“AMC/USABio/Phy/Chem/Co - I believe doing well in thes tests has even higher correlation with being rich. There are many
“private factories” here in bay area prepping kids for exactly these tests and it starts from as early as 5th grade.”
This ^ is spot on. Prepping is exactly what happens. Unfortunately, many of these students assume that the Elite schools will overlook middling gpa’s for some such prize or placement, when in reality the Elites don’t need to make such trades. They admit students who have both the grades and the prizes. So families pay all this money for such prep, only to encounter disappointment on April 1 if the other stuff isn’t there as well.
Back to the SAT discussion, I have a student right now whose parents want him to hurry and take the existing SAT because they know he doesn’t write evidence-based analyses well and they want him to be considered for MIT.
Maybe I should have said Yale. This is my observation from my kids’ friends at Yale–most of them do have some pretty impressive out-of-school achievements. I’m sure that not everybody does.
Regarding JHS’ comments:
I, too, should have not said Harvard, but Y, P, and others. H is somewhat a class in itself in that their favorite thing seems to be to admit Vals from publics (not privates), but particularly those most likely to say Yes because other opportunities are unlikely. It’s part of H’s protection of its high Yield. (They like to keep it that way, apparently.) In any case, lots of those public Vals do not have the kinds of off-campus achievements that private Vals do. I’ve watched the H offers & acceptances in my region (where they are publicized) for some time, and this has been a consistent trend for many years. Maybe it’s not true in all regions, but it definitely is true here.
@epiphany What were your thoughts about the other questions? Questions labeled medium in difficulty seemed shockingly easy to me, basic parallell construction and grammar, solid math fundamentals. I thought the essay was a vast improvement, but I am surprised by the other sections that I read. The only one I havent gone through yet is reading.
Some of us have been following the latest development of the SAT and are discussing it in the SAT Preparation forum for quite some time. The latest release of questions is marking a step in a direction that is (IMHO) rather different from what was first announced or anticipated. This said, I am not sure I can follow or agree with the analogy to the CAT, unless the acronym has a meaning different from the one usually used by TCB, namely CAT = Computer Adaptive Test that found in tests such as the GRE.
Regardless of the terminology, the presented new SAT will not rely on BASE knowledge more that its predecessor unless one erroneously believes that little “knowledge” was needed to ace the SAT, or that knowledge is only acquired through the K-12 curriculum. As far as being more straightforward (or tricky), this is also a matter of personal opinion. For many, the SAT was crystal clear (and more precise in its details than the ACT) and the apparent trickiness was directly related to the lack of preparation or the previous inability of your typical high school teacher to cover anything that requires some degree of reasoning. Inasmuch as the “paint by the numbers” students might recognize a few questions, the odds that many questions will appear to be more puzzling than ever before are pretty high.
Further, I will have --nothing new here-- to disagree about “no test strategy involved” as this test will probably reward the student who does learn the proper strategies even MORE, as the new terminology will be more challenging to the overwhelming majority of the students in high school.
I expect it to be a boon for the few really good tutors and a bane for most amateurs, including your usual suspects found in a high school. But then again, that is nothing really new.
Regarding your question in 83, Mom:
I confess to not looking carefully enough at the levels of questions. Probably the math was too easy for college prep level (just my guess), and I think the grammar is always too easy (then and now). I really do care about vocabulary, and think it should be high level, because that’s exactly what one should encounter in college – not pretentious vocabulary but precise and advanced. You need to know distinctions in uses of words, whether reading anthro, literature, history, or physical science. I would like to see a full practice test, though, before evaluating the new format.
Do you have a source for that statement, JHS? As far as I know, the College Board has not released any info that supports that. It has released data which shows the correlation between income and SAT scores up to a family income of $200,000. At every step of the way, there’s an increase.
The median scores are below 600. So perhaps you are right and a higher percentage of kids from the “middle class” score 2100+. I don’t know of any data that supports your statement, though. If you do, please post it.
Well, Harvard could do about anything it pleases with the same result! However, Harvard and its true peers, have had the benefit to review and scrutinize the largest samples of the highly selective students from around the globe. More than any other school, they are able to balance the applications that have a smorgasbord of AP/IB or Subject Tests with the ones of students who have few (if any) AP tests because of their geographical limitations.
The debates about the validity of the SAT are often confined to “SAT vs XXX” in terms of predicting the college success. In about every case, the discussion miss the most salient point, namely that it is “SAT + X vs Y” and that is where it shines when X = GPA! As others have pointed out, the SAT brings a different dimension into the puzzle, and this exactly because it is testing a different set of academic qualities (use a different term if you wish) including a certain mental acuity and reasoning. Its value is that is NOT a direct reflection of the typical HS curriculum that is hardly “common” in our schools.
And that “hardly” common is an element that H (and others) have recognized and used to identify those students who made the effort to surpass precarious situations and elevate themselves above their peers. Although the final outcome will be decided by analyzing many factors, it remains that the SAT provides a “sanitized and normalized” metric that allows to measure the … hard to measure contexts.
H could drop the SAT, but the question remains: would the school be better off after making such decision? I do not think that many could suggest the answer is yes … unless one has a specific agenda!
JHS, there are other issues related to those correlations – and without going into the hackneyed correlation vs causation.
The source of this are the questionnaires filled by the test takers. As it is self-reported, one could question how much a 15 to 17 years actually know about the income of its parents. My take is that the figures appearing on the TCB books is vastly different from what will appear on the FAFSA. Actually, TCB should be able to correlate the SAT scores with the Profile ... if they wanted.
There is a glaring inconsistency (as you noted) in the high ranges. We have been bludgeoned to death with the hammer of "Asians are the highest scores" and that is an acceptable proposition. Now, compare this to the Pell Grantees at schools such as Berkeley, and you might safely assume that the largest beneficiaries of such grants are also Asians?
In the end, the correlation to income exists because of laws of average. This correlation at the top 100 (if there is anything like this) is probably a lot less tangible than painted with a large brush.
Karabel’s book about the history of admissions at HYP (“The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton”) makes it clear this is exactly why the top colleges moved away from quantitative scores into more fuzzy factors. At the time in the 20’s the goal was to cap the number of Jewish students, but holistic admissions lets the incoming class be tuned any way that is desired.
I happen to like the new math questions presented in the TCB pre-release, but I do not think many will find them unchallenging.
Here is Q17 (non calculator)
A well-prepared student (or one with a mind open to spatial reasoning) might find the answer quickly. Your typical student who hopes for a 650 and usually gets a 500 will glance at the question and pass!
How about 14:
Simple problem but how many students will NOT be flustered by the wording of the question?
Which begs the q - there’s a lot of “fine tuning to get what is desired” (in the class as a whole). So what is desired? Is the goal to get more of x, or is the goal to get less of y, even though by definition more of x means less of y?
Has Lani Guinier ever figured out why the College Boards stop reporting the SAT versus Family Income isolated by Race? Especially since she claims that the SAT is just a family wealth predictor and nothing more. Until 1995 the College Boards used to provide this data and it was not too flattering to certain Races.
xiggi I agree with your post #89, the best predictor of college success is SAT+GPA. If both of GPA and SAT is high, that is where I would put my money for successful college students. It isn’t coincidence that National Merit Scholars go on to have outstanding college success.
I could not agree more. Over 100,000 kids who take the SAT report an A+ GPA (97-100), yet their average score is 1800. That average falls by 100 for an A average and another 100 points down to 1580 for the A- student.
So colleges have 732,000 A+, A, and A- students, but only 62,000 who score 2100+. That’s just 8% of all A students but more than enough to fill all the elite schools with room left to reject the overwhelming majority of them!
GPA is great for measuring a student’s work ethic, and ability to follow directions and meet deadlines, all of which are extremely important to success in colleges and careers. But it doesn’t measure mental stamina or quick thinking. So why WOULDN’T colleges want the kids who have both?
And the math section isn’t “tricky” and the vocab is not “obscure.”
The further Coleman moves in the direction of curriculum, the less useful this test will be to admissions, and the more susceptible it will be to tutoring $$$.
To the extent that tricky implies deceptive, the SAT is probably the least tricky standardized test ever developed. The questions are simply written in a way that requires absolute attention to detail. They are almost perfectly precise, and most people are not nearly as precise (critical) in their reasoning. Duh, that is what the test is attempting to measure.
Coleman’s reasoning on vocabulary is just irrational. The vast majority of level 4&5 words on the SAT are very popular words (just not in comic books). That most 17 year olds are not familiar with many of these words is what gives the questions value as a measuring tool.
Don’t forget: Half of this is marketing. Was it 2013 or 2014 ( I think the latter) that more registered to take the ACT than the SAT, I’m told. (I haven’t checked that claim but did hear it a couple of places.) CB is panicking; heaven forbid they lose market share, so they want to ape the ACT, which is more high-school-curriculum based, less future college curriculum based.
I think it’s also worth noting that what is desired changes over time (and may be different at different colleges as well). While it is certainly true that holistic review was first used to disadvantage Jews, it was also of use to colleges when they wanted to provide advantages to URMs. Opinions certainly differ on how they are using it now.