An anonymous reader left this comment about the SAT.
Once upon a time, 25 years ago, I ‘offered’ SAT tutoring (at a rather high price of $50/hr.) to denizens of a tony private school. I could charge that much because I ‘got results’. But, it was rather easy to improve scores.
First, there was the fact that almost all of my clients had scored ‘too low’ when they first took the test. The probability was, therefore, that if they simply took it again, they would ‘improve’. Secondly, most low performers had a certain level of anxiety when they took the test. Simply being familiar with the format by reviewing former tests helped those students assess the test in a more calm and analytical manner. Thirdly, despite the subtraction of ‘wrong’ answers from the score (at a rate commensurate with the number of answers), the students needed to understand that they actually knew something, if only at the subconscious level, and they needed to ‘guess’ (even randomly) because an inaccurate random guess didn’t really count against the score. They needed to trust their instincts.
The result was often (among ‘median’ scores) a 100 point increase. Were the students any ‘smarter’ after the tutoring? Well, no. Were they more ‘scholastically fit’, well, no. All they learned was how to contain their anxiety and (to some extent) ‘psyche out’ the test. Nothing more.
The test is (and always was) a scam. I say this as one who has benefited from such tests as a youth (I always did well, even qualified for MENSA on my GRE’s). These tests measure nothing of value, and I’m ever so happy to see more and more colleges relying on a body of student work and the recommendations of former teachers (sometimes in the form of ‘grades’… although ‘grades’ are only a shapshot in time, and often a narrowly forced evaluation by a particular teacher who would have much more to say, if asked).
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Amen to:
“The test is (and always was) a scam. I say this as one who has benefited from such tests as a youth (I always did well, even qualified for MENSA on my GRE’s). These tests measure nothing of value, and I’m ever so happy to see more and more colleges relying on a body of student work and the recommendations of former teachers (sometimes in the form of ‘grades’… although ‘grades’ are only a shapshot in time, and often a narrowly forced evaluation by a particular teacher who would have much more to say, if asked).”
Thank you, Anonymous Reader. I know people who have made a lot of money from tutoring teens for SAT (because of mostly “anxious” parents.)
Question: How valid is the SAT when one test preps and takes this exam over and over again?
But BOY is the SAT a $$$$$ maker for the few.
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Performance in high school is a better predictor of academic success in college than any standardized test.
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The SAT has never done what it purported to do. It was first marketed as an IQ-like test of academic potential and was called the Scholastic Aptitude Test. However, it never predicted achievement in college better than high-school grades did. So, they changed the collective name of the reasoning tests and the subject tests to the Scholastic Assessment Tests. But it wasn’t a good measure of Achievement either. Now we have the completely ludicrous Common Cored version of the test from Lord Coleman, who is the gift that keeps on giving, huh? He should have named this tortured, invalid purported test of his backward, puerile “standards” the Scholastic [as in Medieval] Common [as in base, mediocre, pedestrian] Cored [as in hollowed out] Assessment of Trivialities, or SCCAT. After almost a century of the SAT scam, lots and lots of colleges and universities are wising up and doing away with it as an entrance requirement.
Test prep works to the extent that it familiarizes kids with test question formats and some simple heuristics for gaming the test. This improves scores a bit. And that’s it.
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This post receives from me a 1450 out of 1600. That should accurately tell you everything about the anonymous reader who posted the comment, right? Data are needed to make every possible decision in life, right? We can’t get rid of the profitable SAT because we need data data data; everyone and everything is just a number. All numbers generated by humans are precise and illuminating. Take Yelp. (Please.) Of course the SAT makes perfect sense. To support College Board, I will have to change my username from Left Coast to 852847-5. To repeat this message, press or say ‘9’. To read comments by a live operator, press or say ‘0’.
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ROFLMAO!!!! Oh Lord, that’s wonderful!
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LeftCoast, you need to write the the Fordham Institute for the Paying of Big Bucks to Officers of the Fordham Institute to get a copy of the new Reform Post Comment Generator Software. It will not only use all the appropriate phrasing–higher standards, personalized, data-driven, rigor, accountability, stay the course, national curriculum, dashboard, scorecard, disruptive, college and career ready, 21st century skills, choice, grit, value-added–but will eliminate any need to think autonomously ever again and automatically apply for grants from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. If you believe you have reached this message in error, reboot your system.
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All numbers generated by humans are precise and illuminating.
Yes. All numbers are meaningful and accurate because data.
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I am not the anonymous reader, but I could be. As a fairly recent college grad in the mid 1980s, I worked for a test prep company that was just at the beginning of its soon-to-be national rise to prominence. I too got results for little more than familiarizing students with the test format, teaching a few common-sense “techniques” that were actually pretty cynical (including reading the questions first), and urging practice. One of the reasons I am so confident in urging people to opt out of state exams is precisely because I understand how coachable (and therefore how unfair) these sorts of tests are. Although I personally excelled on these tests (including ones I never took for real, like the GMAT and LSAT) I have found the only boost they have given me in “real life” was that I had this relatively lucrative job in my 20s. As for actual college and grad school, it would have been better for me to understand how to set goals and manage my time on longer term projects. Knowing how to ace a one-time test was not of much value.
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“Knowing how to ace a one-time test was not of much value.”
There is not a college in the country which only admits students via their SAT scores. On the other hand, there is a large population of Mayor de Blasio haters in NYC who have huge amounts of money behind them in order to push the notion that knowing how to ace a one-time test has ALL value when it comes to 13 year old children.
These days, it is near impossible to find someone — even at the College Board itself — who says that a student is only as good as his SAT scores says he is.
But in NYC, the NY Times and other news organizations are absolutely positive that a single standardized exam is absolutely the ideal way to identify the best 13 year olds in all of NYC. Period.
On August 3, 2018, the NY Times published this headline:
“SHSAT Predicts Whether Students Will Succeed in School, Study Finds”
And thus followed reporting that is typical of the NY Times in which their education reporters – clearly lacking any ability to interpret data and unwilling to lift a finger to check with real statistical experts — happily transcribe whatever those in power tell them a study means and run it as a headline citing there is now absolute evidence that something that those in power want is “superior”. (They do the same with charter school “studies”).
This was one of the most absurd studies ever and yet the NY Times treated it as if it was designed by the most careful researchers.
It turns out if you examine a group of 30,000 8th grade students who took the SHSAT and take the average 9th grade GPAs of the 5,000 students with the highest scores, that “average” GPA of those 5,000 students is higher than the “average” 9th grade GPAs of the 25,000 students with the very lowest SHSAT scores. That now means that the SHSAT is a terrific predictor!
So if the college board wants to “prove” that admitting students only based on their SAT score is necessary to choose the very best students, all they have to do is hire Metis Associates to do a similar study of the SAT. As long as the average college GPA of the top 10% of SAT scores is even a smidgeon higher than the average GPA of the bottom 90% of SAT scoring students, that would provide absolute proof that the SAT is not just valid, but the best. At least to those who know nothing about statistics but know a lot about doing stenography for the powerful, which means that the NYTimes education reporters would certainly run a huge headline saying that the SAT is the very best way to choose college students.
In short, in NYC there are a lot of very powerful people who insist that yes, a single day standardized test is the only “fair” way to measure a student’s abilities and worth, and those with the higher scores are always superior to those with lower scores, period. And de Blasio and Carranza are attacked as terrible, biased, prejudiced men for daring to challenge that belief that is writ in stone by those in power.
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The New Yoke Times: Newspaper of Wreckard
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aka The Not Woke Times
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The SHAT? OK. Sounds appropriate.
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“doing stenography for the powerful.” What a perfect description of pseudoscientific Deformer data crunching!
Oh, SHSAT, as in Secretly Harming Some American Teens.
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The public school district in Southern California where I taught for 30 years created workshops and developed material where us teachers learned how to teach our students how to take tests soon after the lying, manipulating “A Nation at Risk Report” when High Stakes rank and punish tests were spawned like a malignant virus that has been eating and digesting the public education system from the inside out.
That program did nothing to help the students learn academic material better. It only taught them how to become better test takes, just like the anonymous comment in this post described.
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I taught my children how to take the PSAT and SAT. I wouldn’t spend the ridiculous amount of money or subject my children to useless time sitting at a desk learning “magic tricks”. 20 seconds per question for math. 2 answers can easily be dropped and of the 2 remaining, there is clearly a mistake (misplaced decimal, minus a number, +/- sign etc.). In the ELA, 2 answers can be eliminated and I’ve told them that the common sense answer that they “think and feel” should be correct is likely the incorrect answer….since No one gives a shit about what you think or feel (according to David Coleman). Both did very well with scores that would admit them into a decent college IF the scores are/were needed.
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In the spring of 1977 I took the SAT for the first time after working until 1:00 a.m. that morning. I didn’t do well. This was prior to the test prep game. That fall I took the test again, after getting a good nights sleep, and improved by over 10%. I never considered myself a “good test taker” so I was satisfied with the results and got into a good liberal arts school. Years later I took the MAT and did very well after teaching a high school Humanities class. The college test game represents the path of least resistance for universities that don’t want to do meaningful homework for qualified students. I was a good high school student who did significantly better than my projected GPA in college because I had a work ethic and enough organizational acumen to get through challenging content. The SAT scam has provided a financial roadblock for students who, because they are not national semi-finalists, do not qualify for scholarships and financial aid needed to attend. Testing has morphed into the “educational industrial complex” that is now the stuff of nightmares and the progenitor of ever growing opportunity inequality.
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There are those (some who have appeared on this blog) who defend tests as the great equalizer because it gets a tiny fraction of minorities into elite schools, even though it presents a wall to the vast majority.
Its the game that people like David Coleman play to justify their profoundly UNequal policies.
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Self-indulging here. This is an anecdote. When my kids were very young, we had 2 sibling playdate buddies same-aged as my 2 eldest. Head-to-head eldests [both red-headed] were equally hi-IQ, tho they separated into diff peer-camps as they matured: the other more conventional [mine un-], more athletic [mine un-], more competitive in history/ science academics [mine in music/art]. At age 5-9 when playmates, both were articulate: the other was fact-trivia/ argumentative [mine philosophical-literary argumentative]. Their differences drove them apart by age 10 but I remained close friends w/his Mom, so we continued to compare.
Anyone knowing either would have guessed them both as future lawyers, as either could argue up one side and he down the other. But both—entirely coicidentally—were stalled and re-directed in late teens: both turned out to be aflicted with bipolar disorder, and were forced during early college yrs to interrupt studies, adapt to meds,etc. Each had his own path; what they had in common was that they ended up relying on the field which came easiest to them as kids.
For my eldest, that was music. For his elemsch friend, it was that preternatural talent for memory/ facts/ trivia, & its corollary, strength/ affinity for stdzd testng. Even in the midst of max dislocation/ med leave from college/ psych intervention/ adjusting to meds, that kid found himself a job tutoring SAT at the local Kumon center. It took him years—living at home—but he eventually earned enough to move to Manhattan & then leave the franchised testing center to start his own little remedial-test-tutoring biz, & now it supports his fledgling family.
Am I crazy? I love this story. Though I bemoan our country’s insane testing-accountability policies, I am happy that this kid has, despite max obstacles, stuck his oar in and made a buck off the able- to- afford- testing- remediation crowd . To me it’s no different than the way my own sons make their living—off the 1-15% able to pay big bucks for instrument and rock-band lessons.
I am not so far removed from this story myself: as a Span [& or Fr– when political/ cultural whims permit] special to regional PreK/K’s, most of my career has been as a hanger-on to more-privileged families’ ability to pay for extras. It has only been in the last 5 yrs that private PreK/K’s, following the lead of local pubschs, have begun to incorporate for-lang into general tuition… Ojalá que our pubschs will begin to include in their music programs the modern-style programs that so many kids [privileged kids, who can afford it] currently seek outside their walls
I do not approve of our upside-down economy: just drawing attention to the fact that SAT-tutors, music and for-lang and art teachers, et al tutors/ PT teachers work as non-benefits hrly-wage serfs for the privileged, just like Starbucks baristas, Uber drivers, Amazon box-movers, UPS copiers/ packagers et al. This is the world we live in.
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