Posted on 05/11/2005 4:38:02 PM PDT by emeryboard
Holy Cross College is dropping the SAT as an admissions requirement, apparently in the name of boosting ethnic diversity. I disagree with this decision. Not only is it a capitulation to the notion that blacks and Hispanics are somehow unable to get high SAT scores (which is politically correct bigotry, in my book), it also plays into the conspiracy theory that the test is somehow inherently biased against blacks and Hispanics. As Harvard professors Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom have pointed out, Asians tend to do better than whites on the SAT; if the creators of the test were deliberately trying to make the test biased, why would they make it biased in favor of Asians?
Dropping the SAT is an easy way out, an example of what President Bush once called "the soft bigotry of low expectations."
(Excerpt) Read more at drtucker.blogs.friendster.com ...
Your tag says it all!
The new grading system is not based on length. The folks that read and grade these essays are trained and monitored. Occasionally they get an essay that has an established score, and if they don't get it right, their scores can be thrown away and re-scoring begins. Random papers are pulled for scorer checking, and, personally, I think they are almost anal about the training...
Holy $hit.
You might want to look at the recent article posted here that mentioned a guy that has something like a 99% accuracy level at guessing the grade based on length. It has other observations - the training and monitoring is a a sick joke.
I would like to read that article. What I have seen and what you are saying are very different things.
Agree with this 100%.
From that article: "You are scoring the writing, and not the correctness of facts."
Funny, every essay *I* ever wrote in English comp was graded on style, grammar *and* factual accuracy.
They've been running "The Vagina Monologues" on Saint Valentine's Day the last few years. HC has already gone to hell, sadly.
It may be that recent changes to the SAT have made it worthless as a predictor of success.
Now since the leftist, feel-good redesign of the test a year or two ago, we see stories in that paper about little Jiimy or Susie who scored a "perfect" 1600. Thirty plus years ago, these kids would be lucky to crack 1200.
Very few 18 year olds, even those with a love for literature or history, have a clue about what they will or should do with their lives.
A properly desined entrance exam would show evidence of reasoning capability, whether in math or English.
Thanks for the link.
He fears that the new 25-minute SAT essay test...is actually teaching high school students terrible writing habits.
This was in the first paragraph. I kept reading anyway.
Fact checking. You want every fact in every essay to be checked for facts? Wow. There are hundreds of thousands of kids taking this test, and they want their results in a couple of weeks. If the scorers have to be experts in every area that a kid may write about, it is gonna take even longer. I suppose you could fact-check on the internet, but I have read there that some people actually think the essay is graded on length. Can't trust everything you read.
Hm, there's this wonderful thing one can use to check facts. Teachers send students to it all the time. It is only fair that teachers grading essays should have to use it as well.
It's called an "encyclopedia."
Not saying fact-checking can't be done. Just saying it can't be done in a timely manner. If the essay portion of the test is to check on writing/spelling/grammer and not history (as in the example given), you don't really need to check facts. A student could possibly write a decent essay on why Clinton should not have been impeached. I would disagree with all his 'facts', but that doesn't mean he hasnt written a decent essay.
What else do we know about the 1 professor that was complaining about the essay? Does he propose a better solution, or is he just whining...
As someone who has never taken the SAT but did take the ACT, Ill agree with you! ;)
Btw, Ive always wondered why it seems like colleges in the South and Midwest seem to use the ACT but everywhere else uses the SAT.
I wasn't sure what college they were talking about since I'm sure there are several Holy Cross Colleges, but I checked and it is indeed Thomas' alma mater, The College of the Holy Cross.
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