<p>Ah, the liberal conspiracy.
<em>rolls eyes</em></p>
<p>Happy Father's Day</p>
<p>roll eyes all you want - we live in a country where 40% of kids don't live under the same roof as their own Dad. Well intentioned reforms of many sorts have contributed to that number. The path to hell is paved with good intentions. </p>
<p>When we think with our hearts instead of our heads we come up with great sounding ideas that don't work out as intended. We live in a country where all the kids are above average right? So why can't the tests prove that? And if they don't then there must be something wrong with the test so get rid of it our change it.</p>
<p>If it were a liberal conspiracy instead of just plain muddle-headedness it would be a lot easier to combat.</p>
<p>The topic is probably too important to degenerate into a discussion about affirmative action. SAT was originally intended to allow the universities to select those who could benefit most from the type of education they offered so as to ensure no talent was wasted. Obviously the kind of talent you need to profit from Harvard , Chicago or Caltech is different from what you need to profit from a broad based Community College. If the aim is to select talent and to recognize that to do so under American circumstances you have to correct for race and social class the old SAT properly normalized against school performance was arguably a better instrument than the new SAT. The problem with the old SAT from the standpoint of Atkinson was that at the very high end of the range, because of the nature of the test, men had a very slight advantage to get a perfect score. To even the odds, they wanted to delete analogies which is a quasi-mathematical reasoning skill and substitute a writing skill where it was thought women would outshine men. The revamping of the test has nothing to do with the politics of race based affirmative action but much more with the politics of gender. This too is a very touchy issue amongst 'liberal' academia as the President of Harvard found out to his cost. Anyway, in my view for what it is worth, purely perceived as a tool to identify talent, the new SAT is much more flawed than the old one and is significantly more class and race biased for the reasons identified by the previous poster.</p>
<p>That's interesting about the analogies--it always seemed like common sense to me, not a specific male reasoning skill. :rolleyes:</p>
<p>"Obviously the kind of talent you need to profit from Harvard , Chicago or Caltech is different from what you need to profit from a broad based Community College."
How is this obvious? They require the same skills, just the former group needs it, say intelligence, in greater amounts, due to greater difficulty. They both have the same core classes, like physical sciences, mathematics, writing, psychology...</p>
<p>"To even the odds, they wanted to delete analogies which is a quasi-mathematical reasoning skill and substitute a writing skill where it was thought women would outshine men. The revamping of the test has nothing to do with the politics of race based affirmative action but much more with the politics of gender. This too is a very touchy issue amongst 'liberal' academia as the President of Harvard found out to his cost."
I love how feminists work it both ways.
Summers is vilified for a comment not remotely sexist, and any belief of a difference between men and women is heresy.
On the other hand, mathematical reasoning is played down to favor females, even though they supposedly are equal to men in all pursuits.
Even the new math section is not really reasoning but mostly just working out problems. </p>
<p>HS graduation means less than it did before. Teachers are increasingly reluctant to fail, and hold back, students.</p>
<p>The grammar argument just seems to be a manifestation of liberal doctrine, that there are no absolutes, "no one right answer".</p>
<p>"force language instruction to revert to simplistic, one-size-fits-all grammar drills"
What, there should be different sets of grammar rules for each and every group in society?</p>
<p>"As a result, the new SAT will widen the gap between high and low achievement for speakers of nonstand-ard English and for those who speak English as a second language."
The thought, of a test differentiating between english and non english speakers! Preposterous!</p>
<p>Oddly or maybe not minority students did relatively better on the analogies than they did on the other parts of the SAT so dropping them will also likely hurt minority scores. What it will do for girls I don't know. The median score for girls on the SAT verbal is only about 8 points lower than for boys.</p>
<p>I can't figure out the logic behind adding writing. It does save kids the fee for the writing SAT II. But most schools didn't require it anyway. </p>
<p>I think its actually to allow the most elite schools to become gender equal in admissions without sacrificing their sat score points.</p>
<p>Actually I believe the goal was to throw some randomness into the scores. Everybody obviously knew there was no way to get consistent scoring on two million essays a year. The goal was to make it more of a pot luck draw where some otherwise high scoreers would be knocked down and some otherwise low swcorers woul luck out on the draw of readers. And with just a little more luck the bell curve would be tall and narrow.</p>
<p>If a test could be constructed where the scores are tightly clustered and if grade inflation continues apace (the number of HS kids with A averages has gone from 32% to 41% in the last ten years) then you can escape the tyranny of the meritocrats and proceed to reshaping society without their pesky interference.</p>
<p>The "problem" with the SAT is that it hasn't been returning the results school administrators want. But the farther it gets away from being an actual aptitude test the more coachable it is and the more it will favor precisely those groups in society that already do well on it.</p>
<p>The College Board's New Essay Reverses Decades of Progress Toward Literacy</p>
<p>Actually it is funny that the title reminds me of Blutarsky's Animal House lament.</p>
<p>"Eight years of college....down the drain!" might not have the quote exactly correct. </p>
<p>I do not understand the mantra of modern educators that drill or repetition stifles creativity, or is in other ways harmful. Also, identifying wrong answers or constructs seems a prerequisite to understanding things well. The old Warriner's grammar books had sections in them on common mistakes.</p>
<p>"If a test could be constructed where the scores are tightly clustered and if grade inflation continues apace (the number of HS kids with A averages has gone from 32% to 41% in the last ten years) then you can escape the tyranny of the meritocrats and proceed to reshaping society without their pesky interference."</p>
<p>I personally believe that colleges, specifically admissions counselors, focus less on academics than in previous years precisely because of grade inflation and because of the recentering of the SATs. To a degree, I agree with admissions counselors. Grade inflation has robbed good grades of their ability to distinguish students, so can you really reject one student for having the 3.97 UW instead of a 4.0? Recentering the SATs also robbed the test of its ability to distinguish students at the higher ranges.</p>
<p>"The "problem" with the SAT is that it hasn't been returning the results school administrators want. But the farther it gets away from being an actual aptitude test the more coachable it is and the more it will favor precisely those groups in society that already do well on it."
Quite ironic, isn't it?</p>
<p>There was a thead based on an article in the new SAT in "The Economist" a few months ago which argued that the new SAT does increase the advantage of the expensively educated over others. One of its points was that the analogy questions, now eliminated, were an area where reasoning ability trumped things learned at school, and that talented poor kids did best in that area. Another was that the writing test (and I am not saying that writing and grammar are not important) gave a further advantage to well-prepared, well educated kids, at the expense of those brilliant ones from the middle of nowhere. Those are the ones that Conant and Chauncey sought to identify in devising the SAT, in order to make Harvard less a bastion of privilege, and more a meritocracy. The article went on to suggest, (in a somewhat exaggerated way) that in doing that they set in motion one of the most important pieces of social engineering in the 20th century, which wassignificantly responsible for our modern, merit-based American society. Of course the world has changed since the earlier days of the SAT, but I, for one, accept the possibility that the new SAT is more "achievement" and less "aptitude" oriented, and that there may be a longer term social impact.</p>
<p>"I don't know about other students, but grammar was never really taught to me. It seemed kinda that every English teacher you went to assumed you learned it last year, so the result was you never learned it. That said, I consider myself a pretty good writer, but I can't find detailed grammar mistakes to save my life."</p>
<p>I have the exact same problem! I go to an excellent high school, but every English class is some type of literature, where you read a book, go to class, discuss, repeat. Grammar was taught on random rare days when a teacher felt like it (I've had one great teacher who actually devoted every Monday to grammar, but she was a special case). In the way, I feel the SAT does NOT test material we learned in school, because I was never really taught grammar. </p>
<p>I'm sick and tired of people talking about how adding/removing whatever section will help a certain gender or race. Are there not boys and girls in the same classes; are there not schools with multiple races?</p>
<p>To respond to an early post in this thread, it isn't exactly true that the world is divided into prescriptivists and descriptivists. My graduate training in linguistics makes me a descriptivist. Yet I taught the prescriptive grammar course at my university for many years and loved it. I taught the future high shool teachers who wanted to learn how to teach grammar well as well as those who failed the journalism school grammar test, etc. I see no conflict. The point is that, if one wants to succeed in a society that values the ablity to manipulate a standard dialect, then one must learn to manipulate that dialect. Seeing it for what it is--one of many but the dominant one of those many--is a valuable way to help people learn it without placing too much personal weight on any of it.</p>
<p>And despite my descriptivist training and knowledge that language grows and changes, it still twists my bloomers to see nouns like "advantage" used as verbs!</p>
<p>There must be a fair number of students who took the old SAT in the winter and the new SAT in Spring. Did ETS ever publish the Mathematics/Verbal score correlation for these candidates? My sense of things is that the new SAT as a screening tool for talent is inferior to the old SAT and arguably much more race and class biased, but until there is some direct comparison of candidates we could argue about this forever.</p>
<p>My D went to public schools k-12 and was very well schooled in grammar. Her writing, however, was a bit weak, and they took care of that in HS. She only took the old SAT and scored an 800. As a Spanish teacher, I teach grammar a lot! What I have found is that many kids don't seem to realize the importance of grammar until they take a foreign language, and I have heard many say they never really understood it until they took a foreign language. That doesn't mean everyone listened when it was taught. Many of my students sat in the same classes together, and some got it, and some said they had never even seen it! Grammar just isn't fun for kids and many avoid it, or learn it for the test, and then promptly forget it. That said, however, I was schooled in the old days of diagramming complex, compound sentences that took two blackboards to complete! I know grammar very well. Yet, when a co-worker's son took a summer class at the local community college, he had to correct sentences and explain why they were incorrect. I helped him into a 40! The highest grade in the class was a 60! The prof said he was just using the assignment to see what they kids could already do. He never went over it or explained. I have never seen such obscure sentences! No one would write like that at any level. I suspect the prof didn't know why the answers were what they were supposed to be. (We never saw them, or I would have helped the young man to understand the prof's take on proofing.) I could argue for the answers the friend's son gave on each one, and they would also be correct. Perhaps the authors determined that there was a better way to correct or rewrite the sentence. That doesn't mean that another way doesn't also work. Sometimes it is hard to determine intent of a sentence, because syntax, etc., must also be taken into account. What emphasis or meaning does the author want to get across? All that will also determine the proper "grammar." I have always hated the "pick the best answer" questions. Sometimes the best is what the author determined it to be. Language grammar is precise, but language is not, and there are many ways to correctly say the same thing. Who is to say which is better? Language is also not stagnant, but evolving - along with grammar. Remember dangling participles? They are no longer a taboo. I guess I just don't like the way the SAT goes about determining whether something is nore correct than other answers.</p>