SAT to drop essay requirement as part of overhaul

[DonViejo]

Source: Washington Post

The SAT college admission test will no longer require a timed essay, will dwell less on fancy vocabulary and will return to the familiar 1600-point scoring scale in a major overhaul intended to open doors to higher education for students who are now shut out.

Read more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/sat-to-drop-essay-requirement-and-return-to-top-score-of-1600-in-redesign-of-admission-test/2014/03/05/2aa9eee4-a46a-11e3-8466-d34c451760b9_story.html

[CurtEastPoint]

1. Sounds like they're trying to up their profit margin. I'm sure they're totally magnanimous.

[madaboutharry]

3. I'm thinking this as well.

The SAT has lost ground to the ACT. The ACT is seen as more accurate measure of a student's knowledge and critical thinking skills. Interesting because the ACT essay is required for access to many university scholarships.

[exboyfil]

5. Computer scored all the way

There are problems with the SAT essay as outlined in the link, but I think schools should go to a bit more effort than just what you do on a computerized test.

“What they are actually testing,” he says, “is the ability to bullshit on demand."


http://www.slate.com/articles/life/education/2013/10/sat_essay_section_problems_with_grading_instruction_and_prompts.single.html

[TygrBright]

11. Considering that "the ability to bullshit on demand" is an absolute prerequisite...

...for ANY kind of economic survival in America today, I'd say it's damn' well WORTH measuring.

cynically,
Bright

[Brigid]

33. And we have our thread winner.

[olddad56]

12. Their profit margin has to be pretty good already..

You don't even know about the CollegeBoard until you have a kid in High School, and after you have finished with SAT tests, ACT tests, AP tests, SAT subject tests, etc, etc, you wish you have never heard of them.

[amandabeech]

13. You don't get rid of them until you have decided that you will not attend

graduate or professional school.

GRE, LSAT, MCAT etc.

[Stuckinthebush]

15. Bing bing!

We have a winner!

[question everything]

2. Why not. Young people today have such a poor vocabulary

why bother?



Try to listen to many and all they can say is um... you know.. etc.

Then you listen to older people - Bruce Dern on Bill Maher last week - and you are amazed at how articulate they are. And then you are amazed that you are amazed..

[CurtEastPoint]

4. BTW, isn't it 'yung ppl'?

[question everything]

7. OOps...

[KeepItReal]

27. FTW!

haha!

[exboyfil]

17. It is interesting with voacabulary developed from reading

Hearing the mispronounced words. I have had to correct my daughters who are both avid readers (like I was at their age).

To challenge my younger daughter I had her read a Cormac McCarthy book for her 10th grade English class. She added several words to her vocabulary (hopefully it helps on the ACT).

[Adrahil]

18. Actually, I support them on this....

... the grading of the essay is plagues with problems. See here:

http://www.slate.com/articles/life/education/2013/10/sat_essay_section_problems_with_grading_instruction_and_prompts.html

[MrMickeysMom]

31. It sounds as if the problem is the method of test scoring...

I have to tell you, I'm surprised that the standard of scoring is to be able to have two individuals score an essay within 3 minutes.

WTF?

I actually took a CLAST exam (college level aptitude skills test) because I was one of those luck younger adults who took lower division courses in community college (because I was never on a "college track" in my less than stellar high school. to qualify to transfer from an AA degree into a university as a junior, I took CLAST prep courses, which were pretty damned good in honing writing skills.

Now, I think I did well, but let's face it, the real expertise is practice, practice and practice. Still, you need to structure what is said as a main thought and know how to break down that thought into concluding on any subject. The essay in education is communicate of cogent thought that doesn't have to be so detailed, as factually accurate with support of the main thought for which you conclude.

[Adrahil]

32. yeah, my wife's an English professor, so I understand the value of writing....

... but I just can't see it being fairly evaluated on a mass-produced, mass-graded standardized test.

[MrMickeysMom]

39. Maybe it's like what voting should be...

Have each school district or county for com. colleges devote staff to this task. They're probably non-tenured staff without full hours anyway.

[JoeyT]

21. And then you go somewhere like Free Republic,

and there's a huge pile of older people that mostly sound like gibbering morons.

People that read have large vocabularies, people that don't read won't. That's the same no matter what generation you're looking at, and I don't think it's really changing much.

[raven mad]

23. Free Republic = gibbering morons.

You insulted morons. And those who gibber!

[question everything]

24. This is true. When I hear parents complain that their children don't read

I am tempted to ask: do you? A parent should lead by example, not by "do as I say."

[JoeyT]

38. Amen to that.

Almost everyone I know that reads does so because one or both of their parents are heavy readers and brought them up to think of it as a pleasurable activity.

[Jim__]

6. I'd like to know how they determine what "fancy vocabulary" is.

[eppur_se_muova]

9. Well, I hope they dropped "baldric".

Old English term for a shoulder belt, often to carry a sword. Yes, I saw this on a standardized test many years ago.

[LibDemAlways]

8. While they are at it, they ought to consider dropping or lengthening the time requirement

on the math section as well. Not everyone can accurately solve math problems with a clock relentlessly ticking away. Me, for example. I can usually figure a problem out, but need time to think it through. Timed math tests were always a nightmare when I was in school, and I barely passed the math portion of the California CBEST test for a teaching credential. Simply ran out of time and left a bunch of it blank.

[truebluegreen]

10. I always assumed the lack of time in the math section

was to measure the ability for intuitive leaps...at least, it worked for me.

[greatlaurel]

14. Expecting students to make intuitive leaps in math is not just unfair but enforces bias in testing.

This always drove me nuts in math and calculus classes where the teachers and profs would expect you to just "get it" and act like you were stupid if you did not, mainly because they were not smart enough to explain it!

It shows a real inability to teach or comprehend that not everyone can analyze subjects the same way. Teachers use a variety of methods to teach children to read, math needs to be taught in a variety of ways, as well. If the writers of these tests are planning on students making intuitive leaps, then they do not understand the subject well enough to teach it to every student. Furthermore, the administrators of the tests are standardizing a structural bias against kids from less advantaged backgrounds, because they are far less likely to have decent math instruction to understand the intuitive leaps one needs to make on standardized tests. Good math teaching gets kids through this, so kids who never get exposed to great math teachers never test as well as they could.

[truebluegreen]

19. No doubt you are right

but to restate it, I always assumed the "math" portion was more about logic than math. That was just me.

fwiw, I was lousy at math and/or never had a decent math teacher, never took it after high school, but scored very high on that part of the test.

[Le Taz Hot]

29. And that's a bad thing.

Those of us who are linear thinkers (a great boon in some ways but a terrible handicap in others) intuitive leaps are simply not possible. Not to any great extent, anyway. Step 1 MUST be followed by Step 2 and Step 2 MUST be followed by Step 3, etc. We don't have the ability to jump from Step 1 to Step 11. As a result, we end up being punished for something that is innate within us when dealing with timed tests.

[truebluegreen]

30. I guess one has to ask what is being tested.

I'm not making a judgment that something is right or wrong, fair or unfair, but rather present or not present. I can't say the same for the designers of the tests.

[Le Taz Hot]

34. I understand.

As a linear thinker, I just wanted to throw that perspective in there.

[mahatmakanejeeves]

16. Writing? What's that?

Get over it, grandpa.

The Gettysburg Powerpoint Presentation



More on this:

The Gettysburg Address as a Powerpoint

Thirteen years ago, Peter Norvig, the current director of research at Google, suffered a dark night of the soul. Powerpoint presentations, he felt, ruled everything around him. Sales pitches, mission statements, even (shudder) inspirational speeches: All had been processed and extruded by the harsh, homogenizing gizzard of Microsoft’s leviathan.

So, he wondered, what if the Powerpoint had existed earlier in history? What if Lincoln, for example, had turned to the software in a time of utmost national need—what if, oh my gosh, what if Lincoln had delivered the Gettysburg address as a Powerpoint?

And so the stuff of Internet myth came to be.

In Norvig’s hands, the near-biblical phrase—“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”—becomes (what else?) a chart:

[surrealAmerican]

28. Please tell me I'm not the only one here ...

... who finds this hysterically funny.


As for the SAT essay, it's just as well they're dropping it. It was graded more for quantity than quality - a bias they didn't even try to solve.

[winter is coming]

42. It's not just you. I've never seen that before and it's seriously funny shit!! n/t

[QuestForSense]

20. I'm guessing they had to dumb it down for today's students.

An odd fact: I used to work for a large law firm, and every single associate we hired had to be sent to a remedial writing class at the local university. They made it through law school at the top of their class, yet couldn't write a cogent sentence. I could never understand how they passed their tests.

[liberal_at_heart]

22. maybe instead of criticizing the change we should look at why our public schools are

failing our students. This change will be good for my autistic son. My daughter who has always excelled at English would do just fine on the essay. My son would not. Maybe instead of criticizing the change we should look at why our schools fail so many students especially the ones who struggle. I get so tired of hearing DUers say that the problem is we don't have high enough standards. DUers clearly have no idea about how many students are struggling. What do we do with them? Just throw them away? Say to them oh, well you're clearly not intelligent enough to meet our elite ivy league standards? Or should we figure out how to fix our damn public school system so that they can find a way to succeed too?

[erpowers]

25. Perfer They Keep Essay Section

Most students will do a great deal of writing in college. They should also keep the vocabulary section. First, there are many ways to learn the vocabulary words that will be on the test. Second, many adult books use a number of the words presented on the test. Unless these kids plan either to not read adult books after they leave college, or to not understand what they are reading they will have to learn those words anyway.

[bluestateguy]

26. Bad idea on the essay

Kids need to know how to write, and how to write something other than a text message or an e-mail.

Kids are coming up into college know writing very poorly today.

[LeftyMom]

35. It is worth noting that most of the above posts suggesting young people can't write

appear to have been Google Translated from Swahili by way of Cantonese.

[MissB]

36. Ha!

I will say that the SAT essay portion of the test does little to demonstrate that a kid can actually write a good essay. The essay requires a kid to quickly take a side of an issue in a short introductory paragraph, include three supporting paragraphs with examples and then quickly summarize/extend their point of view.

And that's done in 25 minutes. The essay is graded by an actual human, who takes about two minutes to read it and assign a score. A second reader does the same: the two scores added together make up the score on a scale of 0-12.

And those three examples? The "best" SAT essays (read: scores of 10 to 12) include one example from literature, one from history and one from the student's experience. My favorite part: you can quite literally make up a book and author, give an example from the War of 1813 and talk about your fake Aunt Linda's fake cancer. It's utter bullshit.

What will help America produce students able to write real essays is allowing for small enough class sizes such that the teacher is able to assign many essays each term and provide individual feedback in a timely manner.

[LeftyMom]

37. I spent all of junior high English writing prompt-driven plug and chug five paragraph essays.

At the time I hated them. They were mind-numbing. But every time since I've had to write an in-class essay on some stupid prompt or another for a midterm? I've blessed Mrs. Ebbage and those awful rote essays.

I do think assessing a student's ability to fart out two handwritten pages of weapons grade BS in response to a stupid prompt is probably a better predictor of college success than their ability to do those endless analogy questions or decipher obscure vocabulary words using their Latin roots.

[Brigid]

40. "Weapons grade-BS!"

[greatlaurel]

41. Diane Ravitch has a good post about this

Here is the link:

http://dianeravitch.net/2014/03/05/college-board-will-revise-sat-fairtest-says-drop-sat/