sat, psat, all those tests, good or bad?

<p>just an opinion survey. its for a class i have and i need to know if you guys this that its a good or bad thing. thanks. if you can, tell me why you feel like that. thanks</p>

<p>bad. the tests stress that there is only one type of academic student- one who does well on tests that often have no relevence to college work or futre occupations. I don't need to know the area of a triangle if I am goiing to study history in college. I don't need to know the tone of reading passage if I am going to be a mathematician when I grow up. There's no one correct form of writing - just what is best understood by the audience. Academia disagrees, but its silly to think semantics of a language need to be faithfully followed if those semantics serve no purpose. </p>

<p>BTW, I just took a practice SAT so I'm a tad tired. that explains any convoluity in my writing. at least, that is what I tell myself...</p>

<p>Bad. These test, especially the SAT, are actually very bad predictors of future academic performance. Schools use them for two reasons: 1) it makes the admissions officers' jobs easier because they can quantify people and basically ignore a whole level of student. 2) Test scores are the only way they have to compare students from different schools and different regions. They think of these tests as the great equalizer. After all, your 3.8 gpa might be very different from someone else's 3.8 gpa. Still, I think that just means the admissions offices aren't given enough resources to actually get to know each student as best they can.</p>

<p>they're horrible...</p>

<p>but you need to take them if you want to go to college.</p>

<p>Bad:</p>

<p>they don't really prove anything. There are countless stories of people who were very intelligent, but couldn't for the life of themself get above a certain score. It's great for certain people, terrible for others. I hate the fact one test determines what colleges I can aim for.</p>

<p>thank you guys, theres a bird in the library....... hmmmmmm, sorry thanks if i can get sommore, thatll help even more. so far, everyone has said bad, or not give an opinion. interesting.......:-)</p>

<p>good. they standardize the entire if not world (yes people, sats are given across the world)...i personally do not like them in terms of irritation and time-consuming, but in general this type of test is the only way (or most efficient up to now) everyone can be put on the same playing field...yes people will say oh well theres the money factor and not enough for sat class etc etc, and minorities like me who don't do well on verbal (which yes i do think is messed up), even with all of that, there has to be SOMETHING to standardize the country, because gpas, ecs, all that stuff is so subjective (yes gpa is subjective, i mean people have like 5.4 gpas, while others deal with 3.6 etc etc, and class rank only helps with distinguish a person inside his own school) so with all of that, i'd have to say sats, etc, are the only way for standardization of the entire high school student population.</p>

<p>yah but what about those people who are NOT good test takers? they cant do well cause they dont do good on tests. i guess that there are many different reasons why the sat is good and bad, and people are allowed to have their opinions, and i respect you for that.</p>

<p>i guess if they can't do well on tests then with all the tests in college, boy i wouldn't want to be that person lol...i really don't like the whole test taker excuse, i mean honestly, a person takes more than 1000 tests in his high school, he takes hspas, gepas, aps, espas, all that crap, sats are just another test, and when college comes around, all you usually have is heres a book, midterms in a couple months, finals at the end of the year "good-bye.." so yeah, im not trying to crtisize your opinion in anyway, im just saying that its impractical for one to say i'm not a good test taker. It takes practice too, i mean i honestly used this excuse after psats etc, and i'd always be like o this test sucks its so useless its killing my self-esteem etc etc, but then i also saw that after taking lots of practice tests at home, timing myself, and getting used to the test, it all fell into place. That's my two cents.</p>

<p>interesting. i really gotta get on my case, literally. i ahve to do a contreversy case for speech and debate. aghhhh. its due on thursday. also about the tests, yah i gotta do better on em..... hmmmm</p>

<p>And standardizing the world is what we want to do??????</p>

<p>i dont know, it might be a good thing in the short run, but it might be abad thing in the long run. i really depends.</p>

<p>good. momofwildchild, i don't think she meant that everything in the world should be standardized, but that the test provides you with an objective scale for what is otherwise a very subjective process. grades aren't reliable as comparison since they vary so widely between schools. while standardized tests may not be the ideal way to judge intelligence, it's just another facet of a complicated presentation. a person with a low sat may have written an excellent essay, and will almost certainly be admitted over someone who got a 1600 but can't write to save his life. it's certainly a factor, but it's not the only one.</p>

<p>furthermore, i don't believe that the questions on the sat are useless knowledge. the math isn't calculus; it's simple algebra, which most people have been learning since middle school. grammar is vital to writing, which is required in the "real world" -- as, incidentally, is the ability to understand a written passage. more implicitly, much of the test is nothing more than logical thinking, another important skill.</p>

<p>an interesting idea would be to require all the respondents to include their own score, and to observe the correlation between score and opinion. my hypothesis: posters with lower scores will call it "bad", and those with higher scores will say the contrary.</p>

<p>There's a question implicit in this discussion:</p>

<p>If standardized tests were removed from the college admissions process, would the process become more or less fair?</p>

<p>Consider the consequences. Admissions officers have a number of options at their disposal during the evaluation of a candidate. They can look at grade point average, class rank, extracurricular activities, essays, interview reports, recommendation letters, and so on. Clearly, a holistic evaluation is superior to a completely numerical one. However, are stats really the evil that we make them out to be?</p>

<p>In high school, grades are often arbitrarily and unfairly distributed: colleges have no way to understand the rigor of applicants' classes, and individual teachers can be erratic. Say, for the sake of discussion, that we eliminated SAT scores in the consideration of applicants, and that we gave grade point average and class rank even greater consideration. Would the process really become fairer, or more productive? No. In fact, we would exacerbate the already existing problem of grade inflation: without standardized scores acting as checks on the worst excesses of high school grading, GPA would quickly become meaningless.</p>

<p>All of the other measures are similarly subjective and often arbitrary. Alumni interviews depend upon the alumni giving them, and on CC we regularly see stories about strange interviewers. Wealthy families often hire outside help to write essays for their children. The strength of recommendation letters hinges upon the writing skills of teachers. And, of course, extracurricular activities are widely exaggerated and faked.</p>

<p>These are already problems. They would only become worse if standardized tests were eliminated. I'm certainly not going to say that the SAT, or any other test, is perfect. In fact, the tests that dominate in admissions today have plenty of flaws. The SAT fails to adequately distinguish test takers in the upper end of the score distribution (how many math 800s should there really be?). Similarly, the SAT II subject tests are scaled in absurdly generous fashion. AP tests, by only allowing discrete scores from 1-5, fail to give a very precise impression of the ability of students (especially ones receiving 5s).</p>

<p>However, many here seem to assume that having a flawed test is clearly worse than having no test at all. I disagree.</p>

<p>randomperson -- i agree.</p>

<p>I don't disagree at all with your points, but I do disagree with your conclusions to a certain extent. One of my biggest problems with standardized testing is that many colleges and universities rely too heavily on the tests. For some, SAT scores alone, barring some extraordinary circumstances, can eliminate otherwise deserving students. </p>

<p>Some universities do a tremendously good job exploring all the information they have (as you mentioned "grade point average, class rank, extracurricular activities, essays, interview reports, recommendation letters, and so on"). Good for them. But there are lots of other universities that simply don't have the time, staff or resources to do a thorough job, so they use SAT scores as a crutch.</p>

<p>So consider this alternative: without SAT scores, schools might be prompted to do a more thorough examination of each applicant. That would certainly be an improvement...even if they are looking at other data that is without a doubt inconsistent and subjective.</p>

<p>I absolutely understand the usefulness of a measuring stick test of some sort, but the SAT does not, imho, live up to that standard. I personally think the ACT is a much better test, geared much more closely to the material students should be learning in school. Of course it has its problems, too.</p>

<p>How are people who are "bad test takers" getting through school? At least at my normal public school in California we take about 5 tests/quizzes a week and most of them are multiple choice. They have to be timed, obviously because a class period is only 50 minutes. So...what is the difference between these tests and standardized tests? Or do these people do poorly both in school and on the SATs? I'm not saying that it's not true that some people might have problems with these tests..I just don't completely understand that argument.</p>

<p>The SATs are different and beneficial because a lot of the math and verbal sections test you on logic. Most of the math problems use basic math, however many of the questions require good problem solving and logic skills. These are skills that are needed in both college and life.</p>

<p>One thing that hasn't been brought up is that college classes (generally) place a much more emphasis on finals/midterms etc. So I suppose that someone who gets C's and D's on finals may not be as good of a college student, regardless of their high school performance.</p>

<p>however, I think that standardized testing is seriously flawed on the grounds regarding the amount of improvement one can make in a couple months. if noone was allowed to study one minute for the SAT, it might actually be a decent indicator. (ex I know someone who got a 233 on the PSAT w/o studying whereas I got a 189 w/o studying...however due to massive studying he may score a 2350 while ive worked my way through practice tests to the 2150-2250 range)</p>