Study Finds Little Benefit in New SAT

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.

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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