Slashdot Mirror
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."
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'm not the OP but will answer... I've sat in front of a computer every day of my life, since my parents got us a Coco-I for Christmas.. I still remember the day I came home and found that my father had upgraded it to a whopping 16k using the piggyback method. I did the BBS thing and was on teh intarweb thingie long before the "web" part. In high school I used to program in x86 assembly language on my "True Blue" IBM 8086 PC for fun. I graduated and slaved for a number of years in a _miserable_ third shift job... loosing what little social life I had as a geek.
After which I finally had enough money to pay for school at a technical college. (being a single white male means society gives me nothing in the way of grants or other support) While at college, all of the other students would turn to me for help.. because I always had a firm grasp of the subject matter. My academic counselor/primary programming instructor even said one time that every time he always looked to me in class to make sure he wasn't making a mistake in the material.
I graduated... wrote up my resume.. and applied for job after job after job. I even managed to get an interview or two over time. I did this for two years but never managed to land a position in the computer field. Years of discouragement finally took its toll and I gave up on that hope. I don't regret all of the time and money and effort I put in to my college education.. I feel that if nothing else I can chalk it up as "personal enrichment"... but professionally it was a big waste.
I would have done better using the money to buy lottery tickets.
Well, I'm sure the normalization is at the national level, so there is meaning for some level of locality to say that it's scores have dropped.
I don't know how recent a development it is, but MIT does require foreign students to take the SAT or ACT. I had my GCSE (they don't do O Levels anymore) and A Level grades but I still had to make arrangements to do the American tests for my application. Interestingly high A Level grades in Maths and Physics can be used to skip certain parts of the first year's work, but not in place of the SAT/ACT for applications.
I've always said, you get as much out of school as you put into it. There's a lot of people I know who cheated their way through school, and when it came time to graduate, they had a lot of trouble getting a job, because they hadn't actually learned anything. However, if you spend your time learning the material, researching other related areas, and getting to know the important people, then going to university will probably do you a lot of good.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
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
I had good SAT scores. I chose an Ivy League school, which means needs based aid. I turned down 2 full-ride scholarships for what ended up being a marginal financial aid package that got progressively worse each year I was at school. Now I pay about 25% of my post-tax earnings to student loans.
That said, I didn't really do that well on the Math, my perfect Verbal score pulled my total score way up. So making a stupid money decision was well within character. I'll be sure to pass along this experience to my kids when/if they decide to got to college.
Two things I'd like to say:
1. The people dealing with the rankings and US News are probably not professors and students and the like. Don't confuse the business/political aspects of MIT with the school itself.
2. With regards to students doing stupid things...people here are brilliant. Brilliant does not equal common sense. In fact, there are large groups of people here that lack any kind of social awareness whatsoever (a friend of mine once referred to it as having "an air of asperger's to them"). However, this certainly does not make up the majority of MIT. Stupid people just get the press, unfortunately.