Saturday, May 18, 2019

Mucking With The SAT

So, as I understand it, the SAT scoring is being changed to reflect privilege or hardship or bias or something or other. Your actual score, based on your answers, will be modified by taking into account your race, your social standing, your horoscope and your cholesterol test results. Your shoe size may or may not be a factor.

Huh?

I thought the whole beauty of standardized testing was that it produced a decent estimation of how tough a college you should attend or whether you should go at all. If you scored high enough, then attending an elite university wouldn't be too much of a reach for you. If you scored poorly, then MIT probably wouldn't be a good fit. The test was there, as much as anything else, to keep you from flunking out.

When you fiddle with the test results, you're saying some combination of these things.
  1. The test was never really a good estimation of your performance level. In reality, the thing is a bit of a joke.
  2. We don't really care whether you flunk out of college or not. All we care about is getting the right balance of "advantaged" and "disadvantaged" students.
  3. We're going to ditch the whole grading stuff in college to make sure that the students with the low SAT scores we've modified to gain acceptance don't flunk. 
In any case, objectivity has been blown to bits.

Yay?


SAT scoring explodes. Asians hardest hit.

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