I understand that it might feel like the goalposts are being moved for people who optimize to score high on such metrics, but such is the nature of this type of games. That's also why search engine companies have to keep refining their algorithms.
MIT could drop the real SAT tomorrow and still fill its freshman class with valedictorians who captained their high school sports team and have ten AP 5s. Schools with fewer applicants have the SAT.
Tell that to the massive test prep industry. Many many years ago I took a trial SAT and scored around 1000. Then I took a Kaplan SAT prep course, and lo and behold after learning all the tricks scored a 1300 on a test SAT. Back then the test prep course cost > $1000. I had a car in high school, so I could drive to the test prep school in the evenings.
Seems to me that people who prep for the tests (not necessarily learned things through high school) and are willing to spend time and money have a great margin of benefit.
It's the same thing for tech interview prep industry. The ones who prep well for the interview, do well in the interview.
This is what the CollegeBoard wants you think. You don’t have to be all that great to realize that the people writing the test are hardly better than you are at both the subject and writing test, and in many case significantly worse.
In many cases, not, in many case.
The titles don't give too much confidence.
> About you
> Education/Experience:
> Doctorate in psychometrics, educational research, educational measurement or a related field is required. New PhD level applicants will be considered, as will applicants with additional experience. A minimum of 3 years relevant experience is required for the Associate level.
However, the biggest problems with these tests (and the AP tests) is that they are expensive--they cost a non-trivial amount of money to sign up for and they cost a lot of time to prepare for if your school doesn't offer direct AP classes.
The expensiveness is the barrier.
Edit: I meant I took the SAT subject tests along with their AP equivalents.
I think this is the fairest way to do it. If you got talent but no money, the opportunity is still there.
This just drives home the unfairness though.
You had a school that was willing to pony up this money. That is not universally true.
I agree that the answer is the base SAT, but with an addition of a lottery past a point threshold. Luck (of birth) got us into this mess, and luck could get us out.
I'm all in favor of adding some kind of RNG to this process. The overpreparation of the wealthy in all kinds of aspects of admissions gives them a big advantage over those who don't. RNG evens it out.
Only the wealthy can afford to apply to every single "prestige" college and university available. A lottery where some people get twenty tickets and others get one or two seems just as silly.
> In 2010 three College Board researchers analyzed data from more than 150,000 students who took the SAT, and they found that the demographics of the two “discrepant” groups differed substantially. The students with the inflated SAT scores were more likely to be white or Asian than the students in the deflated-SAT group, and they were much more likely to be male. Their families were also much better off. Compared with the students with the deflated SAT scores, the inflated-SAT students were more than twice as likely to have parents who earned more than $100,000 a year and more than twice as likely to have parents with graduate degrees. These were the students — the only students — who were getting an advantage in admissions from the SAT. And they were exactly the kind of students that Trinity was admitting in such large numbers in the years before Pérez arrived.
> By contrast, according to the College Board’s demographic analysis, students in the deflated-SAT group, the ones whose SAT scores were significantly lower than their high school grades would have predicted, were twice as likely to be black as students in the inflated-SAT group, nearly twice as likely to be female and almost three times as likely to be Hispanic. They were three times as likely as students in the inflated-SAT group to have parents who earned less than $30,000 a year, and they were almost three times as likely to have parents who hadn’t attended college. They were the students — the only students — whose college chances suffered when admissions offices considered the SAT in addition to high school grades.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/09/10/magazine/coll...
The article goes on to explain that while grade point average is relatively consistent across income level, SAT scores are skewed towards the rich. Schools have realized this, which is why many schools no longer require the SAT or ACT.
This was exactly the purpose for which tests like the SAT were created. If that factor wasn’t controlled for, then the quote above is misleading.
The material may be easier in a poor school and an average student can seem amazing compared to a below average student.
The rich dumb, poor smart both come in from behind the eightball. Rich can buy there way out and poor can work there way in. If I'm mit I want rich smart.. seems less risky.
- ALL sections (and sub-sections) have questions that strictly increase in difficulty / projected "miss-rate" as time goes on. This is to keep test takers from coming back to answers they're unsure about but may themselves know how to solve -- so if you find yourself struggling with questions in a row, it's better to stop and go back rather than miss out on what you may already know trying to solve questions that you don't. For the reading section, the scale is scoped to each passage. For the vocab section, where there are 3 sections (vocab, grammar, and multiple-choice fill in the blank), the scale is scoped to each subsection. For the math section, it is scoped to the whole thing.
- The "Free Section" (e.g. the one that doesn't count toward your score, which instructors tell you before you start that section, so you can use it as a break if you wish) is usually section 4 or 5 of the test, to help plan your breaks. Some students, not previously-knowing or confused that the "free section" is ungraded, still take it thinking there must be a penalty of some sort.
- The word "equivocal" is tested within the SAT Vocab in around 60% of tests. Unequivocally, these questions have some of the highest wrong-rates of any question on the test.
- Within the grammar questions, Choice (e) "None of the above" is 99% of the time NEVER the answer. This is one of the most certain things on the test.
- The math questions will usually have (1) answer that is an outlier. 95% of the time, this is not the correct answer; (2) will be similar to the correct answer in different ways; and (1) will be the correct answer (e.g., say you're supposed to subtract "x" by 5 to get to the real answer. The obviously fake one might be multiplied by 5. One of the slightly-wrong answers might have 5 added rather than subtracted, another might just be off by 1). If you're ever in doubt, you can drastically increase your chances at guessing on a question by picking the question "most similar" to all of the others -- something like 65% chance, rather than 25% in the naive case.
- Again for math questions -- particularly the "word riddle" type ones -- the SAT will generally purposely pick questions that could have multiple seemingly-correct questions if you plug in 1, 2, 5, or 10 for the variables. 3 is almost always a safe bet, though I particularly liked to choose 7, because who thinks you'd ever choose to plug in 7.
- The essay is funny. Per the SAT's own published rules, they are not graded on fact at all; purely rhetoric, vocabulary choice, and clarity. All of the prompts also usually include a historical figure or event of some sort -- you don't need to know anything about them other than what the prompt tells you, but a well-known and easy way to win points with the graders is to make up a fake quote from someone adjacent to the event / historical figure as a hook: e.g. "Disconsolate upon hearing the tragedy of [EVENT X], [FIGURE Y]'s au pair journaled 'His life was short, but his memory will last forever'. Previously unknown to historians until then, Y's au pair embodied Y's belief that [SOMETHING FROM THE PROMPT]. [then THESIS STATEMENT on 3rd or 4th sentence, always]." (this is an objectively wrong and terrible sentence that I would hate to read in any other context. This is, however, similar to the SAT's example of a top-tier intro).
This is just the tip of the iceberg, too. It's a very predictable format and pattern (it has to be, as it's given multiple times during the same academic year; tests must be similar, lest one session of test takers do statistically significantly better than an equally-talented group which takes the test a month later)
So yes, while I believe the SAT does attempt to test for knowledge, it's that same pursuit of a bell curve that makes it easily gamifiable for those who know the test and not the material -- who are, once again, usually already the wealthy and connected.
> - Within the grammar questions, Choice (e) "None of the above" is 99% of the time NEVER the answer.
> - The math questions will usually have (1) answer that is an outlier. 95% of the time, this is not the correct answer; (2) will be similar to the correct answer in different ways; and (1) will be the correct answer
This is exactly the reason that, when I design tests, I strive to make "none of the above" or the outlier answer the correct one about 20% of the time. I really hope the SAT writers are doing that now.
> ALL sections (and sub-sections) have questions that strictly increase in difficulty / projected "miss-rate" as time goes on.
The computerized GRE goes even further... it's like a videogame, it feeds you harder questions the better you do, then reverts to easier ones when you mess up.
Isn't that one of the better ways to finely calibrate a score? Rough approximation of heapsort?
It does feel a little crazy, though, when suddenly all the vocab words are like, "tergiversate" and "pulchritudinous". And then when you get them all wrong it's back to "the cat sat on the mat". :P
I used to be semi-adjacent to that sphere, but I do not know anything about the current format of the tests other than what is published.
When I realized this applied to a lot of required essays -- ie, they can be fiction or satire -- I had a lot more fun writing papers. I wouldn't exactly recommend it but can confirm it doesn't completely tank your GPA.
What I learned about studying for tests like these was that you were studying for the test, not the material. This felt extremely different than studying for... say... an actual physics test.
The more we can reduce the overdependence on standardized tests, the better we can be at selecting for well-rounded students and not just test-gamers.
There's a correlation between parental income and SAT scores.
“[S]tudents from families earning more than $200,000 a year average a combined score of 1,714, while students from families earning under $20,000 a year average a combined score of 1,326.”
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/03/rich-students-get-better-sat...
An "equalizing effect" would imply students of both parental income groups would have the same score.
Just because a test is standardized doesn't mean it completely eliminates all confounding factors outside of the test, but it does mitigate some of them. Equality and equity aren't the same thing.
Certainly, without reliance on standardized testing I'm somehow certain that Braden who got a helicopter pilot's license at 16 so he could fly the family helo from Manhattan to Westchester is going to do better in admissions than Tyrone who excelled in academics and was lucky enough to attend a technology magnet school, but grew up in the projects and had no access to anything outside of what school and the library provided. With SAT tests included, the fact Braden made a 1530 and Tyrone made a 1970 plays a factor.
That's what folks are saying.
Those who fight for fair admissions on the basis of intellectual ability and academic potential should hold up the SAT and standardized testing as a cornerstone of the admissions process.
Standardized testing significantly levels the playing field for students across income brackets. Returns on study investment quickly diminish, and reaching a plateau on returns doesn't require much investment at all (internet connection and the purchase of a few large study manuals).
At my high school in sophomore year I remember speaking with a wealthy friend whose father had signed him up for flying lessons so he could "stand out in college admissions". There are many, many cases like this.
Admissions should disregard such superficial peacocking and focus on metrics like the SAT that disentangle intellectual and academic potential from wealth.