whether or not they are qualified to etach APs or even gifted students. Sometimes budding, wonderful new teahcers, who still enjoy thier work get bumped by a UFT transfer.
Our principal is a non-confrontational jerk, who refuses to fight the battles that need to be fought. The CS department gets no respect, we're still classified as math classes.
That's a pessimistic look @ stuy from inside. At least we have knowledgable CS people I can learn from, and student have lots of power. Thanks god we just upgraded to webserver to a PIII-700 penguin box, don't think the old p-pro could have handled it. The layout is new, If you don't like it, don't blame me, I maintain and install the servers, not the content.
--dave
They should accept anyone who wants to go, regarless of SATs, grades, letters of recommendation, or anything else. Hire more professors, build more buildings.
ok then your [sic] infringing on my copyright! Could you as [sic] me next time before STEALING my comments for your own?
>The tests are not perfect, of course they have flaws, but they are better than anything else out there.
They are not "better" in terms of accurate predictors of success in college, and they are not "better" in terms of what tests are possible.
In what sense are they "better"? If all the schools admitted based on the number of push-ups the student could do, you could say that was "better" if the other option was using a dart board to select students. But it'd still be a really stupid measure, like the SAT.
Testing and assessment is a huge and complex topic. Knowing what you're measuring, and even what you *want* to measure are difficult tasks. But the SAT is so full of holes it's a joke.
Remember, this is the test that was billed as an "apptitude" test -- it measured something innate about the student, according to the marketing bullshit. They claimed you couldn't prepare for it, or teach to the test. Whoops! They couldn't have been more wrong.
Since then they've changed the name to "achievement", rather than "apptitude". Only, whoops!, none of the test prep programs that dramatically increase your SAT score actually teach you the material on the test. So it's not measuring "achievement", either.
Mostly, it's measuring whether you took a test prep class. Which mostly depends on your income. The SAT is a *really* good measure of your parent's income. It predicts that much, much better than it predicts your future success in college.
However, that's over with; I'm in college, and I'm majoring in Computer Engineering; a field that is almost immune to the FC syndrome.
(Notice I said almost; there's the engineering folly of the CueCat; even without its moronic policies and software, the first revision of the CueCat itself was a technological disgrace.)
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
> P.S. Don't even get started on Stuy. My GF
> went there and sometimes her arrogance about
> it drives me up the wall.
> The worst part is
> how they act like anyone could go there...
How one can from your GF to "them" is beyond me. There are arrogant people everywhere, but what you are doing is simply stereotyping.
> The worst part is
> how they act like anyone could go there...
Yes, how horrible of "them". How dare they.
> as f most of us ever had that opportunity. I
> hate arrogant elitists who *claim* anyone's
> allowed in their little clique. As if most of
> us ever got that opportunity. Oh well, I still
> love her. =P
If you live in NYC, you can take the entrance test. Thats how you get in. Most of the student body is middle or lower-class, and much of it (maybe half) is first generation American. I really don't understand how you can even pretend to call that a "clique", when it really is one of most blind processes I've ever seen.
Yes, not everyone can go... but everyone is given the same chance when the test is put in front of them. How can you take issue with that? Especially in light of the fact that the results favor the kinds of kids who usually don't get these kinds of opportunities (most of 'em come from public junior high schools, which are not so amazin' in NYC). People will always find a reason to criticize....
mj
http://www.eviljake.com/
Its still valid actually, even with that wording. There are more poor ppl than rich ppl. If a majority of smart people wind up rich then rich people are more likely to be smart. Thats not gonna happen. However, it is certainly not far fetched to say 1% of smart people will become rich (of course its fuzzy what constitutes smart and rich). And the ratio of rich to smart is greater than 100 : 1. So given these conditions the rich are still more likely to be smart.
Should have previewed.... rich to poor
I go to Stuyvesant so imagine my surprise when I saw Stuy being mentioned on Slashdot. The average Sat score at Stuyvesant is 1400-1500. We send between 20 and 40 kids a year to Harvard. Most of our computers run Debian linux. All of our kids have access to their shell accounts via telnet/ssh and all our course programming is done via the web. So tech wise we and academic wise we are 20 years ahead of every other high school in the US and better then some colleges. Stuy isnt an easy place to survive in (long commute hard schedules annoying kids) but its better than the schools that most of my friends attend. We are treated with respect and are basically allowed to do whatever we want (cutting class is easy), but everyone knows the consequences tens years down the line if you do something stupid.Most of us never end up going to ivy league schools however, because pulling a 95 average at Stuy is very very hard. Basically whatever grade you would get at your local zoned school is probably 5 to 10 points higher than a comparable Stuy grade. At stuy the teachers are far more demanding and far less willing to tolerate bullshit.Also the schedule at stuy is very demanding. Take my favorite class ap compsci we meet everyday for one 45 minute period. However, in most other schools the ap compsci classes meet for 10 periods a week. So we only have half the amount of time to cover the course work. At Stuy your not taught to pass some stupid test you are taught that the material is important and valuable and even if you never use it you have to know it to be a better person. Simply put our school kicks ass, but I would rather be on Babylon 5
Dr. Atkinson and others seem to be annoyed that certain recognizable groups (e.g., Hispanics and African-Americans) don't do well on these tests. Guess what? These groups aren't inherently any dimmer than the rest of the population, but there's little wrong with the SAT either.
The real problem here is with the schools, and with communities' attitudes towards them. Teachers are paid crap and given little of the honor and respect that they deserve, being amongst society's most important people. The low level of education funding, particularly in low-income areas like inner cities, is a national tragedy. Poor SAT scores can be traced back to poorly funded schools and bad attitudes towards education in general. These are the real problems we need to deal with.
--Mike
"Not an actor, but he plays one on TV."
I think the SAT is the least of our problems.
First of all, all us Slashdot readers are well aware of the whole "Hellmouth" scenario. That is, if it is absolutely crucial to test an adolescent's intelligence, high school is NOT the place to do it. High school is full of distractions: bitter teachers, bullies, thugs, social cliques, athletic competition, emphasis on passing state-based "dummy" aptitude tests, joke courses, pressure NOT to be the big nerd, extracirricular activities, etc. I'm not saying that all these factors are worthless to the education of a person... as a matter of fact, they ALL get us ready for the real world (bitter bosses, criminals, adult cliques, drinking games, taxes, insurance papers, and other bureaucratic forms, out-of-work interests and hobbies). But, by god, the high school system is so damaging today, that it's a horror that anyone would put any weight on the performance of a person who is currently dealing with it. I mean, what about the SAT scores of all those kids from Columbine... I bet the whole thing of "Our school was nearly bombed and some of my friends and teachers died" surely weighed down on more scores than helped them for the next year's SATs. I mean, that was at least a 3 month lapse in studying ridiculous lists of obscure vocabulary words....
Also, university admissions are already a mess today. I went through it myself... I applied to 7 schools, and they all had ridiculous-length admissions forms that needed to be hand-typed. I didn't apply to U.Penn simply because I didn't wanna type out another 20-page booklet! Nowadays, colleges are overcrowded, there are so many people trying to get in with all kinds of merits, there are no really reliable performance measures (the SAT is the best thing they've got), colleges are always trying to fill minority and culture quotas, and in the end they wind up with a bunch of party animals anyway.
And think of other priorities too. My best friend got into MIT with less than a 1300 on his SATs... he was 3rd in his class though, in a not-too-easy high school. But why did he get in? He'll even admit that he thinks it's because he was a good Division 3 football prospect, and he had a "good enough" brain to go with it. He didn't recieve a lick of scholorship money, though, and he needed the money, so he didn't go. He hardly regrets it, too.
I always think of how Princeton won't accept a lot of kids from New Jersey, being they don't want to be pegged out as a New Jersey school... but how they'll BRAG about how they let a student in who attached a picture to his application of him standing with his prizewinning cow in a corn field in Iowa. As it stands today, it's so much easier to get into an Ivy if you're from North Dakota than if you're from an East Coast metro area simply because the competition is a lot stiffer in those latter-mentioned regions. Schools want diversity, and they don't care if you're more than good enough for their school if they've already got enough kids from your area to attend.
And, to think, that many kids apply to 6-10 schools today just to make sure they get in somewhere. The flood of applications is overwhelming, and enrollments are not guaranteed based on acceptances. Some schools are picky and yet get jilted because students will pick a better scholarship deal elsewhere... other schools, like mine (U. Delaware), try to deal with overenrollment by cutting admissions... and they consistently get HIGHER enrollments every year anyway, simply because a higher percentage of admissions wind up enrolling every year.
Enough ranting, though. You get my point.
as long as the federal government doesn't interfere, they can make their own admissions tests.
I'll grant that SATs are less than ideal. Like any test, you can cram for it and raise your score temporarily above what you would get on a typical day. So if you want to get a fair comparative appraisal, everybody has to do about the same amount of cramming (i.e. spend all their time cramming immediately before the test), and even then it'll be warped toward cramming ability. Unfortunately, that's the way the whole system is run: testing procedures in general reward cramming. If nothing else, being able to cram for a test demonstrates the ability to quickly assimilate and apply large amounts of information.
At any rate, students who can't study for and take tests won't do well in university courses, unless they take a total basket-weaving education. SATs are a reliable predictor of later test performance.
"Reforming" the admission process without reforming the general evaluation process won't produce good results, it'll just cause a lot of people to be let in and then fail. Even an ideal test of true ability would probably pass mostly the same people, it would just free up some of the time they have to waste on cramming (a big step forward if you ask me).
I'm afraid, though, that we'll never see real testing reform: it'll just be more excuses to let people through and not hurt their feelings by telling them that they're not smart enough, or haven't worked hard enough, or just plain haven't learned enough to get a degree.
This is just one more step in the general trend toward poorer formal education. A university degree means less and less a certain level of education and intelligence, and more and more a willingness to play along with irrational requirements and not offend anybody for years on end. The degree signifies that you've spent several years without rocking the boat enough to get kicked out.
I think the best thing I've ever read on the subject is part of Robert A. Heinlein's essay "The Happy Days Ahead" (available in the collection "Expanded Universe", one of my favorite books), in which he explains how to get a degree from the University of California without learning anything. He makes the valid point that there is nothing preventing one from getting a good education, just that "educators" are perfectly happy to give you signed documents saying that you've had an education without actually checking whether you've learned anything. It's starting to show it's age, however, in that the situation wasn't as bad when he wrote it around 1980. I don't believe he uses the term "politically correct" once, which any good modern essay on the sad state of university education would.
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such an idea might even help the students, give them an excellent idea of what the university's "philosophy" is. A party school has a "purity test", an ivy league has their blood test, and a real school has a test on mathematics, reading, writing, basic science, and whatever else they think a successful student needs.
The SAT has come under a lot of fire for allegedly discriminating against certian socio-economic groups. (a dubious claim at best, IMHO) A great deal of effort and money went into making the SATs be as impartial and as fair as possible. If, as the critics charge, the implementation is buggy, then the system might need some modifications. It's not apparant (to me, at least) that the SAT is broken beyond repair, nor has anyone proposed a system that would not suffer from the same kinds of problems as the current one.
It may be possible that the U of CA college system may be able to produce a better standardized test than the SAT - but it will be expensive for them to re-invent the wheel, and they will open to the same kinds of criticism as the SAT. It's quite possible that they will spend millions of dollars and end up with a test that's even buggier than the SATs. The process of writing a standardized test is very similar to developing software, and most slashdotters should recognize how difficult it is to write bug-free code the first time around. Assume California does away with SATs as an entrance test and comes up with their own. Prospective students who are applying to California and non-California schools are going to need to take both the SATs and the California test. How will the test be administered to out-of-state students? How much will it cost? The added cost of having to take a seperate test to attend a Californa school could be viewed as being descriminatory against poorer students. If you were applying to college and only had enough money to pay for one test - which one would you choose: a test that's only accepted by a handful of colleges, or one that accepted by virtually every other college in the country?
It's all and well to say that the SAT sucks; but until you come up with somthing that is PROVABLY better, you are just blowing smoke our collective sphincters.
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
This may sound a bit weird, but what about adopting a standardized GPA multiplier system country-wide?
I imagine a diverse body of educators from around the country could form some sort of impartial organization whose sole responsibility is to measure the relative educational strengths, academic rigors, and overall difficulty level of each of the high schools in the country. And I'm not talking about some silly USNews-esque ranking system based on "alumni donations" or "size of endowment", but a real analysis of the academics of a high school. Each high school would then receive a multipler or weighting, which can then be applied to the students' GPAs and a normalized figure could be acheived.
The main problem nowadays is that this basic system is already in place, albeit "off the record." I went to a very well-known private school in New York, and even with a (relatively) shitty 3.0 GPA, I got into MIT because "they just know." But this won't always happen, and a kid with a 3.9 at a top-notch school in Nowheresville, USA should be recognized for his acheivements.
Obviously this is a far from perfect system -- I think the ideal solution is for each school to have its own admission tests outside the scope of the SAT.
MIT is a VERY different place from Swarthmore, for example. Both are great schools, but using the same test as a basis for admission is silly.
nlh
Ferrari and other exotic car rentals in New York
For one reason or another (hmmm... maybe because they tend to go to better schools), white males score better on the SAT. The ETS has attempted to remedy this by making every single blasted essay question about a female of a minority gender. I'm dead serious. I really don't see how identifying with the person in the story can help your score, but whatever. I still scored well and learned a few things about photographers in the Harlem Rennaseance (sorry, spelling). Until the distribution of wealth among races is changed, test scores aren't going to be equal. Public schools are funded by property taxes. White neighborhoods tend to have big 'ol houses and thus get good school funding. Their kids turn out smart. Their kids buy nice houses. The cycle continues. Obviously, federalized education funding (but NOT federal education control) would fix this. As long as nobody is skimming money off the top, all schools would get equal funding/student. My school wouldn't be able to buy G4 Cubes and those massive apple cinema flat screen monitors, but schools in downtown Kansas City may actually be able to hire teachers with degrees and get accredidation.
The reason the tests are racist is because they don't test aptitude. They test knowledge which, like I said, whites have more of simply due to the inequity of their backgrounds. If it was test that evaluated aptitude in a similar fasion to the LSAT (law school entrance exam), the scores would show far less descrepancy. Unfortunately, colleges would rather not like to start from scratch with students who are naturally bright, but never had the chance to learn. They prefer a test like the SAT so that they get students with a decent bank of knowledge to start with, but they are mostly white students.
Someone's already addressed how you're talking abotu a former professor who never (afaik) hired students to work at his ISP anyway, so I (as another stuy2k) will address your english class issue. I have no clue how you managed to only take one english class. The official requirements (which in my four years they let noone get around) were that you must take eight english courses while at stuy (this amounts to one for every semester). If you had taken freshmen english in high school (as I had) then they will make you take a second set of senior english classes. Now, because they want to really drive home the importance of english, they are eliminating the acceleration and making everyone take freshman english at stuy.
Q:Doctor, how many autopsies have you performed on dead people?
A:All my autopsies have been performed on dead peop
While it's true that it is quite difficult to make qualitative selection of students instead of quantitative, it is certainly not impossible. I've taken the Preperation SAT tests in 10th grade, and although I did extremely well on them, I was struck by how totally irrelevant most of the questions were. 30% of the whole test involved figuring out where commas go. While this stuff might, just conceivably, be important for English majors, if I were planning to major in agriculture, I can't see how commas would constitute 30% of my education. More likely it would be cow shit instead.
Yes, it's true that it's difficult to qualitatively assess students, but now that Cal schools have done away with SATs and ACTs, do you think they are going to rely soley on GPA for admission? No. This move demonstrates that they are going to put more resources into more complete assessment of students, which is something I think colleges have overlooked for too long. Good for them.
-- Nerds on toast in the new millenium
Kind OT yeah, but maybe someone can help me...
I took the SAT about 5 or 6 years ago. The PSAT the year before that. I know I scored highly on both... PSAT was in the mid 1500's, SAT was over 1400... I can't remember the exact scores though. Can anyone give me any advice on how to dig up my old scores? I've tried the websites for the organizations involved, whicyh are singularly unhelpful... They also try to charge for my own damned SAT scores!
I just think it would be a nice bit of resmue buffing, at a time when I need resume buffing. Any help, folks?
P.S. Don't even get started on Stuy. My GF went there and sometimes her arrogance about it drives me up the wall. The worst part is how they act like anyone could go there... as if most of us ever had that opportunity. I hate arrogant elitists who *claim* anyone's allowed in their little clique. As if most of us ever got that opportunity. Oh well, I still love her. =P
-Kasreyn
Kasreyn: Cheerfully playing the part of Devil's Advocate to hairtrigger
it stood for "Saturday Afternoon Test".
It seems to me that admission is not only quantitative, it's EXTREMELY quantitative: it's binary.
About 2-3 years ago, beacuse of the controversy surrounding standardised testing, they changed the name from Scholastic Aptitude Test to Scholastic Achievement Test. Just another attempt to show how they were "keeping up with the times."
If I could only live my life with my threshold at 4...
[NC = No Content]
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Why does this article mention a 3.9 GPA at Stuyvesant? As a graduate ('98) the name jumped out at me. Is the idea that a 3.9 at Stuy is better than a 3.9 somewhere else? Well as a side note, they use a 60-100 point scale, with 60 being a failing grade. If the implication that a 3.9 is particularly impressive from Stuy, you might want to think twice. I have never met a place with a more serious case of grade inflation. In my AP Chemistry class my senior year, I did nothing, absolutely nothing. I don't think I got a grade higher than %85, yet I got a %90 in the class. Aside from that I scored a 1400 on the SATs, I did n't study. 1400 is a decent score I believe, but it was considered quite low amongst my friends and associates at Stuy. Now, while this may be construed as an argument as to why one should count a 3.9 from Stuy more than a 4.0 from East Troy, it is not. The important factor is to think about how I, and everyone else got into Stuy in the first place. We took a test, almost exaclty like the SATs. Those who scored well, got in, those with a slightly lower school got into Bronx Science, and then Brooklyn Tech. As you see, Stuyvesant students have been selected as excellent bubble fillers. I would argue that there is no finer group of American standardized test takers in the world. Because of that we were viewed as "smart" by our teachers, parents and the administration. It would not have been appropriate to asign us low grades, hence the inflation. josh p.s. I only took 1 english class at Stuyvesant, I managed to escape from all the rest. What does that say about my potential performance in college. Oh, and I'm doing pretty well in Grinnell College I have a 3.33 GPA, and I am a CS major. p.p.s. Stuyvesant has had a .edu domain ever since I attended. There is a professor there who runs his own ISP and staffs it with Stuy students.
no wonder the schools were turning you down.
the sat is out of 1600.
even if you're thinking of the act, a passing score is 17.
Any college admissions system worth it's salt has a multiple regression model that predicts the likely success of a student based on a variety of parameters - including the results of a standardized test like the SAT, the GPA, what school that GPA was attained at, what courses and track the student was enrolled in, and the extracurricular activities the student participated in, etc.
Questions like 'what is a 3.9 at Stuy' worth already have answers.
Blanket regection of standarized tests is stupid, for the simple reason that they provide a useful predictor of the likely success of a student.
MOVE 'ZIG'.
SATs and other college admission standards are slightly flawed in one way, certainly...
That is, they don't accomodate for learning disabilities very well.
First of all, there's no accomodations to level the playing field for people with LD. Sure, they can get more time on the test, but that's about all they can get... and to take the test LONGER is probably a DISADVANTAGE on its own, considering that kids aren't used to taking 3 hour tests on a Saturday morning as it is. And more time doesn't make taking the test easier for dyslexics, for example... it just gives you more time to struggle with it. If you're a real fighter, you'll manage to pull through... yet the fact that you probably fought harder to take that test than anyone else in the room won't probably be reflected in the score. The lazy kid with a brain across the room will probably have finished in 2 1/2 hours and got a 1600 by luck...
Second, a lot of learning disabilities go untreated and undiagnosed (or mistreated and misdiagnosed) through high school, because a lot of school systems are ill-equipped to deal with it - other than sending the kids to school on the "little yellow bus". Hence the kids are at an educational disadvantage at that point, even though they may be just as smart as anyone else.
Oh, and third, there's no standard way of communicating learning disability situations to universities... there's no little black circle to fill in for dyslexia or attention deficit disorder, for example. And if you decide to send a note to every school you apply to so that they'll know and adjust for it... their adjustment will probably be more like not letting you in because they know you'll cost them more money and time than, let's say, any of the normal alcoholics attending colleges today.
I know a student here at Penn state who got a 6.5 out of a 4.0 in high school. I on the other hand got a 91%.
I actually like standardized tests, because it gives kids who are very smart and very bored with high school a chance to prove their GPA wrong.
SetupWeasel
The SAT test questions are generally designed to be difficult to answer for people who attempt to study the test, rather than the material. Some people may actual gain knowledge of the material with SAT-specific testing, because certain important verbal or mathematical areas may be covered. Unlike the MCSE exam, perhaps, where there are a specific limited number of questions and they are repeated and can be memorized and smuggled out for test-prep courses, the SATs have the entire english language to use for analogies, for example.
That said, the effects of test-prep, even by the very best courses, are 120-150 points on the high end, for the total test. Historically, about 75% or so of those points disappear within about 8 weeks time after the studying stops. The rest is a "real gain". But that hardly invalidates the test. Notice there is no complaint by the president about the correlation between SAT scores and academic success in the article, only a complaints that, (1) the preoccupation with the test has led to time being spent on studying FOR the test, rather than just the subjects it examines and, (2) the test is not a 'holistic' look at a student's education.
To this absurdity, I offer some opinions: first, students of any type study for tests. When you sit even in a college class, when your professor chalks something up on a board, you write it down, and add it to your points to study especially. Are you studying for a test? Yes. Are you also learning? Quite possibly.
Second, the test need not be holistic. Nothing requires a school to specifically use an SAT score as a prime evaluation tool. In fact, it should be obvious, if the SAT correlated poorly with collegiate academic success, it would be only a small consideration, because colleges primarily want to seek students that will do well in their school.
No, the real problem here is that the UC system doesn't like to select students based on achievement or intelligence or their potential success, because that would leave out the people who can't hack it. Therefore, any test which places any sort of number on people's capabilities is bad. And, of course, since everyone in high school can get a 4.0 if standards are lowered enough, that poses no such problem. The need for everyone to pass, to feel ok, and to be labelled "educated" is what is TRULY responsible for the decline in academic performance. The subjects you teach and the rate you teach them at any level is a window. Through that window, you can capture an optimum learning environment for some subset of students -- the average, the low end, the high end, and you can extend the window with some things (like AP classes, say). Our education system up through high school has been slid down to the low end -- we want everyone to pass, to advance, regardless of their committment to learning, their parental participation, etc. Because of limited resources, the people at the high end sleep through high school and spend their time administering unix boxes remotely, making more than their parents. (Ok, not all of them, but one I know of, should be studying like a sophomore, but knows it all, and is making nearly $100k/yr, saving up for MIT).
UC Santa Cruz is a great example -- look how they've moved away from just narrative evaluations, because graduate schools want letter grades from students -- and they want a test, in every case, as well.
I've always looked at it this way. Part of the test IS the test itself. In order to get a good grade there are many things that are required beyond merely intelligence and logic. Firstmost you need to be able to read. Inability to read, or inability to read well, will greatly diminish your ability to perform well on the test; and this is part of the test.
I don't know about you, but when I took the SATs I had a reading passage from Thoreau. I turned the page, saw the name Thoreau, and let out an audible groan. I hate Thoreau, I hate plowing through his words. My inability to read Thoreau probably negatively affected my grade negatively, and I accept that. It was part of the test. A different author would have given me a different result, but it wasn't on my test. Thoreau was built into this test, and it hurt me. That's fine.
Things like dislexia will always hurt the person with it. It's not as if the real world opens up and slows down for the person with dislexia to take his time and do his or her job at his or her own pace. As a dislexic you're probably not going to make it as a book review for the New York Times... it's just unlikely. You'll also probably have a hard time with all written tests and written work for the rest of your life. This is not the fault of the SATs, this is just something about how you perform on tests and written work.
I have a hard time with Thoreau and since Thoreau was on my test I did less well. You have a hard time reading... this will always negatively affect you, and since it was on your test you performed less well. It accurately displays your ability to take a written test. It's accurate. I don't quite understand how it should be handled differently, or why.
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There are people who are very smart, but don't do tremendously well in school either because it bores them, or because they simply don't work hard. These people will have bad grades, but are still very intelligent and still can add to your institutes of higher learning. SAT scores, for this type of student, are traditionally quite high. These are the people you want around, even if they have goofed off in the past... the smart ones.
On the other hand there are people who get tremendously high grades, but are in general incompetent. I know you can all think of one of your friends or associates from high school or college who did extremely well on every test, but was otherwise a goof. Any conversation would leave them confused and befuddled. Even the most simple arguement would quite them with nothing more than a few fading protestations. These people do less well on the SATs... and rightfully so. They may work very hard, but they're not clever.
I guess it just depends what you consider more important. If you want someone who works hard but is unintelligent, then you go for someone with high grades and a low SAT. If you want someone clever but unmotivated, you choose high SAT but low grades.
Or you could just compare all available information and choose the best person. Why they don't just do this is beyond me.
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Yeah, I got a 1460 (740E/720M), then dropped out junior year, then went back senior year, then dropped out again. Now (~2 years later) I'm working full time as an embedded systems engineer. Sure is nice not having to worry about student loans :)
There are 11 types of people in the world: those who understand unary, and those who don't.
I've heard of these... would someone please deign to explain them to me or point me to an informative site? I went to a really piss-poor H.S. where such things were unheard of...
Thanks in advance,
-Kasreyn
Kasreyn: Cheerfully playing the part of Devil's Advocate to hairtrigger
Why, I wonder, is this considered? What about the SATs make them unbalanced... favored AGAINST minority students? It's not like the math questions involve how much insurance on Bentley's will cost, or finding the average price of Evian water over a three year period. I've always thought that these accusations of standardized testing being racist were unfounded.
Does anybody out there actually understand why they're often considered racist? I can't think of one solid reason.
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I really don't think a 3.9 GPA at Stuyvesant is really all that great. I happen to go to TJHSST (the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology) here in Alexandria, VA. Stuyvesant has been our "rival" for a while, but I think I can now safely say that TJ is one of (if not "the") best PUBLIC high schools in the country. We regularly have students winning national contests, and other such fun things. We have the most national merit semi-finalists in the country. We have a huge number of Intel Science Talent search semi finalists and finalists. In fact, Intel recently honored TJHSST and Stuyvesant for repeated excellence in the prestigious competition. (It's been going since 1944, originally the "Westinghouse Science Talent Search"). And, to top all that off, I have a 4.02 GPA. Bah!
(not to brag or anything...)
47.5% Slashdot Pure(52.5% Corrupt)
I would _LOVE_ to see something to come along to break up the ETS monopoly and put them out of buisness.
I recently had to re-take the GREs (having had my previous scores expire and thus literally deleted from their database system). Despite paying them what I would consider to be a substantial amount of money to take the test, I feel that in all my dealings with them, in person and on the phone, I was talked down with, distrusted, and treated overall with virtually none of the respect which I feel is intrinsic to to dealings with one's _customer_ in a service industry.
Devaluating their product (and introducing the possibility of competitive services), I feel would be the best step in forcing them to reconsider their role and position in dealing with their assumed captive audience.
--craig
Thinking back to my experience in the Florida public education system and I wonder about some things..
Why is it that history classes never covered anything after 1945 (i.e. WWII)? All the rest of american history was covered, why not modern history?
How come economics was not part of the curriculum? I can't even remember it being available at all as an elective much less a manditory course. Seems economics is pretty important to each and every american considing it's the reason we each can put food on the table and roofs over our heads.
Even basic stuff that we all need to know in the real world was never taught. How to balance a check book? How to budget our money? The implications of credit and savings?
Perhaps part of the problem is that the whole high-school has now been geared for 'college prep' when reality is that most high school students will not continue on to college.
My fondest memory of school is being sent to detention in middle school (think ~12-13 y.o.) for reading 1984 rather than paying attention to what was being taught at the time.
-- Greg
Slashdot, would a spell-checker for posting be too much to ask? It's not rocket science!
Eliminating the SAT is a move of ignorance. Contrary to popular belief, it is not designed to test how much you know or what you learned in high school. The test under discussion here, the SAT I, was designed to predict the taker's GPA in college. It does so remarkably well. Although I lost the notes from a psychology class where the prof went into great depth discussing the SAT's validity, I seem to recall that the correlation between SAT scores and college GPA was something like 0.7 (which is really high)---obviously after some formulas and conversions were applied.
If we want to discuss tests that test actual academic knowledge, that's what the SAT IIs are for. But that's a whole different issue.
Oh, and BTW: Stuy doesn't have letter grades or 1-4 scale GPAs. As of the class of 1999 at least, grades were on a scale of 55-100.
To be honest, I was never fond of SAT because they emphasize high-speed solving of many simple problems over solving a few difficult problems.
The alternative is entrance exams held by every school to determine the qualifications of the applicants in-house and according to their own faculty's criteria.
This, however, will break the U.S. university system where students are not asked to declare their major on application. As you can imagine, Harvard U. physics and history departments will have very different requirements for math entrance exam.
Yeah, I took the SAT and got a 930 first time, 1150 second time (after I had studied). Yes, these scores are mediocre at best, but I *did* manage to get accepted to Georgetown (decent school), got a 3.3 GPA there and now I am making a decent living as a software developer. I would also like to say that i am one of the better developers in my company. So yeah, SATs aren't a very good indicator of intelligence or aptitude (in my case anyway).
- Steve
polo --> sport --> soccer
horse --> equipment used by player to move around the field? --> cleats?
is this it or is it something else?
this part of the sat was my favorite part.
I assure you. Taking over the world is at the bottom of our agenda. Stuy '98
I scored very well on the ACT compared to my classmates. Top 1% in my school. I never would have gotten in to college without those high scores.
I was able to complete my degree (BSEE) from a pretty good school, which would have been very tough for most of the guys in my high school with better grades.
My point is that using those scores could be just as unfair as not using them. How can you base everything on the grades you got from your school when schools are so different?
I think the best way to judge students is to get as many different criteria as you can and view them in their totality, not to throw out all the ones that might be unfair -- they're all unfair to some people.
--tim
i took both the sat and the act before i went to college. i did not go to any prep school, but i did go to the library and look through the book that had sample questions in it. some of my friends did better than me, but i did above average.
i think the sat is more able to measure aptitude and the act is geared toward measuring knowlege. both can be good, but you have to know what you're measuring. you won't see any seventh grader taking the act, because so much of the test material depends on how far you've progressed through you're school's curriculum. but there are always a few who are encoraged to take the sat.
i think that overall these national standard tests provide a fair method to compare students' ability to succeed.
what i really wonder about is what standard will be used now?
- they can't use gpa. every highschool has an incentive to inflate their student's grades and this leads to an unfair comparison.
- they shouldn't (and can't in some areas) use race. making decisions based on race is in fact racist. so they are attempting to defeat percieved racism with more racism.
- they have decided not to use national standard tests like act and sat.
- they can develop their own test. they probably won't do this since its a lot of work and will have the same result as using the national tests.
what's left?
Oops. I had Stuyvesant confused with Bronx Science on the topic of the Intel Science Talent Search. Doesn't change too much else though.
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