<p>Making it based on AP or SAT IIs just makes it easier to study for.</p>
<p>What the test is TRYING to do is make a test where studying yields the lowest about of results possible to determine what YOU can actually do, instead of how much time you're willing to put into it to learn.</p>
<p>The best way to make the system fair is to chug all testing and have admission by a national lottery. :) or have all tests as take home quizzes with open books and group assignments with self grading and bonus points for neatness.</p>
<p>Wow did I miss the boat on this conversation. Oh well I caught up in twenty minutes of reading the thread so I guess I'll throw in my two cents.
Ok, boy where to start. Maybe with the socioeconomics string. That one seemed to hold out through the entire discussion. One thing I didn't see mentioned a lot, if at all, was the whole time issue. And not just in the sense of the test but in preparation overall. The general argument against the premise that socioeconomics have a major effect on SAT scores was that "anyone can go buy a 20 dollar book". My immediate thought was, sure you can afford the book, but can you afford to take time off from your after school job to read said book? Is there a space in your home that is quiet and condusive to learning to the point that you will get any type of benefit from the book? And please don't start in about the effing library again ok? Most libraries are open limited hours and, in my observations and experience, these kids go to the library to do their regular homework so their GPA isn't in jeopardy for college admissions. And it has been scientifically shown many times that lack of sleep has a detrimental effect on academic performance. It is much easier to focus on studying for the SAT, and not getting sidetracked by... life in general..., when you go to a college classroom for two hours twice a week and have someone teach you the test (as I was fortunate enough to be able to do when I took a class with the Princeton Review).
Also, as I was relieved to see jhsu point out, the Princeton Review class provides you with books not available at a bookstore. They come specifically designed for the class with stradegies such as the ones jhsu mentioned. They also have specific examples that occur frequently on the different tests so students can memorize them to use. They teach students the various tricks to remember formulas and all the different shortcuts and ways the collegeboard tries to trick people on the tests (one big issue they cleared up for me was the fact that when it says "diagram not to scale" it means the diagram is bs and you should completely ignore it because it is just there to put an incorrect idea into your head about how the problem should be approached). They also have all of this insider information that they don't give you in the store-bought books and that a student will likely never find out by dragging through the "11 Practice Tests for the New SAT". Did you know that the people who grade the essays on the new SAT have between 60 and 90 seconds to grade the essay? And they are paid per essay so it is to their financial benefit to stay towards the 60 second mark. This means that they have enough time to skim the essay, come up with what they think the score will be, look at it a bit closer, then give it a final mark. Studies (by the PR) have shown that essays that are neat, fill the entire space given, use lots of punctuation (the "-" and ";" are big ones), have large indents in the paragraphs, and begin intro, body, and concluding paragraphs with sentences like "One example of this is" and "In conclusion..." are more likely to get a higher score. In the CR section, it is not important to read the entire long passages, this wastes time and leaves less time for the tricky questions to follow, look at the questions then go back through the test to find the answer. As for the questions themselves, the test tries to trick students by providing answer choices that are based on information that could be easily assumed by the reader but is not actually mentioned in the text. ( Avoid extremes! Words like "never" and "always" are usually a clue for an incorrect answer). Also guess agressively. A PR study showed that males score higher than females on the SAT because they are more likely to guess (even though you lose 1/4 point for a wrong answer) rather than leave the question blank (zero points added but nothing subtracted from the final score). Also, along with the class, students sit for an acutal SAT practice test in a classroom like they would for the real exam, a total of six times, before the actual test. Then in the next class, students receive an analyzation of their results telling them which questions they missed, which types of questions they were, and what they should focus on to get those questions right the next time (so they know exactly where their problem areas are). The class also talks about what score students are hoping to get, how long they'll likely have to study to get the score, and how many questions they can skip in each section of the test and still receive the score they are aiming for. Students also get the phone number and email address of the teacher so they can contact him or her if they have specific questions on the homework (yeah, there's homework too) that's assigned or any other problems they have. And if a student doesn't improve by a certain score amount (100 points I think?) they get to take another class free of charge. (So for those of you who were saying it doesn't really help, the PR is still in buisness... if 2 of 3 kids weren't improving from the class they probably wouldn't be offering the garantee...) In the classroom a "good" question is a fair question; on the SAT, a "good" question is a tricky question. The class teaches you how to take the test, it doesn't teach you all the stuff you need to know to be sucessful in college, it teaches you the test. In my experience, confidence is half the battle and the class gives you the confidence to be relaxed and prepared to take the test. I know that this is a lot of going on about the different things offered in the class but it helped bump my scores up a few spread brackets and I just think it is disgusting that students who have enough money can buy these special hints and insider tips while other students are stuck with the mainstream knowledge. (And yes I was fortunate enough to get to take this class and yes I let my friends borrow the various books and taught them the different tips I was learning so they could benefit as well so don't even think about calling me a hypocrite.) And maybe this will convince a few parents to grit their teeth and shell out the 1000 bucks for the PR class because, in my experience, it's completely worth it. This was also a long-winded way of citing a few specific examples of why the class and the book are not comparable. You could spend a thousand hours studying from the book, but if it doesn't contain the information that the class does, they are probably not going to get the same benefit.
(this was too long and i'm tired of trying to shorten it, please see the next post for the rest of my thought)</p>
<p>I think that pretty much addressed my opinion on the benefits of classes as well. I don't think that anyone should be allowed to purchase the kinds of information that you get from the classes just the same way I think that it's dispicable to allow students to hire people to organize, edit, and coach their way through their college admissions applications. And before someone points out the obvious and I have to fix them with a vicious and condecending (albiet virtual) stare, I took the class because I wanted to and my family could afford it, and I ended up upping my SAT scores and getting into a good school. I could afford to do it and I benefited from the fact that I could afford to do it. That doesn't make it right.
As for English as a Second Language and Bi-Lingual students taking the SAT, in my opinion saying that they should be held to the same fast reading standards as students who have been speaking English their entire lives is completely unfair. That being said, I also think it is unfair to have the time constraints on the various reading portions of the test for any person since even the most accomplished English-speaker in the country could do badly on the CR section if they simply read slowly (as many people do). (Oh and just another comment from the peanut gallery, the various responses to the effect of "They're coming to America! It's not our fault if they don't speak American as gooder as us do!" get really old throughout this discussion. Top American colleges drawn students from everywhere in the world because of the level of education that they provide their students. Just because a person doesn't speak English well doesn't mean they are less intelligent and it shouldn't jeopradize their chance to get a good education in the US if they so choose.)
Going back, again, to the correlation between class and scores on the SAT, and also just bias in general, the following example was presented to me a few years ago when I was having a very similar discussion about the SAT in my history class: the vocabulary word "regatta". A student that comes from the midwest who has never seen a body of water bigger than a lake, much less a boat race, or a student who lives on the coast whose parents are not members of the local country club and don't throw around words like "regatta" and "cotillion" would have to have read or looked up those words to even know what they meant, when for a small percentage of the kids taking the test these words are just a part of their normal vocabulary. Are those kids smarter than the ones who don't hear those words in their everyday life? And (screw the PC crap) it is widely accepted that there is a correlation between race and economic class so (look at me pulling out the "poor me blame the rich white kids and anyone but myself/race without consideration for the circumstances, class, and race of those around me" card, guess my credibility is going down the tubes now. Off to the credibility gallows for me...) the SAT is, to a point, classist and racist. It's also interesting to note that, when it first came out, the SAT was blatantly, undeniably racist (look at me pulling out the "r" card again! I'm on a roll!) and then continued on from there to the test we have today.
Accept it, embrace it. Once we get over that fact we can move on to finding a better way to mould the system. I've read a lot of ideas, I have a few of my own, but I don't presume to know the answer. I just think that we need to stop arguing over whether or not the SAT is a problem and move on to finding a better, more equal way to do it. Maybe we should jump on the IB bandwagon, the program recognized as the high standard all throughout Europe and in almost every modernized country throughout the world. And before simba jumps in again (By the way your condecending remarks are getting old. Perhaps you should take your own advice and ...grow up...) I'm not saying that everyone is equally intelligent and we should all go to Harvard and become doctors and lawyers and rocket scientists. The one thing I agree with that simba has said is that it's true, not everyone is Einstein. But I don't think that the non-einstein like students that aren't white or wealthy should have to work harder to go as far as the other kids. It's easy to say "oh tough **** stop whining" when you're the one on top.
I have completely written more than my two cents I said I was going to give, but I had 11 pages of thread to catch up on. Now, argue with me! I love it. ( And yes, I did manipulate the various fallacious techniques of argumentation here. Hooray for me.)</p>
<p>"But I don't think that the non-einstein like students that aren't white or wealthy should have to work harder to go as far as the other kids."</p>
<p>Absolutely. I agree. Makes sense to me.</p>
<p>OK, how about this. What if the kid doesn't study or prepare at all for the SAT, just shows up to take it 'cause they blew the top off the PSAT (which they also didn't study for, but their school forced them to take and then they got NMF due to getting a 132 on the PSAT) and they had to take the SAT 'cause National Merit required it and they wind up in the upper 700s on all three parts w/o trying, plus they get a 35 on the ACT (also w/o any prep other than getting out of bed and driving to the test w/o forgetting their calculator and no. 2 pencil). Add to this that the kids in their class who paid the $900 or whatever to Princeton Review didn't get squat out of it, much to the dismay of their parents and their bank account, some of whom also had paid tutors to help them get through honors whatever while my kid slept on the floor during calculus using the booksack as a pillow while the teacher went over everything for the third time for everyone else, and now the AP results just came in, all 5s. And this at a private school with a lot of rich kids. Would you still say the test is not a valid judge of intelligence?</p>
<p>I just read the first and last page of this thread and don't have time to do more, but, being National Merit and Phi Beta Kappa myself, and not doing any "studying" for any of these tests a hundred years ago when we had to do the really hard stuff like analogies, my own experience (limited to my three kids and their classmates) is that the tests very much do measure IQ or something awfully close to it. Whether or not the kid decides to use that intelligence is reflected in the GPA or lack thereof. High GPA and low test scores equals overachiever (not a bad thing and in some cases what certain schools are actually looking for - hence why Harvard looks down on Chicago as "thinkers" and not "doers").</p>
<p>I can add more later, but if you think even the old SAT was unfair to poor and/or minorities, see what Thomas Sowell has to say about that - he a black HS dropout who got into Harvard pre-civil rights based on his SAT scores.</p>
<p>Actually the PSAT score was a 232, is that right? Can't remember and don't have the score sheet anymore but it was some sort of selection index score and kid got maybe one or two points below the max available. I forget now how it was actually scored. Only got a couple of wrong answere on entire PSAT.</p>
<p>
[quote]
Harvard looks down on Chicago as "thinkers" and not "doers"?
[/quote]
.
Where did you get that idea? In my experience, Chicago grads do very well in the Harvard graduate admissions.</p>
<p>I just read mercymom's comment. It's true that some kids do a lot better on the SATs without having to try. That's great for them. I just think that it's unfair for the kids who fall under the greater part of the bell curve aren't being tested on what they have learned in their school careers but rather on whether or not they know how to take the test and whether or not they can afford to get the insider information or hire someone to teach them the skills to take said test.
Another thought I had, (adding on yet again to my previous firestorm of text) is that perhaps the SAT should become more open ended. I was thinking about the SAT in comparison to the AP and IB tests and I was thinking about how the difference between AP and IB was explained to me: AP asks very difficult, complex questions to try to get students into a corner and judge what they don't know about a subject whereas IB is open ended, students get to show what they know in various different ways (for example the English IB exam consists of two papers written during the school year based on different required readings that were provided throughout their Junior and Senior years, an oral commentary on a passage where the student has half and hour to read and analyse a short passage then present it to the teacher (it's recorded for grading), and also three "papers" or written tests that students sit for. For the sciences, students have lab notebooks that are sent in to the graders at IB for scoring as well as written tests and an important presentation in class.) The different parts of the test contribute to the overall score from 1 to 7. This makes it much easier for kids who have different learning styles to do well on the tests and takes away some of the test taking anxiety. There are no test preps or classes to help your score, the IB organization is all about the integrity of the tests and all of the tests around the world are timed and scheduled so no one can call a friend from another part of the world to find out what was on the tests. The only material offered are past tests and a set of different standards that need to be met for each score along with different topics that the test could be based upon. (For example, in History, each school chooses two different regions of the world to study. My school history program was based on Russian History, World Wars one and Two in the European theatre, and the History of the Americas). The information you need to succeed in the tests is taught in the normal class hours over the course of the Junior and Senior years. If you pay attention and have developed the skills presented to you in high school, you'll likely succeed on the tests. Every student in every country in the world is graded by the same criteria by trained IB graders and if there's a disparity in the grading of some of the graders regarding a particular test or essay, it is looked at all over again to determine the score. Tests are available in almost any language you can think of, the only requirement being that students take a harder test in one language (their native language) and an easier test in a second language (studied in high school). Though there are also special tests designed for students that are bilingual. If there was some way to move the SAT towards this standard, I think that students in the US would be much better off for it.</p>
<p>rj,
I think your informative & thoughtful posts illustrate just how <em>non</em>equalizing standardizing testing can be. (I.e., often creating their own forms of inequality, replacing the so-called equalizing aspects of these versus nonstandardized GPA's from varieties of high school settings). And that doesn't even address the non-equalizing disabilities issues.</p>
<p>As a factor -- optional or required -- in an application package? Perhaps. </p>
<p>...But to be looked on with a qualified perspective & in context, only.</p>
<p>I really think that some people -- both students & parents (not necessarily on this thread) -- look upon the SAT I as some kind of "scientific" measurement or standard, with universal application. Scientific it is not. Those who believe that may want that comfort or assurance, but there is no basis for that view.</p>
<p>As for Harvard and Chicago, that came from a New Yorker article I read some months back with a title along the lines of "What does Harvard want?" or some such. The idea was what were they looking for in admissions, and how so much now rested on things like the interview and the ec's on the resume. There was a specific sentence about Harvard thinking that the kids in Chicago undergrad were thinkers and not doers, and Harvard wanted their graduates to be leaders, people who would go out and make a difference, and supposedly you could predict that from a high school resume of starting food banks in your community, etc.</p>
<p>It was amusing to me at the time because my child had just interviewed at Chicago and was ultimately accepted early decision (not going alas, for lack of funds, but maybe grad school or med school in 4 years?), and it was so clear that they were looking for a particular kind of person who had divergent thinking skills and a high level of out-of-kilter thinking that the kid could express verbally in Chicago's unusual essay questions. Since we have friends whose kids go to UofC, I know for a fact that the kid with the best test scores doesn't always get in and often the kid with lower scores and a higher "thinking quotient", if you will, who's well written and well read, but maybe hasn't won a zillion science fairs, does get in. It's very self selecting and you feel that when you're on the campus.</p>
<p>Anyway, my sentence came from the New Yorker, so blame them.</p>
<p>Some thoughts on what kind of test to give. Here in the South, where we have some seriously bad public schools, a test that focuses on what you've learned instead of how much native intelligence you've got puts public school students with not the best family life at a disadvantage. This is ironic considering most kids take the ACT, which is supposed to be more about what you know than how smart you are. If you gave kids in some of these schools a test like you describe for the IB diploma (or series of essays, whatever) they would flunk like crazy because they haven't been taught anywhere near that much information. This was the original thinking behind the SAT at its inception, I recall, and I do believe it was someone at Harvard (ironically) who got the test started or urged its creation, ie, to find the smartest kids even if they went to bad high school, and then teach them after you get them.</p>
<p>As I recall (I think this was during the 40s, the original SAT being a derivative of the test the army used to sort draftees), Harvard was wanting to diversify its student body and not have everyone be an upper class WASP. According to the New Yorker article (and other stuff I've read elsewhere) the SAT worked so well that soon there was (among other things) an unacceptable % of Jewish kids, so something had to done to lower that to placate donating alums and hence the interview and resume requirements. Devices now used to find gogetters, but originally used to keep from accepting too many Jewish kids.</p>
<p>Once again, blame the New Yorker, not me.</p>
<p>BTW, I think it was during the 40s that Thomas Sowell got into Harvard with his SAT scores. He was a black HS dropout as I said and had no HS degree at all, not even a GED. Lousy home life, etc. On a personal level he also has some experience with LD kids as one of his was slow talking and had school related problems, but he's still a big defender of the SAT to this day.</p>
<p>Thanks for the clarification. You should not believe everything you read in the paper or magazines--or on CC, for that matter.:)
My S is definitely a thinker and not a doer. And he's in at Harvard. On his application, he explained why he had so little time for ECs.
What neither Harvard, Chicago or MIT want are students who have to work very hard to do well in high school. They all value a good work ethic but are concerned that such students may have hit their personal ceiling. At the same time, they do not want bright slackers. Either type of students will find college tough going.
My S has friends who've ended up at Princeton, Harvard, MIT, Yale and Chicago, and I don't really see much difference in terms of their achievements, or attitude to work or commitment to extra-curricular activities.</p>
<p>Well, this serves me right for not reading the original post's quote, but it talks about the guy from Harvard (Conant). I remember now that I got that tidbit from the Nicholas Lemann articles (didn't he write a book about this?) when they first came out. Sorry. Just proves you can't do too many short cuts.</p>
<p>Something that people fail to understand is that the SAT is not SUPPOSED to test what you've learned up to this point, Changed name or not, this is supposed to ba an aptitude test. Crystallized knowledge has no place there. Another interesting point of note is that although false negatives appear with some frequency from the SAT, you will very rarely find false positives.</p>
<p>mercymom:</p>
<p>As a product of a rural southern school, I agree with you, completely. Without the PSAT and SAT, I doubt I would have gone to college at all.</p>
<p>Because of the Republicans and George W. Bush.</p>
<p>The SAT Test is a morally neutral test of human goodness. Income can be based partly on inheritance or connections or looks. The SAT is pure. You can be of any religion (or in half the cases of perfect scores no religion), gender, ethnicity, political belief or economic background. Kids in the ghetto beat George W Bush on it. If you show human goodness as a kid, you read, you study, you listen in class, this is a reward. If you show a propensity for badness but are popular and get good grades due to grade inflation, this will be a day of reckoning for you. If you watch TV, hang out, don't do your homework, cut class, do drugs, you will get hurt here. Grades can be biased by grade inflation. Grades at a good high school, say Boston Latin, Bronx Technical, Palo Alto High or Lowell High in San Francisco, can be low because the school is competitive, whereas a mediocre high school in an unintellectual place can give a 4.0 to someone who isn't really that smart. The SAT separates the smart from the truly smart. There are very few morally neutral measures of human goodness, but this is one. There's no bias. Sure, kids don't choose their parents, and parents who run off, swear and speak slang in front of their kids, divorce and watch TV in front of their kids instead of reading and fail to emphasize education will fail, which is why many blacks do, most don't have fathers and have mothers who speak slang, but Asians dominate the SAT, even poor Asians do better than rich whites and rich blacks. It is heartwarming and truly wondrous that there can be a test like this, one that cuts across the U.S. and can compare all kids with no bias. Libraries are free, hope is there, most perfect scores (600 per year) come from public schools. People object because they hate being judged but we are all judged every day and often on things far more trivial than our level of character in our entire childhood in terms of our hobbies. Most kids spend more time watching TV than reading and studying combined. These are the facts, and they are undisputed.</p>
<p>"The SAT separates the smart from the truly smart. There are very few morally neutral measures of human goodness, but this is one. "</p>
<p>Oh, please. Spare me.<br>
...Besides which, the phrases "human goodness" and "morally neutral" are contradictory.</p>
<p>But then, perhaps you're not one of the "truly smart" ones.</p>
<p>mercymom...it was interesting to read why the SAT originated in the first place
I think it's true that people forget that it isn't intented to test what you already have learned, but rather what you are (as of now) capable of learning. </p>
<p>I think, for example, that certain kids (including my class's current valedictorian) might not do well on the SAT if they took it with no prep, because in school, they study a lot. This girl has never gotten below an A+ as a quarter average...but only because she is fully dedicated to studying the material. I think the SAT was intended to see what the student is capabable of without being able to prepare. Of course this would have been invalidated now that there are so many prep courses/books, etc. concerning the test. </p>
<p>I was able to get above a 2000 cold turkey when my friend's mom signed us up for a free practice test at our local library, and only told us the night before. Meanwhile, my friend--who has slightly high averages than me in class--only got in the 1700s (still very good). This could be a result of many things, like I might have been better prepared just because I took it for Johns Hopkins in 7th grade, or I just read a lot (though I don't usually read "intellectual" books--90% of the time they're just chicklit), but in the end, it may have also been because her grades are, generally, more a result of a lot of studying than mine are (this would only be relavent because we took the test with no prep)</p>