| Topic: |
Sociology > Education |
| User: |
"Mark" |
| Date: |
18 Jul 2007 08:22:30 PM |
| Object: |
Dump the SAT! |
This week the Irascible Professor comments on The Bell Curve author Charles
Alan Murray's call to abandon the use of the SAT I tests for college
admissions.
Read the IP's comments in full at:
http://irascibleprofessor.com/comments-07-19-07.htm
Sincerely,
Dr. Mark H. Shapiro
Editor and Publisher
The Irascible Professor
http://irascibleprofessor.com
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| User: "Herman Rubin" |
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| Title: Re: Dump the SAT! |
21 Jul 2007 09:24:53 PM |
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In article <469ebcd7$0$16602$4c368faf@roadrunner.com>,
Mark <mshapiro2@nospam.adelphia.net> wrote:
This week the Irascible Professor comments on The Bell Curve author Charles
Alan Murray's call to abandon the use of the SAT I tests for college
admissions.
Read the IP's comments in full at:
http://irascibleprofessor.com/comments-07-19-07.htm
Sincerely,
I must disagree. I do not like the present SAT, but the
older ones, closer to an IQ test, is the only method I
know to help identify those with ability and a horrible
high school education, as well as those without ability
who are essentially parroting.
That latter group can get reasonable grades in college,
but they are a major part of the problem of lowering
the quality. As they have been highly rated, their
views about courses are counted heavily, but they keep
the others from getting understanding.
High school records should be essentially totally
disregarded, and the opinions of high school staff
are of little value if they do not have understanding.
--
This address is for information only. I do not claim that these views
are those of the Statistics Department or of Purdue University.
Herman Rubin, Department of Statistics, Purdue University
hrubin@stat.purdue.edu Phone: (765)494-6054 FAX: (765)494-0558
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| User: "Donna Metler" |
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| Title: Re: Dump the SAT! |
22 Jul 2007 03:57:54 AM |
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"Herman Rubin" <hrubin@odds.stat.purdue.edu> wrote in message
news:f7uf5l$q8c@odds.stat.purdue.edu...
In article <469ebcd7$0$16602$4c368faf@roadrunner.com>,
Mark <mshapiro2@nospam.adelphia.net> wrote:
This week the Irascible Professor comments on The Bell Curve author
Charles
Alan Murray's call to abandon the use of the SAT I tests for college
admissions.
Read the IP's comments in full at:
http://irascibleprofessor.com/comments-07-19-07.htm
Sincerely,
I must disagree. I do not like the present SAT, but the
older ones, closer to an IQ test, is the only method I
know to help identify those with ability and a horrible
high school education, as well as those without ability
who are essentially parroting.
That latter group can get reasonable grades in college,
but they are a major part of the problem of lowering
the quality. As they have been highly rated, their
views about courses are counted heavily, but they keep
the others from getting understanding.
High school records should be essentially totally
disregarded, and the opinions of high school staff
are of little value if they do not have understanding.
And you think that students who have gone through multiple SAT prep courses,
had shower curtains printed with SAT vocabulary so they could get a little
more drill in, and generally started preparing for high test scores when
they were not even in their teens yet in some cases aren't "just
parrotting?"
You are never supposed to prep for aptitude testing, nor are you supposed to
ever retest the same person using the same test, since both tend to lead to
artifically inflated scores. (For that matter, it doesn't do good things to
achievement test scores, either, since so often crammed information is lost
quickly). As a result, the SAT I, where students can easily prep
specifically for the test, and many do, is probably the worst measure of IQ
out there-something that the College Board recognized when they revamped the
test and tool the word "aptitude" out of the test's name.
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| User: "Beliavsky" |
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| Title: Re: Dump the SAT! |
22 Jul 2007 03:15:54 PM |
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On Jul 22, 3:57 am, "Donna Metler" <dmmet...@xxxcomcast.net> wrote:
<snip>
You are never supposed to prep for aptitude testing, nor are you supposed to
ever retest the same person using the same test, since both tend to lead to
artifically inflated scores. (For that matter, it doesn't do good things to
achievement test scores, either, since so often crammed information is lost
quickly). As a result, the SAT I, where students can easily prep
specifically for the test, and many do, is probably the worst measure of IQ
out there-something that the College Board recognized when they revamped the
test and tool the word "aptitude" out of the test's name.
Murray's essay http://www.american.com/archive/2007/july-august-magazine-contents/abolish-the-sat
questions the effectiveness of SAT prep courses:
"If you're rich, the critics say, you can raise your children in an
environment where they will naturally acquire the information the SAT
tests. If you're rich, you can enroll your children in Kaplan, or
Princeton Review, or even get private tutors to coach your kids in the
tricks of test-taking, and thereby increase their SAT scores by a
couple of hundred points. If you're rich, you can shop around for a
diagnostician who will classify your child as learning-disabled and
therefore eligible to take the SAT without time limits. Combine these
edges, and it comes down to this: if you're rich, you can buy your
kids a high SAT score.
Almost every parent with whom I discuss the SAT believes these
charges. In fact, the claims range from simply false, in the case of
cultural bias, to not-nearly-as-true-as-you-think, in the case of the
others. Take coaching as an example, since it seems to be so
universally accepted by parents and has been studied so extensively.
From 1981 to 1990, three separate analyses of all the prior studies
were published in peer-reviewed journals. They found a coaching effect
of 9 to 25 points on the SAT Verbal and of 15 to 25 points on the SAT
Math. In 2004, Derek Briggs, using the National Education Longitudinal
Study of 1988, found effects of 3 to 20 points for the SAT Verbal and
10 to 28 points for the SAT Math. Donald Powers and Donald Rock, using
a nationally representative sample of students who took the SAT after
its revisions in the mid-1990s, found an average coaching effect of 6
to 12 points on the SAT Verbal and 13 to 18 points on the SAT Math.
Many studies tell nearly identical stories. On average, coaching
raises scores by no more than a few dozen points, enough to sway
college admissions in exceedingly few cases.
I am not reporting a scholarly literature with a two-sided debate. No
study published in a peer-reviewed journal shows average gains
approaching the fabled 100-point and 200-point jumps you hear about in
anecdotes. While preparing this article, I asked Kaplan and Princeton
Review for such evidence. Kaplan replied that it chooses not to
release data for proprietary reasons. Princeton Review did not respond
at all."
I scored above 1200 in 7th grade and 1560 in 11th grade (around 1985),
just using practice books. The test does not cover advanced material,
and coaching is not essential to get a good score.
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