O.T. Uconn drops SAT for 3 years

[uconnfan68]

I liked your comment on SAT's being "one aspect of a complex puzzle." I have twins, one who did well on standardized tests and one who did not. Both graduated high school in top 20, did well in college and have good careers. My son, who does poorly on standardized tests, became self aware of his issues and this has helped his pursuit of certain careers and jobs. Similar to personality and 360 degree tests, I would not ignore how someone performs on standardized test. I would also second the theory that its only one of many indicators.

Curious, identical twins, or fraternal? I have identical twin grandsons, and am a great uncle for 2 sets of fraternals (boy-boy, and girl-boy). All of them seem unique, but you can definitely see something different in identicals.

 

[uconnfan68]

I did not realize that Harvard, Princeton, Columbia, Cornell and Penn were all “non-prestigious” schools since they have all waved SAT’s.

They may as well waive them... they only get legacy applications now.

 

[Dokey]

Okay so Uconn (along with others) will not ask for SAT results for admision. For 3 years at least. So is this a good thing? Or the dumbing down of our education system. I have no dog in this hunt..Just think its a good topic to discuss.......

The SATs etc. are going away because they have been corrupted by wealthy parents getting their kids tutored to increase scores. One could argue studying to improve a test score has always been the real dumbing down. Because for a few months it was the only option, my daughter attended an accelerated college prep school with many very wealthy foreign students where practice SATs were given once a week. Good riddance to SATs.

 

[stamfordhusky]

They may as well waive them... they only get legacy applications now.

That couldn't be less true. Harvard's pool of applicants last year, for example, was well under 20% legacy. Since legacy applicants are more likely to be accepted, the ultimate class was about 35% legacy. Other Ivy's have similar legacy pools - some less.

 

[diggerfoot]

I was once tasked to research something related to this discussion. This was more than thirty years ago, but the findings are no doubt relevant and provide a resolution to the conflict between #oldude, #bennyskid and perhaps #plebe. (Did I do that hashtag thing right?)

A variety of studies (up until the eighties at least) attempted to tease out the most important predictor of educational success. The one variable that proved to be the best predictor of educational success was parental support for education. This was more important than socioeconomic background, high school attended or anything else. I add to this an observation from many years spent in the university system: both social networking and perseverance (or motivation if you prefer) are more important to educational success than intelligence, or at least the critical thinking part.

This provides support to oldude's argument. Grades are a good predictor because the motivation for good grades are a reflection of the parental support. It also provides an explanation for bennyskid's qualifier. Parents lower down on the socioeconomic scale do not have the same means to train their kids in the SATs as occurs with the upper socioeconomic scale. They also are less likely to go to prestigious schools despite their high school success. Conversely, prestigious schools have more students from upper socioeconomic backgrounds. Part of the expression of parental support in this case would indeed be providing, encouraging, nagging their kids with SAT training. The more parental support the more likely those kids will be trained in the SATs. The ultimate cause still remains parental support for educational success.

 

[cabbie191]

When I was in graduate school, I remember one stark example of the limitations of standardized tests.

There was a test, I believe long since abandoned, that was supposed to gauge children's level of "common sense".

One of the exercises went something like this - "Pretend you are playing ball in a field and you lose the ball in the grass. Draw out on this piece of graph paper how you will go about looking for the lost ball."

The test scorers were looking for something systematic - drawing rows, for example, demonstrating a methodical approach to look for the missing ball.

But scorers also noticed that a sizable minority of students drew what seemed like random lines, nothing systematic at all (or so they thought). It didn't make sense because on other exercises on the test, they "showed as much common sense" as the rest of the population.

Eventually, someone took the time to look more at who these students were, and they found a simple explanation. The kids with the random lines all turned out to live in mountainous areas of the country. The zig zag lines represented their stopping at trees on the hill, the places where rolling balls were most likely to stop.

Very common sense.

 

[Purduke]

When I was in graduate school, I remember one stark example of the limitations of standardized tests.

There was a test, I believe long since abandoned, that was supposed to gauge children's level of "common sense".

One of the exercises went something like this - "Pretend you are playing ball in a field and you lose the ball in the grass. Draw out on this piece of graph paper how you will go about looking for the lost ball."

The test scorers were looking for something systematic - drawing rows, for example, demonstrating a methodical approach to look for the missing ball.

But scorers also noticed that a sizable minority of students drew what seemed like random lines, nothing systematic at all (or so they thought). It didn't make sense because on other exercises on the test, they "showed as much common sense" as the rest of the population.

Eventually, someone took the time to look more at who these students were, and they found a simple explanation. The kids with the random lines all turned out to live in mountainous areas of the country. The zig zag lines represented their stopping at trees on the hill, the places where rolling balls were most likely to stop.

Very common sense.

I think this may be one of those urban legend tests that are beloved in acadamia. I've heard (and read about it) before, except it was offered relative to race and urban children etc. In that ending it was a black child from the inner city who did the zig zagging in the only "field of grass" he had ever seen -- an abandoned lot with pockets of weeds 2 feet tall. So, of course, he thought the ball must have been lost in one of those patches of "grass" and went zig zagging along.

I remember being told that version by a teacher I had dated as we were debating a Charles Murray book quite a few years ago. I then read about the "test" again in an essay that Howard Fast had written called War and Peace: Some Observations about various topics, including race. Fast was from Greenwich and best known for writing Spartacus and several other things. In his replay a teacher friend from NYC showed him the results from two tests he had administered to 12-year olds, one to a "white boy, middle class and test-wise, from a home where there was an endless list of specifics" and the other, a "black boy, out of a much poorer background with limited specifics but with the driving force of survival, calling upon inventiveness and originality" -- and the outcome was as legend would have it, although the details of the test varied a fair bit from my date's recollection.

I don't question there being value to the short parable (as I would think of it), I'm just not sure of its scientific grounding, especially when the details of the test and participants change somewhat indesciminately.