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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."
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.
I pitty the fool... stay in school
Make SELinux enforcing again!
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.
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.
What is quartile?
Don't worry, you're not in it.
Table-ized A.I.
By the way, I had been under the impression that engineering degrees were generally for people who wanted to make money (in a normal-ish job) after graduation, while sciences were for people who either wanted to be, or accepted the risk of being in academia for life. Is that not the case?
ResidntGeek
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 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 ?
Well, English and philosophy are two of the recommended undergrad degrees taken in conjunction with pre-law to gain entry into law schools. So the Bachelor's degree by itself may not be spectacular, but it can set one apart from all those political science majors. History might also be a good choice. See University of Missouri St. Louis Political Science department's information on studying Law for just one program that mentions English and philosophy both as options.
Also, consider that many state government positions have a prerequisite of any Bachelor's degree from any accredited college. In Illinois, for example, many decent jobs with good benefits can plausibly be had with a degree in Liberal Arts or Medieval Literature, although you might be up against candidates who might have studied something more directly relevant. For some fields within the Illinois state government, the degree requirement can be waived for experience.
"I had been under the impression that engineering degrees were generally for people who wanted to make money (in a normal-ish job) after graduation, while sciences were for people who either wanted to be, or accepted the risk of being in academia for life. Is that not the case?"
I think that anyone who wants an engineering degree for the money will be disappointed. I have a degree in chemical engineering, and I make $55,000 (that is with 10 months of experience). That sounds like a lot for being just out of school, but given the extra effort of obtaining the degree, and the amount of work that is expected from me at my job, I don't think it's a better deal than a liberal arts degree would've been. I think that the value of any degree is what you do with it. If you work to gain valuable experience, advocate yourself, and work well with others, you can make a 6 figure income with any degree.
I am in the field because I am passionate about making peoples lives better, and I feel like engineering accomplishes that. I don't want to work forever in academia, because I feel like all the mindless bureaucracy and politics of the university makes enriching the lives of others nearly impossible. Of course, if I did want to work forever in academics, I could still do that with an engineering degree.
Let me fix that for you... 1) Work 2) Profit! There you go.
Most people aren't thought about after they're gone. "I wonder where Rob got the plutonium" is better than most get.
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.
Yes but consider this. The average starting salary of a liberal arts degree holder is generally quoted as $30-35k. The average starting salary of an engineering degree holder is generally quoted in the $50-55k range. That's a pretty significant difference - the engineering degree yields a return of 40 to 80% straight off the bat. Granted the engineering degree is harder but I'd say it's well worth the effort.
Now that said, I do agree with you that a degree is only as valuable as you make it (to a certain point). But I think taking these numbers in the aggregate probably cuts a lot of the variance due to super high- and low- achievers.
Oh, I dunno. I used to go drinking with the MIT women's rugby team. They were fun to drink with, since we shared the same taste in women.
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
Mr T pities all of the fools, all of the time!
What if Tetris was invented by Nazis?
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.
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.
Having a college degree confirms that the bearer can finish college. This isn't trivial: someone who claims to have equivalent knowledge without the degree may, in fact, lack discipline or the ability to embark on long-term projects. Just knowing that someone can do the things required to get a degree is an important piece of positive information above and beyond the demonstrated learning that the degree indicates.
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).
Or just take a DeLorean back in time make sure that your father follows that truly wise advise:
Don't be a fool. Wrap your tool.
...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.
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.
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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.
"what do you expect when you're 22?"
A six figure income, no dress code, full benefits, three assistants, and a 32 hour work week??
"But this one goes to 11!"