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."

Comments

KHAAAAAAN!!!!

[Dan East]

KHAAAAAAN!!!!

Yeah yeah. I have karma to burn.

Re:KHAAAAAAN!!!!

[Stormy Dragon]

Drat, you beat me to it. ....

DAAAAANNN!!!!!

Re:KHAAAAAAN!!!!

[slew]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...

Glad they waited until I was done with college...

[Jade_Butterfly]

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.

What is the goal of the SAT?

[TheSync]

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)

Re:What is the goal of the SAT?

[tompaulco]

The goal of the SAT used to be to predict performance in college. Now it is used to predict how much effort one is willing to put into it to game the system. When I took the SAT, it was not something you studied for or took multiple times. You took it once, it showed how much you had learned, and you moved on. Now, there are college prep courses that focus on learning how to do better at the SAT. if you have lots of money and time, you can buy your way to a better grade. It has nothing to do with what you have learned in high school or how you will perform at university. Well, maybe it does show that you might be willing to throw gobs of cash at tutors and whatnot while at university. So maybe it is a positive predictor. After all, Universities are not about teaching, they are about making money. If you happen to learn something along the way, so much the better.

Re:What is the goal of the SAT?

[zlives]

" Universities are not about teaching, they are about making money"
+1 insightful. i continue to be impressed by the football programs though.

Re:What is the goal of the SAT?

[AthanasiusKircher]

The goal of the SAT used to be to predict performance in college. Now it is used to predict how much effort one is willing to put into it to game the system.

Well, it's always been about trying to predict college performance. Back in the late 60s through early 90s, it was a stable test format, normed rigorously through decades of testing, which was basically an IQ test and advanced reading comprehension test. Things like analogies and vocab testing both how well-read you were and your abstract ability to connect subtleties of meaning; things like quantitative comparisons tested logic and reasoning skills outside of normal basic math.

Then it was renormed in the mid 90s to make it about 100 points easier -- it no longer really could distinguish the top of the scale (which, if you look at the stats, appeared to be disappearing -- the actual number of perfect 1600s went down significantly in the 80s despite increases in number of test takers). The high-level critical reasoning was less stressed in many college programs too.

Gradually, over the past couple decades, the test has been further dumbed down, to service the increasing number of people who want to go to college and the decreasing number of people with high-level literacy and advanced critical reasoning. Analogies and quantitative comparisons disappeared. They added a writing test, but studies showed that the easiest way to get a high score was to write a longer essay, not actually have a stronger argument (at least not above some really basic level).

Increasingly, the test rewarded preparation instead of things harder to teach in some sort of crash prep course, like abstract reasoning.

The latest revisions just follow further in the efforts to service large number of unprepared people who want to attend college. Nobody reads at a high level anymore, so why bother with vocabulary beyond the basics? The test is aiming to be relevant for the average person, which is not where it started -- as an IQ test for the elite. At this point, it's not any better than high school grades for predicting college performance (and actually worse for people with high SAT scores but low GPAs, since it then basically is testing prep skills access to fancy crash courses, rather than higher-level reasoning). So they're basically turning it into a glorified set of midterm high school exams.

How about replacing the College Board?

[MacAndrew]

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....)

Re:How about replacing the College Board?

[slew]

Actually, at more selective schools, above a certain level, GPAs and SATs are totally uncorrelated to collegiate performance.

The best indicator of performance at selective schools (as most admission folks at selective schools will tell you), is sustained participation and leadership rolls in Extra Curricular activities (e.g., treasurer of Club X, going to State in sport Y, second chair playing instrument Z, attending Community college classes, volunteering w/ organization W, starting your own business, etc).

This is somewhat because nearly all high achievers have at least a little ego and many book worms don't tend to handle environments where they aren't the top performers grade-wise and have few alternative places to park their egos. Unlike the highly skewed distribution at Lake Wobegon, nearly 1/2 the folks are below average in a typical class.

You would probably be unsurprised at the vast number of applications that have 4.6 GPAs scored perfect on the SAT and as extra-curriculars list paying a "little-piano" and National Honor society. A standing joke is to wonder how little that piano actually is and how hard it must be to hit the note you want on those "little-keys".

Re:nice...

[oodaloop]

I think it might still grade spelling, grammar, punctuation, etc so you're still out of "luch".

we need more trades / tech schools / apprenticeshi

[Joe_Dragon]

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.

Re:Liberal arts professors' worst nightmare

[aardvarkjoe]

Your test is showing that too many students are unprepared for college? Well, we can solve that problem -- just change the test!

There's something fundamentally wrong with our schools when it is a rarity for a high school graduate to be capable of composing a short written essay.

For what jobs?

[rsilvergun]

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...

Re:For what jobs?

[Joe_Dragon]

and we don't need people loaded with theory but lacking in skills needed to do the job.

Re:For what jobs?

[lgw]

There's never been a decade where the amount of manufacturing in America has dropped. The manufacturing jobs have all gone, but the whole "bring robots to automate 90% of it" thing has been happening for 30 years now, and is mostly complete. The main reason China is having a crisis with its manufacturing sector is America is finally automating the tail end of stuff we used to send to China.

Yet we still have a school system tuned for producing manufacturing workers. We're not in a good place - we're about 20 years late in transforming our schools to produce engineers and artists instead.
 

Re:Glad they waited until I was done with college.

[gIobaljustin]

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.

It's correlated!

[schlachter]

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.

Re:Glad they waited until I was done with college.

[chihowa]

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.

Re:Liberal arts professors' worst nightmare

[buddyglass]

You have a curious definition of mediocre considering 1210 is higher than approximately 80% of test takers. Link.