Everyone who took or is taking the SAT should read this

Test Preparation
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<p>Tiger</a> Woods and the Superstar Effect - WSJ.com</p>

<p>And thus, the reason why the current system of standardized system in place to evaluate students' ability to perform in college is a complete toss up. I wonder what would happen if at one school they let students take the SAT/ACT in a room by themselves? I would wager they would perform significantly better. </p>

<p>I'm sure that many people, including myself, have experienced this "superstar effect." I took an SAT practice test two weeks before the real thing with a fairly small group of people whom I neither knew them or their academic ability and scored a 2300. Come test day in March, I was in a room with a much larger group of people, many of them people I knew. On the real thing, I scored a 2140. I'd like to know what other people think about this.</p>

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<p>That was a great read, especially for a golfer such as myself. Thanks for posting. :)</p>

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<p>… so? If you’re this intimidated by “superstars”, seems to me that score more accurately reflects your ability than your “alone in a room” score, considering challenges college and real life likely will not involve you sitting alone in a room. </p>

<p>Hell, what would you do when you actually go to a place where everybody is a superstar? </p>

<p>And really, I might give up if another person seems to dominate me in a competition, but I have never been influence by another person’s performance in something that will never even begin to influence mine.</p>

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<p>bump…anyone?</p>

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<p>And you can make girls score worse on the math section by reminding them that they are girls, regardless of if anyone involved believes the stereotype that girls are bad at math. What are you going to do to stop that?</p>

<p>You cannot hope to account for subtle psychological factors that may or may not affect performance. There’s just no way to do it.</p>

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<p>“And you can make girls score worse on the math section by reminding them that they are girls, regardless of if anyone involved believes the stereotype that girls are bad at math. What are you going to do to stop that?”</p>

<p>In my school, it’s the girls who are math people.</p>

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<p>Very interesting article, thanks for posting. I feel very badly for teens these days, so many of them become so focused on these (very flawed, in my opinion) test scores, that they lose sight of things. Please do not allow a number to define who you are, or think you are. You are so much more than a number and a good admin will see that! </p>

<p>And as for the girls and math thing, a little story. When my daughter was in first grade, she got a perfect score on a math test. A boy in her class was upset because he didn’t do as well as she did. He apparently went home and talked to his MOM about it. The next day he told my daughter that his MOM told him not to worry about it, when the work gets harder, my daughter won’t be able to keep up because girls are not as good at math as boys. My daughter came home in tears and has hated math ever since! No matter how hard we have worked to convince her otherwise, that seed was planted and continues to grow. Needless to say, that was her last perfect score on a math test.</p>

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<p>For the girls and math thing, at my school there are more girls taking Calculus BC than guys. But then again the youngest person in Calculus AB is a guy.</p>

<p>Don’t know what the point of this post is, but oh well…I’m posting it.</p>

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<p>Fishymom – The seed that the little boy’s mother planted in her son is a worse one yet. The idea that he doesn’t need to respect girls because they are not as worthy as boys, not just in math but in everything. That’s going to cause him (and her) big trouble down the road. </p>

<p>Hugs for your daughter. I hope one day she comes to understand her own powers.</p>

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<p>This isn’t necessarily just a “superstar” thing, it’s a self-confidence thing. </p>

<p>There was a similar study made with race: a group of African-American students performed worse on average when proctored by a white male and led to perceive the test as racially biased than when proctored by a black male and led to perceive the test as unbiased, on the same test.</p>

<p>If you walk into that test room convinced you WILL perform exactly as you expect on a practice test, you probably will.</p>

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<p>I’m guessing, Phil, A. Kim and Lee Westwood didn’t get a chance to read the article before heading to Augusta.</p>

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<p>I experienced a 100 point jump from all of my 15 SAT practice tests by being chill, nonchalant, keeping low expectations, thinking that it doesnt matter, and focusing on only the test, not my surroundings</p>

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<p>Or you (OP) just had testing day jitters, which I think is a far more likely explanation. </p>

<p>Next time you take it, just walk in assuming you are said “superstar”. How do you think I received a perfect score. (I’m being facetious so no flames please).</p>

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<p>Wow, story of my life right here, lol.</p>

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<p>It’s not quite the same effect. To do well on the SAT, you aren’t in direct competition with other students. Their gain doesn’t mean your loss, and your gain doesn’t mean their loss. Theoretically, every student in the room could score a 2400 regardless of the performance of those around them.</p>

<p>If you’re sitting in a room with 24 other students taking the SAT, you have no idea whether they are superstars or strugglers (particularly if you don’t know anyone else in the room, which is frequently the case). The sound of other anonymous students scratching answers is not the same as seeing Tiger Woods show up in your golf tournament. A better equivalent would be if the top-scoring kid in your program who had already gotten a 2400 once showed up in the room for some reason, but even then, that kid’s getting another 2400 doesn’t really diminish YOUR chances of getting one.</p>

<p>However, there is a related phenomenon, in which average kids stay average because their expectations, and the expectations for them from everyone around them, are average. A B student expects to get Bs and therefore gets Bs, because their teachers expend B energy on them, they do B work, and their parents lavish B praise. Likewise, an A+ student gets A+ attention and A+ expectations from parents. Self-efficacy plays a huge role in standardized test scores; it’s one of the reason I hated hearing my SAT students (back when I tutored) say “I’m just not good at taking tests.” That kind of attitude sabotages you.</p>

<p>“In my school, it’s the girls who are math people.”
“For the girls and math thing, at my school there are more girls taking Calculus BC than guys. But then again the youngest person in Calculus AB is a guy.”</p>

<p>Doesn’t matter what the reality is. The persistent stereotype in society is that women are innately worse at math than men, for whatever reason, and when that stereotype is made available and accessible to female test-takers they do worse - AND the male test-takers do better.</p>

<p>Interestingly enough, when you take away the stereotype and state that there are no gender differences, not only do the women perform better but the men perform worse, which evidences the other side of the superstar effect - that if you believe you are a superstar (even erroneously) you will do better on average despite your abilities. The same was true on race - when black and white students took an exam and were simply told that there were no racial differences on the exam, the black students did better and the white students did worse than in the condition in which they were NOT told that and were asked to identify their race before hand. Thus the students in the “no differences” condition scored about equally.</p>

<p>Claude Steele, the father of stereotype threat research, is the recently appointed provost at my university and he’s given several interesting lectures on this. My own research is also about the effects of racial disparities, stereotypes, and prejudices, except in health and health education instead.</p>

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Really? So I should have gotten an 850 on the math SAT’s? And 6’s on the AP’s? :D</p>

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<p>^ Given that those scores are an impossibility, the only logical recourse is that you are really a man and will most likely get trans-gender surgery somewhere down the road. :D</p>

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<p>

Few things.

  1. Can we get some concrete numbers? Scores? Averages? How much did they really change?
  2. By racial differences, do you mean perceptions of different races based on SAT scores, or do you mean supposed biases within the test itself? If the latter is such, then perhaps the folks that continue to scream “SAT IS RACIALLY BIASED” are themselves perpetrators of the problems dealing with the score disparity itself.
  3. What of the fact that the SAT is still considered the most important test a teenager ever takes? Surely this weighs on the mind of any test-taker more than the “fear” of having one’s scores contribute to a pool of millions of anonymous data points. Were these studies conducted with this psychological element as well (as in were they taken from kids taking the real SAT/ACT)?</p>

<p>EDIT: And as for the superstar argument, helloooo? Aren’t top schools looking for kids who exude a certain self-confidence anyways? Not to mention that this supposed superstar effect essentially affects all except a elect handful of superstars, meaning there’s no discernible bias or real inconsistency anyways.</p>

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<p>I just read (wracking my brain to remember where so I can post the citation) that as of this year in the US, girls have closed the math-gap, and their scores, as a gender-group, are now indistinguishable from those of boys.</p>

<p>However…boys have not closed the reading gender gap. They still, as a group, lag behind girls in reading scores in American schools.</p>

<p>Interesting…</p>

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<p>“Can we get some concrete numbers? Scores? Averages? How much did they really change?”</p>

<p>monster, you can find all of these about the SAT on the collegeboard website (SAT scores broken down by gender and race).</p>

<p>This superstar effect doesn’t happen to everyone you know. Once you have a certain degree of confidence in your own ability, you may even do better when “superstars” are around.</p>