I don’t think so. There are certain parts of the test, such as the scrambled paragraphs and the logical reasoning, that are very easy to prep for, but aren’t taught as part of the regular middle school curriculum (my daughter is a seventh grade ELA teacher). Those things ARE taught in prep programs, as, of course, are the other topics.
This is exactly right. Moderate prep certainly helps, but after a certain point you get very marginal improvements. Ultimately you are limited by your talent in that area.
I’m sure that’s absolutely true, but prep versus never having seen the material at all, certainly makes a difference. The material that is most able to be prepped is just not taught as a general matter in the schools.
So the test is absolutely not testing “the ability to sit in a chair and study for a single test for approximately 2,000 hours at ages 10-13” as one poster suggested early in this thread. The vast majority of such extensive prep is going to be wasted.
Hebegebe why do you think the SAT was a long-tailed test prior to the 1995 re-centering? Only a perfect score got an 800 at that point which is likely still the case. And the test included more rote memorization (antonyms) and less reading for understanding. I remember trying to memorize lots of vocabulary words from the SAT book way back when. Even then, it was designed to measure skills, not intellegence (unless given to younger kids who had not had the material taught yet).
While there are many great HSs in NYC, the pathway should be more open to all kids with the ability to succeed. I agree that a test is more objective than grades, which can also be gamed by private tutors or by the great variation in teachers who may favor certain kids over others. There has to be a way to identify promising students stuck in low performing schools who would do well in Stuy or others.
Brooklyn tech has 7% black students, and 61% Asian students according to NYSED. That doesn’t seem much better considering the racial make-up of NYC public schools. Beacon, on the other hand, had 14% balck students and only 8% Asian students.
I also took the Hunter test in 6th(?) grade but was so ill (or nervous) that I literally fainted - to the ground - about halfway through. Lost the time, didn’t make it, that was that for the next two years.
My HS test/audition/interview process went much better.
" There has to be a way to identify promising students stuck in low performing schools who would do well in Stuy or others."
Does NYC no longer have its special placement track for kids who do well at classroom studies (and, presumably, tests as well)?
My JHS was split by tracks: the other kids hated us, but there were about 14-19 or so of us who exclusively took faster paced classes and did higher level work. Three of us were accepted to the Stuy/BronxSci/BTech schools, and the type of work we did and my follow through was enough to have me approached for placement at one of the preparatory academies in NE.
Does this no longer exist?
While the SAT ceiling was higher before 1995, it was not super high. The math section was still algebra and geometry, so a good in math student who had good classes in those subjects would get 800 or high 700s. The verbal section was basically an English vocabulary test; at the ceiling, it measured knowledge of more obscure words. Perhaps an 800 on the verbal would show extreme talent at vocabulary words used on the SAT (or perhaps time prepping with those books of SAT words), but not necessarily much else.
"The verbal section was basically an English vocabulary test; at the ceiling, it measured knowledge of more obscure words. "
I remember this being the case so very well.
In order for the pathyway to be open to more kids, you would need more seats in these schools or more special schools built. Changing the admission procedure only changes which kids can benefit. It doesn’t open the doorway to all kids.
One can compare the old test scores to the new. First, there were no test prep centers ( and if there were in some parts very few kids used them unlike today where it is more of the norm). I know that 700s were pretty rare in the 80’s and most who got them could get in any school they wanted. 700’s are not going to blow anyone away these days. And 800s are common. You can look at the stats.
@gallentjill Yes, they need to have more seats in all these schools and colleges for a larger population. Grow the pie or limit choices for extremely talented and hard working kids.
The pre-1995 SAT had a high ceiling on the verbal section, but did not weight tails like the SHSAT with a 99.0/76 perecentile kid scoring higher than a 98/94 kid. Using pre-1995 concordance table estimates for the verbal section, a pre-1995 98 to 99th percentile increase corresponds to ~15 points on the pre-1995 SAT, and an increase from 76 to 94th percentile corresponds to ~130 points. So the 98/94 percentile kid is expected to outscore the 99/76 percentile kid by ~115 points on the pre-1995 SAT… by a larger margin than occurs on the current SAT.
The purpose of the SHSAT is not at all transparent. As far as I know, the SHSAT has never defined what they are trying to measure. If the goal is to predict HS success, it doesn’t appear to be doing a good job (as measured by HS GPA) compared to other available metrics like middle school GPA. However, this is expected with the nature of the test and favoring spiky kids who score well in only one area over balanced kids who score well in everything. The test doesn’t appear to be oriented towards evaluating subject knowledge, like a NYS regents exam or the ACT, so I doubt the focus is evaluating HS preparedness. Maybe the purpose is more to flag potential prodigies, like you suggested, who have a better chance of a certain post-HS outcome than average?
Regardless of what the actual purpose of the test is, there should be a some kind or review to see how well the test is meeting the stated objectives. For example, the College Board regularly publishses validity studies, looking at how well the SAT predicts first year college GPA. ACT is a little different in the emphasis on college preparedness with subject knowledge, but they still publish validity studies on multiple metrics. If one of the primary goals of the SHSAT is indeed to flag potential prodigies who have a better chance of a certain post-HS outcome than average, then it’s fairly straightforward to do a longitudinal study or regression analysis to review how successful it is in that purpose. This can also help figuring out how to improve the test to better meet objectives with modifying questions, weighting, which subjects are evaluated, etc.
For a public educational admissions exam, it’s not acceptable to just assume that any type of test will do a good job of predicting anything desired, so long as is standardized. The little information that is available in prediction of HS GPA suggests the SHSAT combined score is not especially predictive compared to other alternatives, and the exam overpredicts for several key groups, partially males.
“Maybe the purpose is more to flag potential prodigies”
Or maybe the original purpose was to devise a test that wasn’t very preppable? That seems to be the objective of many long tail tests that are frequently used (for example for graduate pre-employment assessments) in the UK.
Of course that would be particularly ironic…
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The SHSAT is quite preppable, with large score increases being relatively common, but the prep strategy is different than the SAT or others. For example, a NYT article writes the following, suggesting a common strategy is to prep in the strong subject rather than the weak subject. Prepping to get the verbal score a couple points from 45/50 to 46 or 47 could have more impact on total score than prepping to improve a weaker math background, even if the math score is improved by a larger number of raw exam questions than the verbal. As such, careless errors on the stronger section can be especially important, much more so than on the SAT.
NYT Article
*"Last year, for instance, a student with a 99 percentile score in math and 49 percentile in verbal would have been admitted to Stuyvesant High School – the most coveted specialized school – but a student with a 97 in math and 92 in verbal would not.
As a result, test-prep tutors who understand how the test is scored advise their students to spend as much time as possible not where they are weakest, but on their stronger subject. "*
The author of the study notes the same phenomenon:
Linked Study
"he or she might consider spending more time (both in preparation and on the test) on his or her stronger area. Many people might find this advice counterintuitive. Yet that is exactly what some expensive test-prep tutors advise their pupils—those fortunate enough to be able to afford test-prep services.20 They also emphasize to their pupils that catching an error on the test in their stronger area is worth more to their total score than catching an error in their weaker area. "
What’s ironic is that families will sacrifice everything to get into Stuy and then when it comes to college send them to CUNY. They could have gotten into CUNY going to any high school and saved themselves a lot of stress. Of course there are many Stuy grads who go on to the best schools in the country, but not all.
That’s true @citymama9 but some of the kids who do go to CUNY go to the Macauley Honors program or to Sophie Davis.
I agree, but you can get into those programs without having to go to Stuy. If you’re shooting for Cornell it’s the school to go to since they take so many Stuy kids. I just have heard that Stuy is such a pressure cooker, so I wonder what the point is if you’re not going to parlay the experience into a top college. @jonri
Being an extremely selective high school, Stuy is expected to have an overrerpresentation of stellar students, as well as an overrepresentation of kids who apply to selective colleges. This leads to an expected overrepresentation of Stuy kids attending selective colleges, even if there wasn’t any kind of admissions preference for Stuy. This is especially true for selective colleges in NYS, such as Cornell due to the larger number of applications. So having a lot of Cornell acceptances does not mean Cornell favors Stuy students over comparable achieving kids at non-selective high schools.
For example, I attended a basic public HS in upstate NY. It has numerous kids who are accepted to and attend Cornell every year, accepted kids who I expect usually have lower test scores than most of the accepted kids from Stuy. According to my HS’s Naviance, the majority of Cornell applicants with a 96%+ GPA were accepted regardless of SAT score, although the 96+% GPA combined with <1200 SAT sample size was not significant.
Both the basic public HS I attended and Stuy have a lot of Cornell acceptances, so which one gives a particular student the better chance of being accepted? I expect it depends on the particular student. Some students thrive in the more selective and more challenging HS environment like Stuy, and some students thrive as the big fish in a non-selective HS. I expect kids who get grades towards the lower end of their class at Stuy don’t tend to do well in Ivy-type college acceptances.
However, there are a lot of great reasons to attend Stuy beyond just college admissions. For example, the HS I attended only offered 3 AP classes, I was bored out of my mind in most of my HS classes, and had issues with the social dynamics with some of the less academically motivated students. I expect I would have enjoyed attending Stuy far more with the larger selection of advanced classes in math/science, more rigorous/challenging classes, and being in classes with a larger portion of motivated students who are doing amazing things and inspiring me to do amazing things . I also expect I would have learned far more and would generally have been far better prepared for college. I probably would have had more colleagues doing ECs that interested me, such as Math League. I remember being impressed how some of the selective NYS HS’s used to get all representing students having max scores in Math League every time (my math teacher once said the kids at Bronx School of Science “were not human” while discussing at the score results), while my HS barely had enough interested students to fill all the score slots. However, I probably wouldn’t have had as much success with college admissions at Stuy as I did by attending my non-selective HS.
To get a good education?
Some kids can’t afford to leave NYC to go to college, and they can’t all go to Columbia. Some may be from families that make too much for financial aid or some may have to stay to take care of parents or work at the family business. Some may get pregnant in high school and need to stay home to take care of a child. Some may not want to leave NYC because they like living there, so Dartmouth and Cornell hold no appeal.
Even the old SAT was not as easy to prep for as a lot of folks seem to think:
https://nepc.colorado.edu/sites/default/files/Briggs_Theeffectofadmissionstestpreparation.pdf
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1745-3984.1999.tb00549.x