Does whatever a spider pig does."
Posted on 06/22/2008 3:03:32 PM PDT by neverdem
The revamped SAT, expanded three years ago to include a writing test, predicts college success no better than the old test, and not quite as well as a student’s high school grades, according to studies released Tuesday by the College Board, which owns the test.
“The changes made to the SAT did not substantially change how predictive the test is of first-year college performance,” the studies said.
College Board officials presented their findings as “important and positive” confirmation of the test’s success.
“The SAT continues to be an excellent predictor of how students will perform,” said Laurence Bunin, senior vice president of operations at the board, and general manager of the SAT program. “The 3-hour, 45-minutes test is almost as good a predictor as four years of high school grades, and a better predictor for minority students.”
But critics of the new test say that if that is the best it can do, the extra time, expense and stress on students are not worth it.
“The new SAT was supposed to be significantly better and fairer than the old one, but it is neither,” said Robert Schaeffer, the public education director at FairTest, a group that is critical of much standardized testing. “It underpredicts college success for females and those whose best language is not English, and over all, it does not predict college success as well as high school grades, so why do we need the SAT, old or new?”
The reports, called validity studies, are based on individual data from 151,000 students at more than 100 colleges and universities who started college in fall of 2006.
Plans to revise the SAT were announced in 2002, the year after the University of California president, Richard Atkinson, threatened to drop the test as an admission requirement.
“Given the data...?”
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
With a national test like the SAT you get compared to your peers, not against your classmates at podunk high. Bottom line, getting rid of the SAT is a bad idea, and is really only about increasing the power and discretion of admissions officers to do the social engineering they so want to do.
Ever notice the stuck record pattern developed by the libs? Anything that requires more work, study, effort, or intelligence “won’t work”. Of course, this is coming from the group that has an unparalleled record of things that didn’t work.
Ah, a gender and English as a second language is the issue. So we throw it out and forget standards. They'd rather have quotas on gender, race and English as a second language. They don't want ANY standards because that would discourage their arbitrary social engineering based on anything but MERIT.
I think there is PC at work in this summary of the results. This sentence is imprecise and misleading. The predictive power of standardized tests applies to high grades from poor performing school districts. The PC argument is that high grades alone should determine suitability for top university education. The corrolary is that race will be used to determine financial aid. There is no question that standardized tests predict differently for high performing schools than low performing schools. For high performing schools, standardized tests do not matter. For low performing schools, standardized tests indicate grade inflation and lower academic achievement. Dropping standardized tests removes the large difference between high performing and low performing schools. The effect is a backdoor quota for certain underperforming groups.
The mostb unethical thing I have ever done was take the sat test for someome else. It wasn’t too difficult thirty years ago when I did it.
It was for a friend who was a brilliant artist but a bad student. She wanted to attend suny purchase which was/is a NY State college known for its art dept. Without the grades she wouldn’t have gotten in. She was not book smart is all.
I scored a good score for her and she got in.
Last year I saw her at my thirtieth hs reunion. She is a very successful photographer in NYC and I don,t have a moments regret about it. By the way, she did something equally unethical for me in return but what I did helped her life in a way we could not have imagined. We had a big laugh about it and agreed we were crazy to do it and you probably clould not get away with it today!
Also, you will notice that they use freshman college grades in the comparison. As you move on in college and the coursework becomes more difficult, sheer intelligence becomes more important than it was in freshman year.
An awful lot of people would like to deny the role, or even the existence of intelligence--about 50 percent of the population, as a matter of fact.
I did horrible on the SAT, but I had great grades from a good high school in Dallas. I also took hard classes in high school.
I got a degree in computer science from Texas A&M. I was originally a chemical engineering major. Most of the class flunked out of chem E after their freshman and sophomore years. These were even National Merit Scholars. I never flunked out (but I did change out of Chem E my junior year because I hated it).
I know that I had to work hard in college, and the people that didn’t work hard didn’t do well.
And yet, contrary to your assertion, high school grades remain a better predictor of success than the SAT.
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luckystarmom: I know that I had to work hard in college, and the people that didn’t work hard didn’t do well.
I think you're both right, to some extent. The SAT is a good measure of a student's background knowledge, but grades can be a good measure of a student's work ethic.
For success in college, I think students need a good basic academic skill set and a good work ethic.
I’m all for getting rid of the new test and reverting to the old. It’s beyond retarded to have a writing section on a standardized test. In what way is that possibly standardized? Granted, everyone is asked the same question, but I refuse to accept that the reading of that question by a grader is a very revealing fact about someone’s future, particularly in a timed environment.
Go back to the old bubble sheets. Save the kids money. Let them get their results back earlier. Don’t make them sit so long writing essays.
Interesting story, though. There was a fairly well known character who got rejected at top 3 law school with an LSAT of either 178 or 179 (perfect is 180). Can’t remember which. In any case, there’s an essay section on the LSAT that is roundly ignored by admissions committees. Apparently this guy chose to draw stick figures stabbing themselves with knives. ;) (Which frankly, most of us would have rather done than complete the pointless exercise)
In speaking to the AdComs about why he was rejected, they said they had but one: and it was that essay. It may be the first admissions decisions ever made off that worthless exercise futility. :)
The SAT stopped being used as a valid indicator of intelligence after 1994. Mensa and other high IQ societies find it not indicative of intelligence after then.
Females proportionally take far more opinion-based classes in college than males. It's a lot easier to get an A in women's studies, for example, than physics. We cannot have people designing overpasses who BS'd their way through college, but in many classes, no one even knows what is learned.
In fact many college classes no longer give a final exam, preferring a paper. I believe that the profs don't want to know how little actual knowledge their students have acquired.
Yes, but aren’t those college results at least partly based on students who were matched to appropriate colleges with the help of their SAT scores? That is, take an A student from your average inner-city school and drop him/her into Harvard and it’ll be a much bigger challenge than one so placed from a top competitive suburban school.
That may be the case. But nevertheless, grades are a better predictor of college success than the SAT. So the point remains, why bother to use it as a benchmark?
The difference is slight. But give the SAT a break. It has a couple of hours to assess someone. A high school GPA has four years.
Considering that, the predictive value of the SAT is pretty impressive. Furthermore, if you removed from the calculations some of the college courses that are not predicted well by the SAT because they have little academic content (e.g. art, dance), the predictive value of the SAT might very well be above the h.s. grade point average.
Interesting. Does Mensa no longer accept SAT scores for membership, but still use the GRE, LSAT, etc.?
At my college, it was the kids that worked hard that did well in the upper grades.
I knew plenty of kids with high IQs that had always had it easy in school, and they didn’t know how to work or study. They flunked out.
My 13 year old son has a very high IQ, but he is a bit lazy. My husband and I are trying to figure out how to get him to be a harder worker.
I also have a special needs daughter who has a low average IQ. She has a brain injury that has affected her auditory processing, language, and memory. I will add that her math skills were not affected and she is gifted at math. Everyone that knows her thinks she will do well in life because she is an extremely hard worker. She just got a 100% on her last science test. It took hours of studying. Her gifted twin sister got the same test score with little studying. However, the results were the same. My daughter does get some accomodations in school, mainly extra time on tests. She sometimes doesn’t even need the extra time.
To me, a kid with an IQ of 90 with straight As is more impressive than a kid with an IQ of 130 with the same grades.
I’ll be very curious to see how my kids handle college. I will also add that I do think my special needs kid will need some help in college. She’s looking at majoring in accounting. I think she’ll be good at accounting, and who cares if she can’t write a creative story very well or if she doesn’t understand all the symbolism in some novels.
There are a number of reasons, starting with the fact that when you use both, you get more predictive value than if you use only grades or SAT alone.
Some of the other reasons: the SAT is especially predictive for some disciplines, like the sciences. Another is grade inflation: some schools have to distinguish among thousands of applicants who all have 4.0 HS GPA. The SAT lets them do that.
Grading practices vary dramatically from one school to the next. Having a variable on which everyone is evaluated the same way is often useful given that reality.
I almost think there needs to be different tests based on what you want to major in. For instance, someone going into engineering does not have to be great at writing an essay question, or someone going into English literature does not need to be good at calculus.
By a whopping .03 of a grade point (after you factor in the course-taking differences you describe. Before you adjust for that it's a whole .06 of a grade point.)
Naturally these sleaze balls don't give you the numbers. One, it ruins their argument, and two, I think a lot of them have trouble with arithmetic.
My main complaint with the new SAT is that it is weighted against people that are good at math and not good at language arts. Two of the sections now are language arts sections. I’m so glad I didn’t have to take the new test. I would have done horrible on it because I’m not good at writing. My strengths are in math (and sciences). The new or old SAT doesn’t even test any general science knowledge.
I think this is probably about the "renorming." What happened is that around 1995 the SAT people "re-centered" the scoring so that more people [read females and underrepresented minorities] would get perfect scores. As a result, the highest score now represents around 2.3 standard deviations above the mean. That's probably at least a half SD lower than the old test. For this reason, the scores don't distinguish out the top 2% anymore, which is who Mensa is looking for.
If Mensa were looking for everyone between the 80th and 90th percentile the test would still work for them. That is until political correctness does away with the 80th-95th percentile too.
Mensa accepts SAT taken prior to 1995, GRE taken prior to 10/2001 and still accepts all qualifying LSAT scores. Seems that SAT and GRE tests are trying to test other things.
That will be perfect!
Obama is an eloquent candidate for the status quo
He said that if his Republican opponent, John McCain, spent more time in America's schools, he would "understand that we can't afford to leave the money behind for No Child Left Behind; that we owe it to our children to invest in early childhood education; to recruit an army of new teachers and give them better pay and more support; to finally decide that in this global economy, the chance to get a college education should not be a privilege for the wealthy few, but the birthright of every American. That's the change we need in America."
My son had to write a paper about whether or not every child should get to go to college.
My son said that he didn’t think they should because some kids don’t want to go to school and learn. He said that only kids that work and want to learn should go to college.
My son was saying that in some of his middle school classes the teachers would give the kids an A just for doing a homework assignment (not even if it was correct), and kids would still get an F. My “lazy” son was appalled.
I believe the new SAT was designed with the writing component so that, if necessary, colleges would be able to compare the SAT writing sample with the essays that the student submitted at the time of application. Colleges were finding that students were sending in fabulous essays, then when they arrived, they couldn’t write worth a darn. They realized that some students were buying their essays from others and not sending in their own work.
After you take the miliary entrance exam, you take it again under strict control.
My biggest beef with the new SAT is the time it takes to complete. Part of that is because there is an entire 30 to 45 minute section on every test that will not count towards the score. These are ‘test’ questions that are being vetted for a future test. The kids have no idea which section it is, so in essence they are paying to take a test and in return their test is made longer because they are testing out questions for the next test.
How long does it take now?
I think that when a test goes that long, the test begins to measure other things besides knowledge, such as stamina and task-completion. These are fine things to test, but not in combination with a knowledge test.
In other words, it's a cold, objective standard that weeds out those to whom professors would give automatic, subjective "A"s because they are winsome victims.
Yes, it defeats eradicating the WHITE home grown male.
Yes, it defeats eradicating the WHITE home grown male.
LOL! That's an interesting angle!
My comment was more of a comment on how the liberal media skew the view.
I think my 13 year old will be okay. We’re putting him in a private Christian school for high school, and I think that will make a huge difference. It’s just a higher level of achievement than in our local public school.
Wish me luck with trying to get my 11 year old special needs daughter into college and through it. If she wasn’t good at math, then we wouldn’t try. However, I just think that a kid who tests in the 95-98% on standardized math tests should go to collge. She is skipping a year of math this next year. Most of her troubles show up as her being slow with writing and reading. Slow reading is an easy fix with audio books. I don’t quite know what to do about slow writing. There are some software programs that may help.
It’s an interesting topic. How does IQ (and all it’s components) affect learning?
I’ve worked with people who have problems writing and have found some techniques that work.
Engage your daughter in a conversation about the topic. Ask her some questions and discuss the answers with her. Then ask her the questions again and get her to respond orally.
Once she has formulated the problem/answer in her head and is able to verbalize it, putting it in writing is much easier.
If writing it is still difficult try tape recording her response - but don’t let her know beforehand that you are recording her.
After you try that process a few times, I guarantee you, she will find writing easier.
What you are describing is called dysgraphia. it is a specific learning disability, and audio books are not the way around it. The best thing for your daughter is make her read, practice, practice, practice.
The only way around the slow writing is a computer, but her typing probably won’t be very fast either. It is really a fine motor skill problem, and maybe even a little dyslexia. Does her hand writing look like a second grader and combine printing with hand writing?
Both my husband and my son have it. My husband was never diagnosed because they didn’t know about it in those days, but his parents sent him to a boarding school, where he was sent to supervised study hall, every night. He learned to like reading, and I think that it changed the course of his life.
She doesn’t have dysgraphia. She has apraxia of speech, word finding problems, and short term memory problems.
The biggest problems are that it takes her a long time to figure out the words she wants to write, and then she can’t hold it in her short term memory long enough to write it.
The apraxia of speech causes her reading to be slow, and audio books are very good for her because it models good speech.
She can copy things great and has beautiful handwriting.
She was doing much better with writing, but then she had a seizure in October, and was put on anti-seizure medication.
Her short term memory was already bad, and it got worse. Her processing also got a lot slower. I also think her attention span has gotten less.
I pretty much have her dictate her homework to me. She’s tired after school, and can’t handle writing assignments. At school, she does her own work, but she may take extra time.
She also goes to a speech therapist who helps on all of these issues. They are all tied to her speech. She has trouble just verbalizing the answers.
I’m hoping she’ll be able to get off the anti-seizure medication in a 1 1/2 years. That will be before high school, and it should be better when she gets off of it.
Ah, so she doesn’t have trouble with writing, she has trouble thinking what to write. My daughter was diagnosed with something similar to that in kindergarten, they just called it a language deficit, though.
I remember when they first tested her, they showed her pictures of things and asked her to name them. The first doctor who tested her said that her intelligence was low because she couldn’t tell him what an antenna (the kind that goes on top of a house)was, but we didn’t have antennae in our town. Then he said that she couldn’t identify a picture of a judge, who dressed in black robes. She could tell him that they sit behind a desk and tell people whether they are right or wrong on tv, though.
Anyway she worked with a speech therapist who had lots of experience working with stroke victims and she has really improved. I actually forgot about it. (she’s thirty, now)
Anyway, if your daughter has no math problems, she can overcome all the other.
My son is almost through his master’s degree. My daughter, who had the language deficit, also has dyscalclia, which is really difficult, numbers have no real meaning for her.
The savvy speech therapists know what they are doing. My daughter was just tested, and the speech therapist said she thought her scores should be a little higher.
There were a couple of items that my daughter was supposed to identify (maybe a payphone and a record player) that kids don’t see these days.
I remember a friend of mines daughter who was being tested for kindergarten readiness, and her daughter was asked to name what a mop was. Her daughter had never even seen a mop, and didn’t know what it was.
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