Slashdot Mirror
College Board To Rethink the SAT, Partner With Khan Academy
An anonymous reader writes "According to the NY Times, 'Saying its college admission exams do not focus enough on the important academic skills, the College Board announced on Wednesday a fundamental rethinking of the SAT, eliminating obligatory essays, ending the longstanding penalty for guessing wrong and cutting obscure vocabulary words. ... The SAT's rarefied vocabulary words will be replaced by words that are common in college courses, such as "empirical" and "synthesis." The math questions, now scattered widely across many topics, will focus more narrowly on linear equations, functions and proportional thinking. The use of a calculator will no longer be allowed on some of the math sections.' The College Board will also be working with Khan Academy to provide students with free, online practice problems and instructional videos. The new version of the SAT will be introduced in 2016."
KHAAAAAAN!!!!
Yeah yeah. I have karma to burn.
Better known as 318230.
Cause thats what highschool students crave.
The current college entrance tests make it easy to game the system, even for someone like me, who had an ultra low high school GPA. They test knowledge that is easy to learn during a few last minute cramming sessions. These changes might actually make them fair tests.
Not only are college students incapable of effective written communication, no one will know about it until they show up in your class the first week and turn in a paper written in nothing but accordion paragraphs.
I thought the goal of the SAT was to predict performance in college, not to gauge "important academic skills".
I suspect actual college performance is best predicted by having the students drink, do drugs, and have sex all night - then have a high-stakes test at 6AM in the morning! (You score some for just making it out of bed BTW)
While they debate what to do ... the Board itself should be challenged for its power and profiteering. They overcharge for things that should be dirt cheap like score reporting, keep pumping out more and more tests, and have surprisingly little proof of the validity of the tests themselves. Meanwhile the test prep industry is making millions, providing (or insinuating) false claims of what they can deliver, and helping wealth discrimination.
Closely timed fill-in-the-bubble test-taking skills are not valuable life skills, in college or elsewhere. FWIW I'm speaking as someone who got near-perfect SAT scores, as did my son, and have to admit it's a scam. The scores do mean *something,* but it's all gotten out of control. GPA is the single best predictor of performance. (But don't get me started on grade inflation....)
If scores go down after this it will be received as proof that kids today are all morons.
If scores go up after this it will be received as proof that they had to dumb down the test because kids today are all morons.
42 years too late.
it's really nice to hear the the test that almost totally defined my future opportunities that I took when i was 16 (1982), barely old enough to understand much about career and life...
when what collage you were accepted to and what you were to study pretty much defined how successful you could be (thank god those times are changing fast, tbh)... ...has been "fundamentally rethought" and judged wanting in many areas...
what is this really telling people in my age group??
"whoops...sorry about that...due to our ignorance you missed 60 points on the test that could have helped you get scholarship money and/or admission to a significantly better schoo...better luch next time, oh our bad, there isn't any next time"
or some shit like that....sigh.
never bring a twinkie to a food fight.
Nah. My high standardized test scores got me into pretty much any college I wanted two decades ago, despite not really attending much of high school.
than I learned in 4 years of high school.
Any role Khan is allowed to play in formal education is a great thing.
So basically they're going to dumb down the test so that the scores will be higher.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
They need to get rid of the SATs altogether. They distort the schooling system and do not show one's competence in learning in the long run at all.
The SAT, the ACT and to some extent the AP examinations have always had two purposes. FIrst to let high ranking schools have a tool to compare students from completely different backgrounds, so an A student from school X can be compared to an A student from school Y even if the rest of the student body is not comparable. Second to let State U know if a B student from in-state schools will be able to succeed in various fields at said state school.
Moving to a 1600 pt system doesn't change either of these. The kids who start preparing for the SAT/ACT/AP exams in 8th grade will continue to outscore (on average) the kids who start preparing in 10th grade. The B students who didn't learn enough in high school and start preparing in 11th grade will wind up in the same quartile they would have placed had the test been based on 2400 with essay.
Maybe I'm wrong and there are lots of states where a top 10%- GPA paired with a reasonable SAT is not enough to get into State U. That's not going to change. At the same time, for admittance to elite schools there must be a metric, at a national level, to decide between candidates. Any such metric will favor certain socioeconomic groups.
we need more trades / tech schools / apprenticeships so college can go back to it's roots and be filled with people who should be in some other place that is both a better fit for them and is better at teaching real hands on skills.
basketball and football need minor leagues so they don't end up Dumbing down for people who should not be there. Not saying that all of them are really bumb but lot's of them can be better both playing and learning a trade and / or going to a tech school.
SAT is NP-complete
Sounds like the College Board will concentrate on evaluating an increasingly dysfunctional middle and abandoning the top 0.1-2% with the SAT. Probably a battery of advanced, expensive achievement / AP tests for the top 2%-5% well educated students, forget about finding untrained native ability. This is a disaster to the poor but promising who can't afford to great schools.
There's no manufacturing to speak of in America. It costs too much to employe Americans. If you bring back manufacturing you bring robots to automate 90% of it.
Turns out, the world doesn't really need ditch diggers anymore...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
FWIW there are tons of trade and tech schools in the US. Some need to better advertise for sure. While others need to evaluate their tuition costs, among other issues. For example, local non-profit trade school annual tuition was about $14k for a refrigeration tech. That's twice what I paid for tuition at a state university.
I don't know what "fair" means, but I really don't see where they're improving these tests so that they test for something other than rote memorization.
Thank you Dave Raggett
> They test knowledge that is easy to learn during a few last minute cramming sessions.
BULL SHIT
studies have repeatedly show that those SAT prep courses have minimal gain and similarly retaking the test has minimal impact.
People already retake the test too often...with your approach they'd be retaking it every day!
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
Well, the use of the word "prediction" aside, it IS CORRELATED with performance in college more so than any other measure...so it's not a meaningless test, at least at the population level. I believe it's correlated at around 0.3 which is very high for social science...whereas HS GPA is more like 0.25.
Nonetheless, none of what I wrote above means that it is a good test, I'm sure there's room for improvement. Sounds like these are good changes coming.
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
Actually our school system is tuned to producing neither.
If we were producing manufacturing workers, you'd see way more vocational programs with companies deeply involved in apprenticing students so that by the time they are 16 they can go work in the factory or as a skilled laborer.
We should be producing BOTH. The economy would benefit from both.
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
I taught a couple of the GRE prep courses in college and I disagree (though not for the reasons the prep companies will likely say). The prep courses make you practice, which allows you to solve the problems more quickly and this makes a huge difference. These are timed tests.
I don't remember the SAT well (it's been forever since I took it, but I did do extremely well which helped moderate my poor high school GPA), but the GRE was based very heavily around high-school level skills that needed to be performed quickly to score well. If you hadn't solved some of these problems in years, you'd get them correct but waste time remembering the best strategy for solving them. (Trig, for instance, isn't hard but I never use it and I'm in a math-based field. It took a little while to remember how to quickly solve the problems.)
There's no need to take the prep courses to do well (I didn't), but practice pays off big and the courses encourage you to practice.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
I am more worried about a bunch of musty old farts at the 'College Board' ruining Khan Academy.
Removing the penalty for guessing on a timed multiple choice test is dumb. It will only penalize those test takers who don't realize its now advantageous to guess on all remaining questions (as opposed to leaving them blank) if they're about to run out of time and haven't finished a section.
Maybe retaking it doesn't help, and maybe even practice tests, and prep courses don't help. However I did have a significant boost in score between my PSAT and SAT tests. That could be accounted for due to additional classes though and the introduction of new materials I hadn't yet studied when I took my PSAT test though too. Either way kids really do improve between the time they take the PSAT tests and the SAT tests. My scores were significantly better. I did have private lessons and I'm not sure much was gained from it even if my scores were much higher. By the time I had the private lessons in the afternoon (after school) my brain was fried. I can't imagine much was retained and the process of figuring anything out was near a complete failure. I bet the kids who see the best scores are those who get the best night sleep and the best foods the week prior to taking the test.
Essay writing isn't a key skill useful for college or thereafter?
Penalizing students for guessing is somehow no longer a good idea?
I appreciate their thinking about the issues, but the conclusions seem odd to me.
This is an excellent comment. Would bump you up if I had mod points. The notion of practicing so that you can solve problems quickly is hugely important on these exams (any exam with a time limit).
The value of prep courses does extend beyond practicing, though. In particular, testing for things like arcane vocabulary encourages prep courses (or at least books and self prep). There also is some value in coaching and exam strategy. I suspect that this could lead to increases in people's scores (e.g., coaching students to not answer a question if they are unsure of the answer since, at least until the new format, you lose points for wrong answers).
The alliance with Khan Academy is interesting. The education system is stacked heavily in favor of those from the higher rungs of the economic ladder. Although it's not strictly about money (a free course is not useful if culture/family/teachers do not push students to take it and take it seriously), this is a nice step in the right direction.
Never going to happen. trade schools do not have fraternities and are too much like working. Apprenticeship are great, for a career, and for learning, but they are not high school 2.0, with more drinking, sex, and drugs, so they are never going to attract 99% of the college going population.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
"Rote" memorization? Care to expound? How are the exam's existing compositional components samplings of rote memorization? How is the reading comprehension so? Beyond knowing formulas, how are the computational components of the SAT tests of rote memorization? What is it of a high school student that you want tested, exactly? U.S. students who score highly on "IQ" tests also perform highly on the SAT (http://www.sq.4mg.com/IQ-SAT.htm). It is not only an examination of what one knows, but more significantly, how efficiently one COMES to know, as well as their ability to understand and express/communicate what it is that they have come to know. It certainly measures how quickly all of this can be done, given that it is a time-limited exam together with punishing incorrect answers (guesses).
How about citing some sources for your claims.
Those "best indicators of performance at selective schools" of yours beg the question--you limit it to "selective" schools. Of course the most socially adept of a selective school's incoming students will do relatively well--they are not only qualified for admittance to selective schools based on GPA and standardized test scores, like their cohorts, they are also the least likely to suffer negative impact from social anxieties associated with moving away from friends and family for the first time into an environment where they are no longer the "special" ones, but among equally capable individuals.
1. GRE != SAT
2. How much (useful) practice can you do in a 'late-night' cram session?
3. You're wrong, suck it.
http://online.wsj.com/news/art...
"It found that SAT coaching resulted in about 30 points in score improvement on the SAT, out of a possible 1600, and less than one point out of a possible 36 on the ACT, the other main college-entrance exam"
Anyone have any examples of the "rarefied vocabulary" used by the SAT?
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
The unemployment rate for plumbers and electricians in the U.S. is around 10%. Worse for other trades. A lot of people in the trades who do have jobs or own businesses are barely scraping by. The shortage of tradesmen in the U.S. is as fictional as the STEM shortage.
The current college entrance tests make it easy to game the system, even for someone like me, who had an ultra low high school GPA. They test knowledge that is easy to learn during a few last minute cramming sessions. These changes might actually make them fair tests.
College.
The only institution in the universe that charges you tens of thousands of dollars for an education, while people cram and cram to get scores high enough to obtain the right to hook up their wallet to said institution, to obtain questionable results that may or may not have an impact on you being able to do jack shit with said education.
Ever.
Hey, at least get a nice frame for it. Don't cheap out on that piece of paper now. Shit ought to be gilded. You paid enough for it.
(Sorry, got off on a tangent there when you started talking about college and "fair"...I started laughing hysterically.)
It's more about he SATs being the culmination of a ground-up flawed educational institution.
So only the upper middle class can apply? Because secondary education is rapidly coming a caste system, where the only people who can afford the risk of 5 or 6 figures of student debt are those who's parent's are well off. And that's university.....the #1 factor in how well a student does in grade school is the economic situation of the student's parents.
I think practice is the biggest thing for increasing your score, but coaching makes a big difference. I remember the prep book I read in high school and a couple of things still stick out (although this was a long, long time ago on the paper test).
1. If you are unsure of your answer early in the test, go with your gut. These are supposed to be relatively easy questions so your gut is likely to be correct.
2. If you are unsure of your answer later in the test, the answer is unlikely to be the obvious because these are harder questions.
3. Guessing is OK if you can eliminate one (or is it two?) answers from the multiple choice. The odds are you will increase your score in that case.
4. Time management for paper tests - if a problem is taking too long, come back to it.
These might seem obvious, but there are a lot of students that don't hear these tips. This was for a paper test, but when I took the adaptive, computerized GRE there were similar tips (#4 doesn't apply. #1 and #2 apply differently because the test can get harder more quickly, but I don't remember the rule-of-thumb for those).
Astounding. They are doing it to themselves and wondering where the American Dream went.
"They test knowledge that is easy to learn during a few last minute cramming sessions."
You mean, like everything they do in high school? By getting a good SAT you have proven you could have gotten an A in every high school class had you wanted to. The test did exactly what it set out to do.
... studies have repeatedly show [sic] that ....
Any time someone mentions "studies" without providing the date of the study, the name of the institution and researcher(s) conducting the study and the specific scientific journal the results were published in, you know they're blowing smoke.
In other words, 285.
Do you have a source for that other than "admission folks"? Casual web searching didn't find anything.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
How about googling the history of the SAT? People think every comment needs to be an wikipedia article.