Math scores on ACT, SAT diverge

[Nottingham]

http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/nation/2087135

Math scores on ACT, SAT diverge
By STEVE GIEGERICH
Associated Press
First, the maker of America's second-most popular college entrance exam releases this year's test scores and declares incoming freshmen largely unprepared for math and science classes. A week later, results from the nation's No. 1 test show math scores at a 35-year high.
Something doesn't add up.

In the wake of the annual release of ACT and SAT test scores, educators are disagreeing about what to make of the results.
One testing critic calls the discrepancy a result of marketing efforts aimed at setting the two exams apart.

"These are businesses in a nonprofit form," said Robert Schaeffer of FairTest, an organization that advocates balanced standardized exams.

The ACT scores for the high school class of 2003 were identical in math and science to the year before -- 20.6 and 20.8, respectively, on a 36-point scale.
In the last five years, math and science scores have dropped slightly on the test, taken by nearly 1.2 million of last spring's high school graduates.

more...

I'll tell ya what doesn't add up giving Iraq 87 Billion and not our Kids! :bounce:

[ant]

1. you want to give Iraq our kids?

:evilgrin:

[HereSince1628]

2. Politics of Math 101: figures don't lie but liars figure.

Anyone who works around the 70% of higher ed institutions that are not selective in their admissions can tell you that the impact on what is going on in the classrooms is awful. While the national average entrance exam scores isn't changing much, the actual scores that allow entrance to colleges and universities is changing.

At non-selective schools, the standard deviation getting is getting larger and is biased toward the low end because the brighter kids get into the 30% of schools that have reasonable entrance standards.

The net result is that most people's kids are sharing their classrooms and study areas with less capable students even at a time when "group work" and "peer teaching" are being presented as desirable teaching modes.

[Nottingham]

3. I don't trust SAt and Act scores cause Many kids study

courses for years just to take the Tests

and I don't think they reflect how well a student is going to do in the real world outside the classroom

And to think our colleges are judging them on these tests

Stupid! :bounce:

[discordian]

4. things sure have changed

When I took my SAT's in 1992, things were vastly different. I fell asleep during part of the reading/writing portion of the SAT (still got a 570v/770m, like it matters). Our valedictorian had been up all night dropping LSD and he scored over 1500. Most of the people in the room were tired or hungover, very few had any sort of SAT preparatory classes.

[TheYellowDog]

5. I took my sat's in 2001:

I had not gotten much sleep the night before, and I ended up with a 630 verbal, 700 math score on the SATs. Other people who had gotten even less sleep than I did got better scores. :shrug:

[fujiyama]

6. Also wasn't

the SAT rescored in the 90s? It used to be much tougher to get these very high scores...

[TheYellowDog]

7. indeed

i believe it was.

[enki23]

8. that's what the percentile score is for

the top 90% is the top 90%, regardless of how difficult or easy the test is. some tests (if not all) are skewed toward high scores, of course, which leads to some small difficulty maybe. you can get a perfect math score on the gre, for instance, and still not know where you stand in the top 10% of test takers. for the verbal section, on the other hand, you can score significantly less than perfect and still be above the 99th percentile. the subject tests might address that issue a bit, comparing math students to other math students. comparing them to history students on the quantitative portion isn't quite fair, after all.

so the raw scores don't mean anything without a context. you don't have to have a perfect SAT quant score to see that one coming.