@3scoutsmom they are surprised about how many took it - really? They did it on a weekday -how can this be a surprise. They’ve been preparing for years for this. I can’t stand them.
@Mamelot I took it to mean that they got too many of certain populations are scoring very high and others are scoring very low so they are trying to figure out how to deal with it. At this point I can see them tossing certain questions to try to bring up the bottom end and making a really hard curve at the top end. When D16 took the SAT she lost 50 points for missing one question in Math.
I really don’t know what it means, that just my interpretation. Maybe you can get a better answer out of them? I have the rep’s name and direct number PM me if you want it.
@suzyQ7 I think they were more surprised at how poorly those kids that were forced to take the PSAT did!
It’s not surprising at all. Some people took this test who have no ability to or interest in attending college and others studied like their lives depended on it! No doubt there is the usual gap between “populations”
@Mamelot You can see the original questions online at the quickstart website. Or at least that’s how it was for last year’s PSAT.
Thanks @FutureMMAChamp that’s good to know.
And thank you @3scoutsmom for the offer but I’ll wait till my kid’s score comes out. The CB has done enough damage with all their “helpful” explanations to date - this latest one is sure to raise a mini-firestorm. Expect another e-mail to the schools assuring everyone that the scoring is accurate and not rigged by “population” etc.
Thinking through the possibility of tossing questions - that simply can’t be. We don’t toss out anything when scoring the practice exams and CB would be caught mega-fast by some AP stats kid (or not even) if they were somehow weighting certain questions differently ex post facto, or otherwise misrepresented how the test is scored. For sure the easy tests will have big drops in scores for just missing a few questions (and hard tests will be more lenient in that). That applies to all parts of the curve, I believe, not just the top portion.
I read the CB comment to my husband when he walked in the door this evening and my son, who was with him, actually interpreted that to mean that different “populations” must be clustered at different parts of the curve! Can that really be what happened? It begs the question as to what these “populations” actually are - I’m not sure what my D3 was directed to report about herself on her test but now I’m wondering if they are allowed to leave the demographic info. blank. What business is it of CB’s, anyway?
At any rate, none of this should delay score reporting, only analysis of how the scores fell out. The distribution is what it is. Any scaling they do is simply to account for the degree of difficulty of the test. You can’t turn a non-normal distribution into a normal one and I doubt that the distribution is somehow unrepresentative for the new PSAT - not with that number of kids. It could well be that with 4.5 million test takers - 3 million or so brand new to the very concept of taking the PSAT - that there are a LOT of kids on the bottom end (because the test was so easy that even a few wrong mean big drops in your scaled score . . . ) and they are looking through that to see what that means by “population”.
It is really worrying to think that College Board might manipulate the curve to try to reflect a perfect “bell curve” distribution that wasn’t present. That is my biggest fear.
@3scoutmom - how does that work… If your son lost 50 points on the SAT for 1 math problem, doesn’t that mean everyone would lose 50 points for a question? Trying to remember how curves work. Something like 1x =50 points penalty, 5x 100 point penalty, 10x 150 point penalty? (This is a hypothetical).
“For sure the easy tests will have big drops in scores for just missing a few questions (and hard tests will be more lenient in that).”
Didn’t all the kids(4.1 million) take the same test?
@suzyQ7 Two tests: Oct. 14 and Oct. 28.
Do we know that there were 2 different tests?
Yes, everyone that missed one on the math section of that sitting lost 50 points you could have also missed two and still lost only lost 50 points but if you missed 3 (hypothetically) you might only have lost 60 points… just depends on how the CB sets the scoring.
On other sittings of the SAT missing one on the math could mean loosing only 30 points just depends on how the CB sets the curve for that particular test.
This is why I am so concerned with the PSAT, if their were several students in the high end with perfect/near perfect scores missing one or two question will be huge but kids at the middle or bottom won’t face such a huge penalty. The College Board will just assign the curve to make it work best for their own objectives. I think there is a lot of playing with numbers going on and that is what is causing the delay.
@suzyQ7 and @Ynotgo it’s probably reasonable to assume that both tests (though different in content) were equal in level of difficulty. Therefore, the raw test scores from both tests (in other words, the complete student population) can form some curve or other - hopefully normal. (I suppose there is a possibility that there is a bi-model distribution of raw scores given that the test population is now suddenly 3.0 million larger and perhaps a broader range of student ability and goals etc. but let’s wave our hands and not worry about that LOL). When they fit the raw score distribution to a normalized curve and translate the raw scores into scaled scores, you will find that if the test were relatively easy (compared to a “representative” “true” PSAT which they already claimed to have via the “scaled scores” we saw from the practice exams) then fewer wrong answers will result in a bigger drop in scaled score. Conversely, if the test were harder than the “true” “representative” PSAT test then you can get more wrong for the same scaled score.
We see this with SAT Practice Exam # 4 don’t we? It’s a harder test so you can miss more and still get a pretty good score compared to the other tests.
@Suzyq7 I believe that there were four tests a form a and b for each of the two test dates.
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Well, the problem then is that there is an inconsistency with these posts. The CB can’t still be playing with the scaling AND have already released some percentile (based on the scaling) to Stanford/MIT/Brown et al. If anything it’s either one OR the other. Or neither. But not both.
@Mamelot Yes! having an ‘easy test’ will make it more difficult for high scorers to get a good score because even smat kids make careless errors.
If form A was easy and a student lost 50 points for missing one question and form B was difficult so a student that missed one only lost 30 points this is really unfair the the to the brightest students since the greater masses, the average students are the ones that are actually defining the test as easy or difficult and the high scores are likely to view the test at the same difficulty level. Does that make sense?
Any way I hope my kids end up with which ever test are deemed more difficult because they didn’t feel the PSAT or any of the prep was that difficult so I know that they will score better on the more difficult test.
The kids on CC who took the two PSATs seemed to be reporting different levels of difficulty in different parts of the test. I didn’t take notes, so I don’t recall the differences. Of course, they were different kids and it is somewhat subjective to say that the “math was easier/harder than the practice test” because there are various ways to be harder or easier.
Yes, the tests on the two days were different; the memes that got posted on Twitter etc after the test were different for the two tests. I don’t know about Form A & B; probably one is much more common than the other. It seems like most kids report the same memes. You don’t see half the kids saying, “What’s all this talk about Herminia’s poetry, Nasutoceratops, and wolves that won’t look at you? That wasn’t on my test.”
@ynotgo with past experience with PSAT and current discussions with the College Board I am certain that their are at least three forms of the PSAT, though it’s possible that the some forms had exactly the same questions but in a different order which should not effect the difficulty of the test.
If CB didn’t make all four tests comparably difficult that might be a problem. They are supposed to be the same student population with the same prep. Why would their tests all be varying degrees of difficulty? Although I suppose as long as the scaling adjusts for the varying difficulty and the tests are scored separately rather than having the raw scores jumbled together, perhaps it doesn’t matter.
The only thing I can think that messes this up is that they WERE planning to jumble them all together because they thought they were all the same level of difficulty. Except that the 14th had the normal “we were planning to take the PSAT anyway” crowd and the 28th had the “What’s this new test called again?” crowd. THEN you might have some issues - like a bimodal distribution. Still, the more I think about it the more I’m coming to believe that CB did the scaling by test (rather than just one big distribution).
@3scoutsmom I’m not sure it really matters easy or difficult. If easy your kid would make fewer mistakes careless or not and have more severe scaling. If difficult he/she would make more mistakes and get easier scaling. That’s the norm, at any rate (each kid is going to deviate from that norm on a given date/test, of course).
But why did 3 million extra people take the test? This could create a massive shift for the nat’l merit corporation, because I assume that there will either be 3x as many semifinalists or a way higher cutoff score…