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MIT's SAT Math Error
theodp writes "The Wall Street Journal reports that for years now, MIT wasn't properly calculating the average freshmen SAT scores (reg.) used to determine U.S. News & World Report's influential annual rankings. In response to an inquiry made by The Tech regarding the school's recent drop in the rankings, MIT revealed that in past years it had excluded the test scores of foreign students as well as those who fared better on the ACT than the SAT, both violations of the U.S. News rules. MIT's reported first-quartile SAT verbal and math scores for the 2006 incoming class totaled 1380, a drop of 50 points from 2005."
I would have never gone to college. My degree is useless and I'm in lots of debt thanks to school loans.
and a minor in dupe detection ;-)
Table-ized A.I.
You can't compare any scores because it's all been rebased to be meaningless.
Back then, a 1400 really meant something, and a "perfect" score was a one or two person thing.
Does anyone actually rely on US News & Reports in making these sorts of decisions? I found the rankings laughable when choosing my undergraduate and graduate schools.
What is quartile?
First the bomb-girl with the board and playdough. Now this. I shudder to think what the Caltechies may do with this information for their next prank.
Why should the SAT scores of Foreign students count at all?
I ask because I know several people who graduated Jamaican high schools then enrolled in American universities, including MIT (There is a rumour going around that MIT is a good school).
Thing is many of those Jamaicans never did SAT at all. They either did the CXC (Caribbean Examination Council) exams or the British "O" Level and "A" Level exams.
Many US Universities (Including MIT) are happy with grades from those exams. So happy that you are not asked to pay school fees if you can run or jump.
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
Yet another hilarious prank, no doubt. I wonder how many kids scored 1337?
Just watch out when one of them attains the CEO position at your company.
"Hey, you know what would be a really hilarious number for our stock prices to hit?"
Uh oh.
When things get complex, multiply by the complex conjugate.
With the recent "MIT Student Arrested For Wearing 'Tech Art' Shirt At Airport" http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/09/21/1849208, and now this SAT Math calculating error at an institution that prides itself on being one of the most technically and quantitatively facile on the planet, can it get any worse for MIT?
Sucks for them I guess. I really don't think that the ACT/SAT scores should be used by colleges or universities. Instead, the IQ test score should be used. The ACT/SAT tells that you know stuff. The IQ test shows your ability to figure things out.
Perhaps from a math standpoint, the ACT and SAT could be useful. But the rest of the stuff in the tests... useless.
The game.
I don't normally put a lot of stock in standardized test scores, but with a total score of 1380 for an entire class, I can see how that might be a problem.
1380? I scored that, and I'm terrible at math. I always thought MIT was way out of my league, but I guess not.
That would explain the error prone nature....
Ahh, parent poster is a Troll, eh? Forbes publisher Rich Karlgaard would probably agree with AC. Is he a troll too? I saw far too many kids there for the party myself... the 'life experience' they called it. We even have online encyclopedias citing which schools paaar-tay the hardest. I'm sure that image doesn't hurt enrollment numbers and the government money flowing into universities. I wouldn't be surprised if universities quietly encourage that 'rep' via PR firms. College is big business. So big in fact that university finances have begun drawing the scrutiny of congress. We've even begun exporting American-style higher education. It may not be the best in the world, but it sure makes a shitload of money.
In the meantime, there's a lot of kids leaving college with a worthless degree and lots of debt. The university was enriched by the process, but you can't say that for all their graduates. I'll bet if the OP had mentioned something about outsourcing the post would be +5 Insightful.
I doubt a chemistry or a nuclear physics degree would be useless.
You didn't go to a school with a nuclear engineering or nuclear physics department, did you? I did (Georgia Tech), and the job market for those skills is ridiculously tight according to what I heard. Try to think of jobs for that degree. Think real hard, and you'll probably come up with a list of tightly regulated industries that aren't seeing much expansion or much in the way of fundamental research.
As for a chemistry degree, you're looking at poor job prospects unless you go on to grad school or at the very least do a lot of undergraduate research. I know from experience. When I was a chemistry major my freshman year, and I was seeking a job to help pay through school, the market for those jobs was super tight as well. That was a small part of what convinced me to switch to computer science. (The larger part was my clumsiness in the lab.)
You can get a well-paying job in Marketing or Business right out of undergrad as long as you don't screw around and manage to get low grades in super easy classes. Music can be tough unless you've got boatloads of talent, but I'd hardly expect someone who's regretting college to have majored in something as marketable as Marketing or Business.
Now, English or Philosophy or History might land you in no-job-land, but your examples are all really bad for showing degrees that are or aren't "useless."
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
At first I just chuckled at this, but then I thought about 5-6 years ago when I was applying to undergrad. If I saw that MIT's average SAT score was 1380, I would have applied because that is right around where I scored. If I saw that MIT's average SAT score was 1430, I wouldn't have applied (and I didn't).
There were hotter girls at my college anyway.
The reality of the situation is that SAT and GRE scores are so easy to doctor. I am an international student, and at MIT. I crammed 3000 words from word lists for the GRE. I scored 1480 (800 math + 680 verb). In terms of percentile scores, the math was 93% (even after a perfect :-) and the verb was 99%. Yet, my English really isn't as good as that of my fellow classmates, primarily because I am not really a native english speaker. So I think that a selectivity metric based on SAT / GRE scores is a weak one.
On the other hand, USNews rankings is a weak metric itself. But really, MIT is a great school - much bigger,better,faster than some California schools like to think.
I couldn't resist putting the last line in, after all, this mesg was posted from a 18.xxx.xx.xxx address.
" I saw far too many kids there for the party myself "
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m4422/is_n6_v15/ai_20860361
"Her dad once chastised her for wasting his tuition money by not going to her classes. With typical Esther aplomb, she countered, "Daddy, you don't understand. You don't come to Harvard to study. You come to Harvard to get to know the right people."
Need Mercedes parts ?
I really don't understand why it's called an error when it would most likely have to be deliberate to do that.
MIT is a prestigious institution. Does anybody really decide between Universities based on a US News rating?
Scoring high may or may not help you get into the right school. The right school will make a difference for pretty much your first job. After that, if people are even mentioning your education other than in passing during an interview, you've already lost.
I know very few people who value educational qualifications over proven experience. Of course, the tech world is a bit different than the rest of the business world, but this is slashdot.
Oh sure, find the problem NOW!
- JW, SAT=1380, RPI '88 thank you ever so much (99% of the people I knew at frickin' RPI were there because like me they got bagged by MIT)
Why should the SAT scores of Foreign students count at all?
That's not the question at hand. Rather, if everyone else is reporting them, why should MIT be exempt?
-Bill
SlashSig Karma: Excellent (mostly affected by moderatio
True.
That happens. Sometimes you look at a disparity and ask "why doesn't the misfit follow suite" Other times you ask "Why doesn't everyone else follow the misfit."
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
Otherwise, the only viable way to keep selectivity in(and keep things civil) is to literally make it forbidden to state more than just a standardized(should a university try to come up with a university specific major) degree status of a person in the workplace.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
As someone who actually has a bachelors chemistry degree, and has been using it for 15 years, I can report that your impression of the job market from a freshman's perspective was off.
Well then I'm glad to say that I was wrong, and that my experience was not indicative of the field as a whole. It kind of makes me nostalgic thinking about the possibilities of what could've been; I really did love the subject matter, and it's good to hear that people pursuing it aren't necessarily "in for a penny, in for a pound" when it comes to requiring advanced degrees to get a job.
We can still pity the Nukees though, right?
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
The number of people saying "OMG? MIT has a mean of 1380?!" somewhat disturbs me. Apparently, 25% of people at MIT have an SAT of 1380 or lower. That's all this means. To be fair, though, when comparing top schools it's most meaningful to look at the bottom quartile. After all, we know they all have lots of smart kids; the question is, how many not-so-smart kids do they have? Whatever, this only tarnishes the name of whoever made the mistake, not the school itself.
Yes, well, another proof that SAT is NP-hard.
So it is not normalized based on the year you take it. It is correlated to the kids who took it last year, and what score they got. Of course, its a much more complicated algorithm spread out over millions of students. But, in essence, the questions *are the same* and the statistics are mind numbing so that it stays fair. Its actually a very smart system.
the byproduct of years of oppression by the white man
...this post was about the famous boolean satisfiability problem. :(
Here I always thought MIT was full of really smart kids, and a relatively normal person like me could never get in. I always sorta figured MIT only took people with crazy-high SAT scores, like 1500 or more. But 1380, that's only sixty points higher than _my_ score, when I took it in 1993, and if that's the _average_... I'm probably within the range of what they accept, not even taking into account the College Board's "recentering" of the scale in '95. Not to mention, I only took the thing once and might've been able to squeeze out a few more points if I took it a couple more times.
I probably could've got into MIT if I wanted. Huh. Never would've guessed that.
Not that I necessarily would've chosen to go there (I'm actually quite happy with where I did go), but it's interesting to think about.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
It's Affirmative Action for people who don't know as much!
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
The first thing I note is that, for an institution as brilliant as MIT to make an error that increases their ranking seems a bit suspicious. Despite the fact that many readers here see little or no purpose to these rankings, they are horribly influential, and the difference reported is substantial. MIT is good enough to be great without cheating.
The second point is that many schools are very careful when examining foriegn test scores because of cheating supported by the government. It is well-known that many countries actively encourage cheating (which helps the students get grants or acceptance). The school where I was had a watch list and would ignore scores outright from many countries. Makes me wonder whether they still reported these suspect high scores as part of their average (I expect they did).
...And where you go to school. I got a philosophy degree at Rutgers, one of the best analytic philosophy schools in the world. Whenever someone asks me, with a superscillious smirk, "How is philosophy useful in computer science?" I give them a deadpan look and say, "I did my senior thesis on finite automata and fuzzy logic trees, I took 4 more hard logic classes than are required for a CS degree, and my advisor was one of the greatest living cognitive scientists in the world. You tell me." Of course it helps that I took a frickton of CompSci as well.
Unless you went to some school whose idea of philosophy is ancient philosophy and subjective continental philosophy, you can pitch it successfully to anyone, as long as you can also show skills in whatever you're actually applying for.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
I work as a consultant doing programming. I have been a consultant for over a decade, and was a regular employee in the decade before that. I got my Master's in Astro-Physics about 20 years ago. In interviews clients always ask about my degree. I always quip that: "majoring in Astro-Physics is like majoring in Art History. Only with a lot more Math, and a lot fewer jobs." Many people with degrees in Physics find work outside of the field. The training you get in critical thinking and problem solving is useful in many fields. Some people do work in physics. I have friends who started at Intel right out of undergrad, one is still there. Two went on to get Phd's. A few went to National labs. Most of the people I got my undergrad degree with are in fields that have their own tracks, and they are doing as well or better than their peers in the field.
All that means is that they don't put as much emphasis on the SAT score. I had a 3.8x in high school, and an SAT score of about their average, but didn't get in. Probably lacking enough in extra-curricular activities, who knows?
I probably could've got into MIT if I wanted.Probably so, but it wouldn't be because of SAT score.
There have got to be programs out there that would kill to get a combined 1380 for the entire team. Then again, there are programs who just don't care either, as long as you can run a 4.3 40.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
The parent is 100% correct.
I see this dichotomy in what my wife and I got out of college:
I, unfortunately, was one of those "skate where you can" students--I aced the tests and did just the minimum amount of coursework to pass. I rarely cracked a (course-related) book, paid attention in lectures, or participated in discussions. I got a few things out of my college years--generally from required courses in subject areas I wouldn't normally have taken and actually had to learn about to pass the classes--but most of that was in spite of myself. I often regret the wasted opportunities to learn.
My wife, on the other hand, was diligent and attentive. She is one of those students who writes a 30 page paper when 20 pages are required, who always asked questions when she didn't understand something or needed clarification, and just generally worked to get all the possible benefit from her time in school. She took difficult classes as a choice, carried more than a full load of classes, and came out way more well-rounded and with a greater breadth of interests and knowledge than when she started. She put way more effort into her courses than I did, and obviously got a lot more out of them, too.
Your whole educational experience is a matter of getting out what you put in. I wish I'd invested more time and attention.
Interested in a Flash-based MAME front end? Visit mame.danzbb.com
You and your parents were fooled into thinking an expensive college translates to success. Now you've learned the truth.
Only buy as much college as you can afford without taking loans. Graduating from college without debt puts you ahead of the game financially by 10 years.
Go to a cheap in-state school. After you graduate you learn the ugly truth that college snobbery is an expensive indulgence best left to upper class blue-bloods.
And if you think the national attention a couple of incidents receive is intense, try the Boston-area coverage for even smaller issues.
Warning: Apple/Nintendo fangirl. Likes her electronics cute & cuddly. May be rabid.
"Education does not promise you money"
http://www.nd.edu/prospective-students/
and scroll down to "find your path". You tell me what they are selling undergraduates.
or, look here and tell me what these institutions are really interested in:
http://www.duke.edu/about.html#Giving%20to%20Duke
You're right thought... it doesn't promise the students money, it's about getting money to the University. It's all about that.
I happen to be one of those people with a high IQ but who, much to my chagrin, could never score well on standardized tests. I have Ph.D., a good job (actually doing what I was trained to do), and am making contributions to my field. Yet my SAT scores were not particularly strong and neither were my GRE scores. I always just barely got into schools and had to fight to get over the threshold into opportunities I cared about. However, give me a real problem to solve and I instinctively find creative solutions. People view me as someone who is sharp, creative, and insightful. That is, until the topic of standardized tests scores comes up. You might be surprised to learn how many people still strongly judge others based on scores received when they were 18 (even twenty years later, i.e. after dozens of other worldly accomplishments). It is as if a mediocre SAT score invalidates all other integrated personal accomplishments and suddenly poisons their viewpoint of you. People start seeing your real skills and accomplishments in a discolored light: we thought you were an Alpha, but clearly you are just a lucky Delta. On the other extreme, I have known many people whose greatest accomplishment in life was getting above 1300 on the SAT (pre 1990). The fact that they have made no meaningful contribution to anything since then does not seem to faze people. Poor unlucky Alphas! They remind me of the cliche high school football star who, twenty years later, still relives the glory days while swilling beer in his mother's basement after working a long day at Burger Barn. Anyway, I don't want to sound too bitter. Things worked out for me. However, it is clear standardized test score do measure something, I just don't know exactly what that is (except perhaps the ability to take standardized tests).
I'm not a big fan of the SAT or other standardized testing, but having worked with college admissions, I can tell you that in general SATs/ACTs (or other standardized tests) are generally used only as a dispersion function. You have this huge multi-dimensional space on which to rank candidates, but it's a crap shoot trying to balance all the criteria with subjective and objective components. So what's to do other than apply some weighting/dispersion function that's at least weakly correlated (e.g., SAT)?
It's my opinion that the results are mostly arbitrary, but at least you don't spend a zillion years arguing about whether a 3.4GPA student that plays the violin and being president of a chess club in a 500 person high-school is better than a 3.2GPU student that play a little-piano and being the secretary of the math club on a 1000 person high-school when you make the final ordered list near the cutoff line between accepts and wait-lists and rejects.
Remember, on the admission committees, they basically haven't met any of these students (except perhaps if they have been interviewed and then only member at best), nor have them usually met any of the people writing letters the reccommendations (other than to remember some teachers/councellors that write multiple recs or have a history with the school). Students other than very coarsly ordered have pretty much arbitrary GPAs having taking classes from teachers with different grading scales and class ranks in schools of different sizes are nearly impossible to compare not to mention most students exaggerate their involvement with extra curriculars (or even make them up at times)... you get the picture...
That's why schools (led by university of california and others) have been demanding better SATs for years that have better correlation factors because they don't have really have much objective criteria to go on to begin with...
Here are the links for those who are interested:
http://www.collegeboard.com/highered/ra/sat/sat_data_equiv.html
http://www.collegeboard.com/about/news_info/cbsenior/equiv/rt019019.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAT#History.2C_name_changes_and_recentered_scores
My "recentered" score is 1550 (my pre-'95 score was 1470).
And how many make $50k+ without either of those? I was doing so within a year of college (Diploma, no degree), and even that was based very much on my experience as opposed to my education/grades/courses/etc
Wasn't this the school with the admission's dean who got fired because she fudged her resume so long ago?
I got a 99th percentile overall, and was rejected admission to pharmacy school. The test means nothing, except being a trick to test applicants for engrish proficiency. Can't graduate Asians who are unable to speaky the english to stupid American pill eaters. Got to look out for Walgreens and CVS's bottom lines
not that it really matters ;^)
...not being one of those kids who studied hard and got a really high SAT score. I probably could have gone to a better school or gotten a scholarship. :-(
Sadly, part of the reason you got rejected, is where you went to high school...
One of the worst things is that many schools will accept the best SAT/ACT score that you submit not because it's the best measure, but because then they get to report that SAT/ACT score in their statistics. In fact, some will even cherry pick the best verbal and the best math from the set. It's just insane. There's an economics paper on the topic, titled, "Retaking the SAT" By Vigdor and Clotfelter in the journal of human resources, 2002ish.
for the liberal arts majors unless they are from a well known school or have other connections.
Count your blessings.
Because if you do like I do, then it's best to leave the state like everyone else has done in the last decade. Ohio has no IT jobs.