JHSU SAT threads

Parents Forum
1

<p>I did well on the SAT and GRE (which was a clone of the SAT I took in high school back in the early 1990s), and I can't imagine what they actually measure. I can tell you that the things I did to prepare for these tests had NOTHING to do with enhancing my ability to handle high school, undergraduate school, or graduate school work. Learning the fancy vocabulary words, using the Joe Bloggs Rule, working backwards, taking practice exams, learning to pace myself, etc. didn't make me any better educated. I liked the brownie points I earned at the time, but all this did NOTHING to improve my capability in any academic or professional aspects.</p>

<p>Exactly what do the SAT I and GRE measure? Would I have been a lesser student if I had never bothered to prepare for the SAT I and GRE? Some of you say that the SAT I and GRE measure potential or intelligence, but I find it hard to believe that I would be less intelligent or have less potential today if I hadn't bothered to study for these tests but handled everything else in the exact same manner.</p>

<p>Some of you would say that you're not supposed to prepare for the SAT I and GRE and that I earned higher scores than I "deserved". According to this logic, I cheated. Of course, under this twisted logic, studying is cheating, students shouldn't bother to crack open their textbooks, and truly good students should be able to learn 100% of everything within the confines of the classroom.</p>

<p>Some of you say that the SAT I is supposed to be a way for admissions officers to find disadvantaged students with much potential. But exactly how does this translate into higher SAT I and GRE scores? The implied converse is that low scores and high academics are supposed to be an indicator of a student about to decline. Well, my SAT I and GRE scores didn't indicate that my GPA was destined to decline throughout undergraduate and graduate school. I even scored a perfect 800 on the Math GRE but ended up gradating near or at the bottom of my class when I earned my MSEE.</p>

<p>Some of you say that the SAT I and GRE are supposed to be a national standard for comparing everyone. None of my high school classes, college classes, or graduate school classes had tests that were anything like these standardized tests. Knowing the fancy vocabulary words wasn't an important part of my classes, reading short and verbose passages and then answering questions with lightning speed wasn't an important part of my classes, and I had to study A LOT MORE math than what the SAT and GRE tested. SAT and GRE math was more about speed and evading booby traps than knowing math. In other words, doing well on the SAT I and GRE was more like emulating James Bond than emulating Albert Einstein or Ernest Hemingway.</p>

<p>SAT IIs and AP exams are a MUCH better way to compare students across schools. They have their flaws, and it would be a tragedy if school revolved around these tests (or any other tests), but at least these tests are based on what students are supposed to study. These tests are a MUCH better way to find the students with potential as well.</p>

<p>Although I liked the brownie points I earned on the SAT I and the GRE, I found the tests to be an insult to my intelligence. Colleges that insist on these tests for admissions send a negative subliminal message: that gaming the system is more important than actually learning and accomplishing things. Professors complain that students are too anti-intellectual, ask "Will this be on the test?" incessantly, hate studying, refuse to actively participate, etc. The heavy emphasis on gaming the system even promotes cheating.</p>

2

<p>"Measure" isn't the right word. </p>

<p>For more on "measurement" in mental ability tests, see </p>

<p><a href="http://psycprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/archive/00000046/%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://psycprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/archive/00000046/&lt;/a> </p>

<p>The argument is very general, and applies just as well to the SAT I as to tests labeled IQ tests.</p>

3

<p>By the way, in my experience it was the high-GPA, low-SAT students who would ask "Is this on the test?" while the high-SAT students were full of intrinsic intellectual curiosity.</p>

4

<p>I think you just claim for it precisely what the CollegeBoard claims for it - no less, and no more - the ability to predict first-year college performance. I can't see why anyone would want to claim more for it than its proprietors do.</p>

<p>Everything else is speculative. As to whether it does what it is claimed for it is another discussion.</p>

5

<p>The SAT wasn't a good predictor of my college GPA. I earned 690V/780M back in 1991, but my cumulative GPA in electrical engineering at UIUC was 4.13 on a 5.0 scale (equivalent of 3.13 on a 4-point scale). Either my cumulative SAT score should have been some 200 points lower, or I should have graduated with High Honors.</p>

<p>The GRE was an even worse predictor of my graduate school grades. I earned 620 verbal, 800 math, and 650 analytical. This was above average for my class (electrical engineering at George Mason University), but I graduated with my MSEE at or near the bottom of my class. Either my scores should have been at least 100-200 points lower on each section, or I should have earned a GPA of at least 3.7 instead of the 3.03 I actually earned. (Yes, I just barely graduated.)</p>

6

<p>Regarding post #3, let's not start with the anecdotal "evidence" game. For example, my anecdote "proves" the opposite: i.e., <em>all</em> of the "high"-scoring testers with whom I shared classes at U.C. were ones I outperformed in those same classes. They demonstrated little intellectual curiosity, could not articulate a thought, were poor debaters in class, did as little work as possible, but definitely bragged about their scores, more than once. Even as upper-division students, they seemed lost at Berkeley when it came to initiative in scholarship & an engagement with research. My experience is not a representative sample, cannot be projected to a population. It's just my experience. If it "proved" anything to me, it "proved" that I probably had much better preparation for UC., because I had a bang-up pre-college education (in <em>public</em> schools, btw), which rewarded & satisfied my intrinsic intellectual curiosity.</p>

7

<p>"The SAT wasn't a good predictor of my college GPA. "</p>

<p>The plural of anecdote is not evidence. I think the CollegeBoard's evidence has been challenged (actually, they did so themselves), but since they make no other claims, it is unfair to ascribe any to it.</p>

<p>It would be rather like taking a cancer drug, and suggesting that it might be useful for athlete's foot.</p>

8

<p>In fairness, mini, jhsu was limiting his/her "predictability" comments to personal experience outcomes. In addition to the Collegeboard's studies, I thought I read somewhere that sampling has been done indicating high scores as measuring ability to ace tests in general. I'm not being facetious, or "obvious" here. (Sounds like a big Duh.) What I mean is that one of the common attributes that has been found is that very high-scoring SAT testers almost never perform poorly on any standardized test, but that the range of their academic performance (of that population) is considerable. I do not have a URL for that, sorry.</p>

9

<p>"In addition to the Collegeboard's studies, I thought I read somewhere that sampling has been done indicating high scores as measuring ability to ace tests in general."</p>

<p>There are also clear associations with race, gender, family income, parental education, test-prep, and, perhaps left-footedness, for all I know. But the question was what does the test "really measure"? </p>

<p>Thermometers are usually used for temperature. ;)</p>

10

<p>"It would be rather like taking a cancer drug, and suggesting that it might be useful for athlete's foot."</p>

<p>"Thermometers are usually used for temperature."</p>

<p>Mini...those were funny.</p>

11

<p>I did no studying whatsoever for the PSAT and SAT (aside from in-school required grammar and vocab), and received good scores on both (230/2290). Sometimes I feel frustrated that my good scores are less impressive because other people spend thousands of hours and dollars on test prep to get those same scores, but if they want it that badly, why not?</p>

<p>My observation has been that while students can "game the system" to an extent, the SAT has value in admissions because it measures something very different from the GPA: reasoning and critical thinking skills in a time-pressured environment. GPA is largely a function of work ethic (though intelligence is also a factor): a student who is less naturally bright can get almost the same grades as me by studying longer and harder and being diligent about their work. With the SAT, however, despite countless hours of preparation, those students are not breaking the 700s barrier. Now, test anxiety and other, unrelated factors can get in the way of an accurate SAT score, but my perception has been that SAT measures intelligence (of a certain type), while GPA measures predominantly work ethic. </p>

<p>The "first year college performance" thing has never made sense to me, because I would think that the ability to manage social pressures and schedule time effectively would play just as large a role as intrinsic intellectual capability. But I suppose you can make statistics say whatever you want.</p>

12

<p>Here's my humble opinion...the thing the current SAT measures best is stamina. If the person can stick with it for four hours (not counting any travel time to and from the test site), that would be good. Back in the dark ages, I took the SAT with combined Verbal/math about 1100. I graduated from undergraduate school with high honors. The GRE was about the same. Somehow (probably due to my work experience, and undergrad transcript), I managed to get a full fellowship to grad school, where I graduated with a 3.9 GPA on a 4.0 scale. Not bad for an "average" test taker. One thing the SAT does NOT measure is the motivation and/or hard work of the student. DD's combined CR/Math was 1230, but she was top 5% of her class with an agressive courseload because she is a very dedicated and hard worker.</p>

13

<p>etselec, you are right, SAT measures intelligence "of a certain kind" . On this test one has to solve many problems fast. In my opinion( 20 years with a mathematician) it has little to do with being a succesfull scientist.<br>
For that one has to be able to generate the ideas, and that's a different story alltogether.</p>

14

<p>I've heard there is a .35 positive correlation in the ability to predict grades from SAT scores. I also heard that this drops substantially in the second year. In addition, I think high SAT/generally low GPA majors (engineering, hard sciences, mathematics) at least partially skew the measurement, but maybe I'm wrong.</p>

15

<p>.35 positive correlation---now there's a number I can latch onto! And it's not very good. I mean, if you are using the SAT 1 to help you predict who will do well in your university, you would be nuts to use something that only had a .35 correlation.</p>

<p>Why don't they use something with a higher correlation--like parental education and income? (Just kidding!)</p>

16

<p>SAT I is a cumulative measurement of one's language, verbal, reading, and math skills up to the current moment. I'm not sure about the writing section because only a small portion of it is actually writing...the rest is grammar, puncuation, etc. ....I do believe that it measures one's "potential" as a student. Things that it can't measure are work habits,organization, motivation, and short term memory (which is quite important to do well on specific curriculum based tests). I've given thousands of IQ tests over the past 20 years. I believe they are a good predictor of financial success in life....but at least in high school, subtests which measure short term memory and concentration appear to correlate more highly with grades. My youngest D does very well on standardized tests similiar to the SAT. However she has OCD which in her case has symptoms of inattention which leads to: lost papers, foolish mistakes on class tests (leaves out a part of a response), messy handwriting , ....she may end of getting the highest SAT score in her class but I highly doubt she'll be even in the top 5 for GPA's.</p>

17

<p>Standardized tests are required for a lot of fields. Whether or not they are good predictors of your success hardly matters, since if you want to be in that field you must pass the test. I scored relatively poorly on both the SAT and GRE (weak in math), but graduated with a 4.0 on a 4.0 scale undergrad and grad, avoiding math classes whenever possible. </p>

<p>I am a voracious reader and consider myself to be strong in English, yet flunked the English portion of the foreign service exam 3 times and then gave up. I passed all of the other sections, on which I expected to do poorly. I am still unclear how that could be possible. Regardless, those failures cost me that career.</p>

<p>I ended up becoming a bond analyst, which has required passage of standardized math tests (my major weakness). I know some fantastic analysts who were pushed out of the field when the CFA (chartered financial analyst) designation became popular with employers. That is a series of tests taken over three years (if lucky), with a high fail rate. </p>

<p>In short, standardized test may not be fair or good predictors but are frequently a necessary evil, in my experience.</p>

18

<p>I think the SAT II has a higer predictave correlation, which is why some schools are using it, switching to it, or . And remember, the SAT I score is one of many factors in college admissions. And some think it's .35 first year correlation and afterward is because of the trend in wealth (the wealthier tend to do better), some think exclusively.</p>

19

<p>I was always under the impression that the SAT 1 tested the ability to select correct answers under time pressure, including the ability to efficiently fill in little circles with a number 2 pencil. Is there something else going on?</p>

20

<p>I was a National Merit Finalist with an SAT score of 690V/780M/60+TSWE (back in 1991). In 2002, I took the GRE and earned 620V/800Q/650A. I've always done well on standardized tests and earned brownie points for this. It's always been my opinion that everyone's test scores should be as good as or better than their academic performance. The content of the SAT I is SUPERFICIAL. Any idiot should be able to crack open the <em>Cracking the System</em> and <em>Up Your Score</em> books, practice the techniques on practice exams, get all psyched-up for the exam, and then be done with it. This is MUCH easier than doing well in school, where you have to perform well again and again, not just once.</p>

<p>I would gladly trade away my high test scores for better motivation and productivity in my undergraduate years. The skills I had to learn for the SAT and GRE had NOTHING to do with what I was studying in school, and I knew this even back then. Both my entrance exam scores AND my high school academic record (salutatorian, AP Scholar With Honor, and Honors/AP classes to the hilt) overpredicted my undergraduate GPA. I should have either graduated with a GPA of at least 4.8 (5-point scale) instead of the 4.13 I actually earned, or my combined SAT score of 1470 should have been at least 200 points lower. (Or my high school class rank should have been at least 20 places down out of a class of 349.)</p>

<p>What happened? Most of my academic motivation was due to being a member of the Academic Performance Cult. I was a big drinker of the Kool-Aid back then and the predecessor to today's CC student, though I'd be Ferris Bueller or Zack Morris by the standards of the CC board today. However, I dropped out of the Academic Performance Cult, which I had become heavily dependent on for motivation. Due to the motivation vaccuum, I didn't care about my studies and kept waiting for a mysterious flash of divine inspiration to bring sudden enlightenment.</p>

<p>Once you're in college, nobody cares about your standardized test scores or even report cards from your past life. College is WORLDS away from high school. Shakespeare, valance shell electrons, the Articles of Confederation, and <em>The Scarlet Letter</em> were no more relevant in college than electrical engineering (my major) was in high school. It's no surprise to me that the correlation between high school and college academic performance is so weak.</p>

<p>Although my GPA was much lower in college than in high school, I'm surprised I didn't do worse. I had unprecedented motivation problems in college, and my general attitude towards my studies deteriorated over time and really fell off a cliff going into my junior year. I lamented that if my performance had been living up to my past academic record or test scores, I'd have been on track to graduate with High Honors, and I also knew that I wasn't firing on all cylinders. I became an amateur radio operator the year after I earned my BSEE, and I have wished ever since that I had become an amateur radio operator at least 5 years earlier, as that would have made the electrical engineering I studied seem so much more relevant. (Incidentally, I never knew about amateur radio as an undergraduate student.)</p>

<p>Some of the unscholarly things I did as an undergraduate student:
1. I dropped a number of classes. I dropped Philsophy 101 in my first semester because the professor seemed really boring. In my first semester, I switched from a special Mathematica section of Calculus (special section that used a special software tool to teach the class) to the regular class halfway through.
2. I enrolled in two Classic Civilization classes in my sophomore year because the professor was very popular and because I heard that the tests were easy. It turned out that I didn't have the will to memorize facts like I had in high school, so I ended up taking one of the classes pass-fail to avoid a C and dropping the other because I only earned a D on the midterm. (The dean chewed me out for dropping the class because it was after the official deadline, but the first midterm didn't come until halfway through the semester.)
3. In the second semester of my junior year, I was enrolled in an astronomy technical elective. The professor was AWFUL, but I stuck it out because I'd always been interested in astronomy. At the first midterm, I realized how much trouble I was in - I couldn't answer a SINGLE question and had to drop the class right then.
4. In my junior year, I began ditching some classes after I handed in the homework and received the next assignment because I couldn't understand anything the professor said. This was after steadfastly attending EVERY class in my first two years. Ditching a class was once something that only "the bad kids" did.
5. My senior project was a joke and probably the worst ever in the history of the electrical engineering department. The original plan was to measure temperature and show it on the Internet. I never got anywhere close to getting anything to work right. I had to BS my report, and the TA made me resubmit it because it was so bad the first time. I earned one of the few Cs in the class (most of the rest of the class earned As or Bs). When I was asked about the project in job interviews, I must have looked like George W. Bush at the first debate. It's no surprise that my first engineering job didn't require me to use what I had studied as an undergraduate.
6. I avoided various specialties of electrical engineering because of my experience with the introductory classes. So I steadfastly avoided taking any classes beyond the initial introductory one in semiconductors, signal processing, and computer engineering.</p>

<p>Some things I did right:
1. I made sure to take classes in nonwestern history. I could have duplicated my past studies (which would have been easier and led to better grades), but I opted to take classes in African, Latin American, and East Asian history so that I wouldn't be completely Eurocentric. (This isn't a knock against American and European history - just the exclusion of other history in the K-12 curriculum.)
2. I took a class in Extreme and Unusual Weather as well as technical electives in meteorology, as I've always been a weather weenie. This spurred me to read up on tornadoes and storm chasers, which later led me to become a SKYWARN storm spotter and amateur radio operator. (No, I haven't gone chasing.) My experience as an amateur radio operator brought to life the electrical engineering I studied as an undergraduate student.
3. I took classes in economics. It's amazing how different the world looks to me now as compared to before I first took economics in high school.
4. I read extensively about investing, particularly value investing. I haven't made a killing, but I've avoided every bubble, and I am a shareholder of Berkshire Hathaway and Wesco Financial.
5. My 4 years at the university greatly changed the way I viewed the world.
6. I avoided the risky behaviors in the news, such as drugs, alcohol, spring break flings, etc. (Of course, the fact that I was as stone-cold sober as a Mormon priest on Sunday makes the skeletons I told you about that much more glaring.)</p>

<p>My graduate GPA was lower than my undergraduate GPA - 3.03 on a 4-point scale. I just barely earned my MSEE and graduated at or near the bottom of the class. Despite this, I'm proud of what I did in graduate school. I specialized in control systems (which is an extension of signal processing, an area that I hated in undergraduate school and thus had a weak background in) when I could have easily earned a better GPA in a specialty where I had a stronger background. I did two time-consuming projects for credit even though it would have been MUCH easier to take two classes instead. (The second project wasn't anywhere close to working. My GPA really took a hit in my final semester because of this and the time it took from studying for my other classes.)</p>

<p>As a graduate student, there were times when I wished that I was as proficient at what I was studying as I was at taking the Math GRE (on which I earned a perfect 800). I lamented that I would be an A student if my academic performance were as good as my GRE scores. But preparing for the GRE did nothing to prepare me for graduate school - the GRE was just a game I had to play for brownie points in the application process.</p>