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 ...
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.
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