New York Times Article about the Redesigned SAT

Test Preparation SAT Preparation
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Of course there are ways other than the SAT for a student to demonstrate the skills necessary to do well in a place like Cal Tech or MIT. My only point in relation to the NY Times article was that the new SAT is even less usefull than was the old SAT for identifying students who have those skills. Already students scoring old SAT 2300-2400 are regularly rejected by top universities. So what will happen with the new SAT? Will students need to clear 1500 just to have their “more meaningful” qualifications considered? Will smart people be spending their time practicing proof-reading, arithmetic of fractions, and data entry skills just to be sure the adcoms will read about their more meaningful accomplishments? Or will Cal Tech accept students with lower SAT’s if the students have the other more meaningful accomplishments? Wouldn’t that mess up the Cal Tech USNWR stats?

If a test is being used to decide who goes to Cal Tech, it should meaningfully measure the skills necessary to do well at Cal Tech. It should have some of the questions that are on the “more meaningful” math tests you mention. Many of these questions do not require any more advanced knowledge of math than does the current SAT, and many problems can be solved in few steps in a very short time.

Maybe the real SAT in March will contain some more meaningful math questions…

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None of the super selective schools were selecting on SAT alone, so I fail to see what they will do anything differently.

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The difference is a difference of degree.

When there were very, very few high SAT scores, and high SAT scores were more correlated with academic talent, SAT scores had more weight in admissions decisions and factors such as EC’s etc. had less weight.

The new SAT looks to me even less able to identify the academic skills necessary for a top university, especially in math.

This means that whatever weight SAT scores now have in admissions decisions at top universities, this weight is likely to decrease.

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The weight of the SAT was already well in decline before this new SAT was rolled out.

The diminishing weight by colleges of the SAT had nothing to do with the test’s ability to differentiate math skill. The diminishing weight had to do with lending opacity to pursue a SJW agenda.

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@GMTplus7 You don’t think there is a connection between lowering the SAT level and facilitating the pursuit of SJW and other agenda?

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Actually I believe the new SAT Math section has questions based on precalculus and weighs the pre-algebra items less than the old SAT.

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No, because colleges & the CB have different objectives. Colleges are pursuing a SJW agenda. The CB is pursuing market share vs the ACT.

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Let’s consider the following passage from the Frederick Douglass speech that was on the Oct. 14 PSAT:

"Would to God, both for your sakes and ours, that an affirmative answer could be truthfully returned to these questions! Then would my task be light, and my burden easy and delightful. For who is there so cold, that a nation’s sympathy could not warm him? Who so obdurate and dead to the claims of gratitude, that would not thankfully acknowledge such priceless benefits? Who so stolid and selfish, that would not give his voice to swell the hallelujahs of a nation’s jubilee, when the chains of servitude had been torn from his limbs? I am not that man. In a case like that, the dumb might eloquently speak, and the “lame man leap as an hart.”1

Predictably, there is question asking the meaning in context of the sentence “I am not that man”.

I have been reviewing this passage with mostly bilingual students who read at about 600 level old SAT CR. I have discovered the following:

They don’t know what “would to God” means.
They don’t know what “who is there so x that not y” means.
They don’t know what “swell the hallelujahs” means.

Some of them know “obdurate”, “stolid” and “jubilee”, and some don’t. However, the vocabulary words are not the main problem. The big problems are the rhetorical devices such as “who is there so x that not y” and “would to God”. Failing to understand these, it is difficult to grasp to what “I am not that man” refers.

“Who is there so x that not y” is a rhetorical device typical of preachers and possibly politicians. I don’t know about other students, but my students have had absolutely no exposure in school or out to any sort of rhetoric of this kind, and these include students in IB and AP programs. It also seems to me really unlikely that students need to able to handle rhetoric like this in college unless they study religion, political history, or black history. A student can sail through almost any major without ever encountering “swelling hallelujahs.”

Yet I would not be surprised if this is the passage that is going to be the difference NMSF and not NMSF for more than one student. Personally, if it came down to this, I would rather give NMSF to someone because he or she knew the meaning of “redolent” and “halcyon” than because he or she knew “would to God” and “swelling hallelujahs”.

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And the runner from Botwana missed an Olympic bronze medal by 0.01 sec. That’s life…

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@GMTplus7 But nobody is changing the metric for victory in sports to make it harder for some people to win and easier for others.

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^Yes, that passage (and other examples like it) are the reason why I believe CB should issue dictionaries to bilingual students (students SHOULD NOT be allowed to bring theirs - CB should hand out the dictionaries they choose as most likely to provide appropriate accomodation without undue advantage, just like thy handle accomodations for students with LDs etc.) It wouldn’t necessary help because using dictionaries has its own set of issues, but 18th/19th century terms and rhetorics pose a specific problem to kids who speak other languages.
I too know bilingual students who know “obdurate”, “stolid”, and “jubilee” (and use them un-self consciously because they like English words) but would have no idea what “swelling hallelujahs”, “would to god”, and “who is there…” mean - and the issue is that answering questions about this text has NOTHING to do with college readiness. Students may encounter this text but would always have a dictionary to prepare it, and the number of students who would actually work on rhetorics in 18th/19th century speeches is incredibly small to boot. There could be a contemporary text used for analysis but I’m guesing 18th/19th century authors don’t charge copyright fees.
A test has to measure what it purports to measure. Some aspects of the new SAT don’t really do what they’re supposed to do.

BTW, I’m also in favor of redesigning Math1 and Math 2, with Math 1 being mostly algebra1+geometry+ statistics, data interpretation, and personal finances, and Math 2 being mostly precalculus and calculus plus statistics and probability.

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Who cares about the bar for athletes. Those students are a torn-ACL from having nothing.

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I agree CB is pursuing market share versus the ACT. But I am not sure why you think this excludes pursuing a SWJ agenda as well. You don’t think that CB made an attempt to design a test that would “narrow the gap” between the hot potato groups? Isn’t a test that “narrows the gap” also a test that will sell better to state and local governments, and so increase market share?

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My point was that there is a difference between a runner who loses a race by a fraction of a second and a student who misses out on NMSF by one or two redesigned PSAT questions because in the case of a race, the fastest person still wins, even if only by a small fraction, and the skills required to win are not changed from one race to another. By contrast, in the case of the PSAT, the content of the test has changed, and so the skills required to “win” have changed. The question is whether the skills required to “win” have changed for the better or for the worse, and whether the changes have the intended or unintended consequence of favoring specific groups.

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And surfing the internet, I found the “Achieve the Core” website, which has a detailed lesson plan (for 8th grade Common Core) about …yes, you guessed it, the Frederick Douglass speech, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?”

http://achievethecore.org/dashboard/300/search/1/1/0/1/2/3/4/5/6/7/8/9/10/11/12/page/530/anthology-alignment-project-lessons-grade-8-list-pg

Of course it goes without saying that behind this website are the “Student Achievement Partners founded by David Coleman, Susan Pimentel and Jason Zimba, lead writers of the Common Core State Standards.”

I wonder how many students who took the PSAT analyzed the Frederick Douglass speech in detail in class before the test, and whether this might have introduced any kind of bias into the results. Or are the readings on that website mandatory high school knowledge required for success in college, just like addition of fractions and systems of linear equations? So we are not talking about bias, but about testing the universal knowledge base?

So it DOES look like if your school is following the Common Core as interpreted by David Coleman, you really have a big advantage.

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This is interesting. If indeed there’s a text from a core list on the test, then it’s entirely different. Bilingual kids would study it with a dictionary in hand or the lexicon typically provide d with differentiated lessons, everyone would discuss it qns work on it at level, etc. It also gives a huge advantage to kids whose states adopted common core.

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@MYOS1634
Is there an actual Common Core reading list? Where is it?

In the past CB/ETS made an big effort to find passages that students were not likely to have seen before. Of course there might have been the occasional random pre-exposure. But certainly CB did not use passages from texts that regularly were part of some school curricula. This really is a big change. A passage with very contorted rhetoric that some kids have had their teachers explain to them in school and others have not really can’t distinguish the students on the basis of reading ability…

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More evidence that in redesigning the SAT, CB is motivated by SWJ:

http://newpittsburghcourieronline.com/2014/03/13/sat-officials-hope-to-score-high-in-eliminating-racial-bias/

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This is what CB says: “The redesigned SAT will be grounded in the real world, and cover questions directly related to the work performed in college and career… the evidence-based reading and writing section of the exam will focus on words that students will use throughout their lives — in high school, college, and beyond — …”

But this is what students found on the PSAT: “Who so stolid and selfish, that would not give his voice to swell the hallelujahs of a nation’s jubilee.”

Language students use in high school, college and throughout their lives?

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Something else about the Frederick Douglas speech.
“Frederick Douglass PSAT passage discussed on the College Board website – before the PSAT”:
http://thecriticalreader.com/frederick-douglass-psat-passage-discussed-on-college-board-website/