Thinking about the SAT test

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Wednesday, September 21. 2011

Thinking about the SAT test

The SAT was designed to produce a more egalitarian, less elitist American college student, yet few are ever really happy with it. I tend to view it roughly as an IQ test, but one which conflates the upper end to eliminate the upper outliers (it's not fair to the others to be too good).

From Steve Sailer's Asians, aptitude, and achievement: a positive sum reform proposal (h/t AVI):

...once the Ivy Leagues started trying to find the most promising non-upper class kids from the rest of the country, they needed something more objective about individuals than just grades. Another issue is that high school grades have certain inherent shortcomings. The future Nobelist in physics might not care about his social studies class and thus wind up with a lower overall GPA than the well-adjusted grind. Plus, grades have a ceiling. Even an A+ in physics doesn't really tell you that much. Moreover, lots of future successes are alienated in high school. Some people who get all As in high school might not have the upside to continue to do so in college. Incentives toward grade inflation at the high school are built in. And so forth ...

Posted by The Barrister in Education, Our Essays, The Culture, "Culture," Pop Culture and Recreation at 14:42 | Comments (6) | Trackbacks (0)

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My son just took it and is about to retake it (despite doing moderately well. We figure he needs 100 more points to get into the college he wants to attend).

It is an IQ test, but one that can be gamed. $200 and a few classes on how to game it (conveniently offered by a local community college), and you can pretty much tack on a substantial number of points.
IQ tests can't be gamed, at least not as easily. They require logic and precision.

I don't know how I'd do on today's SATs, but I suspect much better than I did 32 years ago. I've found the prep questions to be almost humiliatingly easy. The questions I found difficult weren't hard because they required thought. They were hard because the language of the question itself was convoluted and designed to mislead. I was forced to re-read a number of these to be sure I answered correctly. That's hardly a test of knowledge.

Not sure what value the colleges find in the test itself, but hey - it's a gauge of something.

#1 Rick on 2011-09-21 16:12 (Reply)

I don't know how I'd do on today's SATs, but I suspect much better than I did 32 years ago.

Bob Greene, formerly a columnist for the Chicago Tribune, once wrote a column on doing precisely that. He had scored around 700 on both the Math and Verbal sections of the SAT when he was in high school. Several decades later, the second time around, he scored 800 on the Verbal and around 500 on the Math. Greene reasoned that his Verbal score was a consequence of his work, where he was reading and writing all day long. By contrast, his high school math wasn't something he used on daily basis, if at all.

I believe that GRE and SAT scores are supposed to be about the same. When I took the computer version of the GRE, three decades after taking the SAT, my two scores were nearly 100 points higher than my old SAT scores.

SAT scores are overrated, at least from my perspective of having higher SAT/GRE scores than grades. As gross indicators they have some value. Someone who scores below 500 on the Math portion of the SAT would not be advised to become a mathematician or an engineer.

Anyone who took the SAT decades ago would do better today, as the scores have been normed up.

#1.1 Gringo on 2011-09-22 04:40 (Reply)

"The SAT was designed to produce a more egalitarian, less elitist American college student..."

Well, not exactly. They have been RE-designed with such purposes in mind, over decades. I suppose the older tests were "egalitarian" in a way, since they largely tested for the basic sort of thing - known as the Three Rs - which were/are supposed to be common to the one-room school and the exclusive prep school.

Oh, there were problems even fifty years ago when I took them. I recall a bit of a rumbling about a question involving a cup-and-saucer, with the claim that not everybody knows what the heck a saucer is, which after all is true.

#2 John A on 2011-09-21 17:39 (Reply)

Neither possible nor desirable to design a content-less test. Those who like to learn things, learn things. Look at Abe Lincoln.

#2.1 Bird Dog on 2011-09-21 20:36 (Reply)

In my college economics class, the professor kept talking about taxi medallions as an example of restricted supply. The medallions were also mentioned prominently in the textbook.

Although I had already lived in two foreign countries and in four states by the time I was in college, I had never taken a taxi in my life. I had no idea what a taxi medallion was.

The proper thing, of course, would have been for me to ask. What the heck was a taxi medallion? But I didn't. My stupid fault.

However, the writers of the textbook were a bit New York centric to assume everyone would know what they were talking about.

#2.2 class factotum (Link) on 2011-09-22 09:34 (Reply)

John A, people then didn't know what a saucer was? What with flying saucers in the movies and newspaper articles?

I sure did.

#3 Sam L. on 2011-09-21 21:58 (Reply)

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Wednesday, September 21. 2011

Thinking about the SAT test