The SAT will drop the pencil and go completely digital by 2024:
The SAT standardized college admissions tests will be taken exclusively on computers starting in 2024, The New York Times has reported. The new system will spell the end to tests taken on paper with No. 2 pencils, a right of passage for American high school students since the SAT was first administered nearly a hundred years ago.
Students will instead complete the exams on laptops or tablets, either their own or devices issued by the school. If students don't have a device, the board will provide one on the test day. And if a student loses power or connectivity, "the digital SAT has been designed to ensure they won't lose their work or time while they reconnect," said the College Board, which administers the tests.
On top of the technical changes, the testing time will be shortened to two hours instead of three. It'll feature shorter reading passages with one question for each, reflecting a wider range of topics more representative of what students will see in college. For the math section, calculators will finally be allowed. And students and teachers will get test scores in days rather than weeks, with educators no longer having to deal with packing, sorting or shipping test materials.
[...] Critics have also noted that the SAT tests handicap students who don't have access to expensive test preparation courses or who can't afford to take the $55 test multiple times. The digital SAT shift "does not magically transform it to a more accurate, fairer or valid tool for assessing college readiness," Schaefer told the NYT. The College Board, meanwhile, has said that SAT scores can actually help students who don't have top-flight grade-point averages.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 26 2022, @11:18PM
I thought standardized tests and teaching math were racist, according to all the Jews running the education system?
See Spot run. Run, Spot, run. What is Spot being tode to do?
Who are White people, and why are they racist and out to kill you? (Note: for this test section, Jews are not considered "White.")
" For the math section, calculators will finally be allowed. "
• • • + • • • • • = ? (a) • • (b) • • • • • • • (c) 💯 💯 💯 (d) Muhfugen Bix Nood
All tests graded using the Equity-o-matic AI machine, with more points granted to those with more unintelligible names. Jews, who run higher education, have like other Jews figured out that they don't have to grade papers or otherwise do any work to collect their paychecks. Besides, badmouthing White and Asian Goys is hard work in itself!
(Score: 0, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 26 2022, @11:24PM
First it was office work, then came letter writing, applications for all sorts of job or loan any want/need, short contacts, then full blown socialisation, now voting, health assessment and finally this form of eligibility testing.
Whatever happenned to computing being a fun pastime, rather than a necessary crutch to all and everything.
Used to be the measure of intelligence involved the head and hands.
/rant
(Score: 2, Troll) by krishnoid on Wednesday January 26 2022, @11:58PM
Twitter's "American Spring", perhaps.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 26 2022, @11:58PM (1 child)
I'm sure no one will take advantage of this to game the system. No siree.
Need a couple of extra minutes here or there? Whoops, the network cable came unplugged, Again.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 27 2022, @12:04AM
How could kids who enjoy DDoSing their schools possibly take advantage of a timed online system like this!
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Frosty Piss on Thursday January 27 2022, @12:14AM (6 children)
It is well past time for the SAT and the money making machine that owns it to die. Many universities have made it “optional” or simply not a part of admissions at all.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 27 2022, @04:24AM (5 children)
There needs to be *some sort* of er... standard tests, run each year. Else how would a country measure and know how effective its education system is? Can't have a slow, general dumbing down of the populace and not know it!
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Thexalon on Thursday January 27 2022, @05:00AM (4 children)
So here's the problem: Measurement tool + real stakes = People adjusting their behavior to fool the measuring tool into getting the desired result.
An example from my dad's time student teaching in a fairly notoriously bad inner-city high school back in the early 1990's: One of the administrators encouraged the teachers to give students an "Incomplete" grade rather than a "Fail" grade whenever they could create any kind of excuse for doing so. The reason was that while the "Incomplete" would eventually become a "Fail" after sufficient time had passed to make it abundantly clear the student wasn't going to turn in whatever they hadn't completed, this transformation would occur after the school had reported its student failure rates up the chain. The students hadn't learned anything new, or accomplished anything, but the statistics looked better.
As for how you do that on standardized tests, there are lots of ways to game it, like:
- The least blatant is "teaching to the test", where you focus all your class time on the exact sorts of questions that will be tested, whether or not those are the sorts of questions someone might need to be able to answer regarding the subject at hand. For example, if the teacher knows the history portion of the test will concentrate on the American Revolutionary War, they'll pretty much ignore the colonial period, the Six Years' War, the American Civil War, World War I, and World War II, to the point where students wouldn't even know when those things happened.
- Figuring out ways to give the students more time to take the test. For example, a staggeringly unlikely percentage of the kids in the class might suddenly be diagnosed with ADHD.
- Figuring out ways to give the students access to answers they aren't supposed to have. For example, leaving a key book open on your desk while you step out to visit the washroom, while proctoring the test.
- After the test is handed in, flat-out changing the answers to the ones known to be correct. A number of schools, especially charter schools whose public funding is at stake, have been caught pulling this one.
There have been many attempts at trying to come up with some kind of objection measurement of humans' capabilities. None have succeeded, in large part because real life is way more complicated than adding "+1 geometry knowledge" to a character sheet during level-up.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 27 2022, @08:12AM
Let's just give everyone a participation medal and a gold star. Leave no child behind. Never measure or test - you'll only stir up trouble!
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 27 2022, @11:39AM
Even with the trouble you mentioned, as long as it is kept to a low fraction of all tests taken, testing is valuable.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 27 2022, @02:36PM (1 child)
That's why the people who do the testing shouldn't be the same people doing the teaching. The incentives line up for things to happen just like you described at the high-school. Getting rid of the SAT is just going to remove the last remaining check on that behavior. It's not perfect, but it a damn sight better than not having it. Don't make the perfect the enemy of the good.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Thursday January 27 2022, @06:06PM
That idea solves the more blatant methods of cheating that I described. It doesn't solve "teaching to the test" or "getting kids into a shrink to diagnose them with something".
And for the SAT in particular, it's an optional test, so the solution most crooked teachers or administrators will land on is simply to have the dumber kids not bother taking it since they're unlikely to be applying to college at all. And then your average scores go up! See, the school is doing better!
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 27 2022, @12:43AM (1 child)
You say that like it's a good thing.
Might be better to reduce the Adderall and Ritalin intake
(Score: 3, Touché) by ElizabethGreene on Thursday January 27 2022, @02:17AM
Adderall increases your ability to focus on long blocks of text.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Thursday January 27 2022, @04:30AM (6 children)
To all those sneering at the whole idea of testing, how should college admissions be done? Grades only? I prefer accepting those who have good grades or good test scores. Or just l et everyone in, so long as they can pay? Turn it back into an elitist system that only the rich can afford? Shut them all down, who needs college anyway? Or go the other direction, and make college way cheaper, maybe even free?
Anti-intellectualism has gotten much worse in recent years. Lot of people all too eager to cripple or outright destroy education. Arguments against the SAT should not be taken at face value. Trolls are ever ready to run with negative arguments taken from those sincerely concerned about various problems, and use those concerns as excuses to push their real agenda: pull everyone down to their level, which may be terribly low, as in, high school dropout level.
(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 27 2022, @11:42AM (1 child)
The educators do not value rigorous education anymore. This is why the public's opinion of "education" is diminishing.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 27 2022, @11:55AM
>> The educators do not value rigorous education anymore.
That's simply not true. My son's physics professor made the class memorize all 89 recognized genders, with no cheat sheets allowed.
(Score: 0, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 27 2022, @01:53PM
The critics should shut up because HERE COMES THE MONKEY! [youtube.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 27 2022, @05:52PM
There isn't an easy answer, but putting so much (or any significant amount of) weight on a single-vendor standardized test is just a bad idea. It is ok if it is used just as one facet of an application, so I think treating it as optional is not a bad idea. For decades the College Board has run roughshod on the system, running the SAT, the ACT, the AP exams, and all of the instructor and student prep and training courses. You can look at a list of some of the criticisms on the Wiki page [wikipedia.org], but they've been the de facto gateway for entrance to colleges for over 100 years. By some accounts the upper management there act like NCAA or FIFA administrators, with outsized pay and benefits. I personally think they should scrap the whole enterprise and if they want some sort of standardized test to use, then start over from scratch. I've never convinced myself that I know what the SAT is testing. I recall on the math tests that they would have answers that anticipated simple common arithmetical mistakes, so if the solution required two numbers to be subtracted, they would also include the answer if you mistakenly added them. Yes, that is the wrong answer, but it is basically catching someone who made a mistake while calculating under pressure and not someone who didn't know how to do the problem in the first place. Should arithmetical mistakes under time pressures be a major part deciding what college you get into? The SAT essays were a disaster. Can you imagine putting effort into writing one, not to mention the stress of preparing for it, only to have someone pulled off of the street assigning you a score that is in proportion to how many words you put down? Again, a horrible metric for decisions on applications. I would also need to be convinced that memorizing lists of vocabulary words is a reliable metric for determining how "smart" someone is, or how successful they would be under different college programs.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Thursday January 27 2022, @06:58PM
The factors admissions counselors definitely use in addition to the SATs include:
- High school grades and tracking: This is their #1 indicator of student quality, based on the usually-correct idea that the students are being evaluated reasonably, and this is an indicator of what they've made of the academic opportunities available to them.
- Extracurricular activities: Not just whether there are some, but what sorts of things they are, e.g. they might want a mix of band kids, theater nerds, debaters and chess players, athletes, etc.
- Geography: For public universities, in-state and out-of-state matter a lot. For top-tier schools, they're looking for a mix of locations so that not all the incoming class is from New York or Boston or even a major city at all.
- The essay: Yes, it's possible the student didn't write said essay, but I'll point out that admissions counselors also have access to Google and a bunch of other essays, so they're probably going to have a good chance of spotting the cheaters.
- An on-campus or college-fair interview, if they had one.
- Depending on the school, yes, finances play a role. The admissions staff know that there's only so much scholarship money to work with.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 27 2022, @07:30PM
Also: "a right of passage"? English not so good, I see. You got the wrong "rite."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 27 2022, @09:16AM
And it will end as usual: Mr. Computer is always right, even when it's wrong.
I see it in some developing countries in EU where introducing computer systems led directly to putting a complete trust in these systems, even taking blatant errors as truth because "the system is always right".
As it may be a bit relevant, I'll show the example: My friend works in academic environment and every semester he gets an official warning because he has not introduced all grades into their system. The thing is that it is not possible to put all grades, as students who resigned before the end of the semester are locked and it is not possible to put grades in their records. After phoning everyone, starting from the department supervisor, helpless "just-ignore-it" support, server administrators who could not do anything with it (but they deleted a mkv of "Big Buck Bunny" uploaded as video compression exercise material as it "could be illegal"!) ending with Ministry of Education, after asking to remove this warning which does not work because "system is always right", he just hacks it. He shown it to me as example of SQL injection - to put a "not attending" grade to these records. Hey, it's an official order to put the grades, it doesn't matter that the only way to do it is to use security hole :D.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by PiMuNu on Thursday January 27 2022, @10:33AM
Note that the benefits are for the examining body - easier to assess, potentially using [shudders] automation and multiple choice or machine learning for long-form answers. Mostly negative for the examinees.
Perhaps they will be able to reduce fees due to the cost savings? [That was a joke]
> And students and teachers will get test scores in days rather than weeks, with educators no longer having to deal with packing, sorting or shipping test materials.
(or marking test materials)