This post was submitted as a comment by a reader who self-identifies as “Democracy”:
There’s little question that the SAT and ACT are marginally “good” at predicting success in college. I’ve made this point here numerous times.
The best predictor of success in college is high school grade point average (including an SAT score doesn’t add much). Moreover, research shows that “the best predictor of both first- and second-year college grades” is unweighted high school grade point average. A high school grade point average “weighted with a full bonus point for AP…is invariably the worst predictor of college performance.”
The College Board, which produces the PSAT, SAT, and Advanced Placement courses and tests, now recommends that schools “implement grade-weighting policies…starting as early as the sixth grade.” Yes, the SIXTH grade! There’s nothing quite like hyping nonsense.
College enrollment specialists say that their research finds the SAT predicts between 3 and 14 percent of freshman-year college grades, and after that nothing. As one commented, “I might as well measure their shoe size.” Matthew Quirk reported this in “The Best Class Money Can Buy:”
“The ACT and the College Board don’t just sell hundreds of thousands of student profiles to schools; they also offer software and consulting services that can be used to set crude wealth and test-score cutoffs, to target or eliminate students before they apply…That students are rejected on the basis of income is one of the most closely held secrets in admissions; enrollment managers say the practice is far more prevalent than most schools let on.”
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2005/11/the-best-class-money-can-buy/4307/2/
The authors of a study in Ohio found the ACT has minimal predictive power. For example, the ACT composite score predicts about 5 percent of the variance in freshman-year Grade Point Average at Akron University, 10 percent at Bowling Green, 13 percent at Cincinnati, 8 percent at Kent State, 12 percent at Miami of Ohio, 9 percent at Ohio University, 15 percent at Ohio State, 13 percent at Toledo, and 17 percent for all others. Hardly anything to get all excited about.
Here is what the authors say about the ACT in their concluding remarks:
“…why, in the competitive college admissions market, admission officers have not already discovered the shortcomings of the ACT composite score and reduced the weight they put on the Reading and Science components. The answer is not clear. Personal conversations suggest that most admission officers are simply unaware of the difference in predictive validity across the tests. They have trusted ACT Inc. to design a valid exam and never took the time (or had the resources) to analyze the predictive power of its various components. An alternative explanation is that schools have a strong incentive – perhaps due to highly publicized external rankings such as those compiled by U.S. News & World Report, which incorporate students’ entrance exam scores – to admit students with a high ACT composite score, even if this score turns out to be unhelpful.”
The study cited on this thread is from a small (a couple of thousand students) study at the University of Alaska. While some its findings confirm what’s already known about the SAT and ACT, some of its findings suggest that another College Board product — ACCUPLACER — might actually be as good as the College Board says it is.
But it isn’t.
The Community College Research Center at Teachers College, Columbia University has done extensive research on ACCUPLACER (tens of thousands of students), and their research finds that ACCUPLACER has “only a weak relationship with educational performance.” Follow-up research found that the vast majority (71 percent) of students who disregarded low placement test scores to take credit classes rather than remedial ones passed the classes.
Author Nicholas Lemann, the Joseph Pulitzer II and Edith Pulitzer Moore Professor of Journalism and Dean Emeritus at Columbia’s School of Journalism, and whose book The Big Test is all about the SAT, said this about it:
“The test has been, you know, fetishized. This whole culture and frenzy and mythology has been built around SATs. Tests, in general, SATs, in particular…”
Princeton Review founder John Katzman was a bit more blunt:
“The SAT is a scam…It has never measured anything. And it continues to measure nothing. And the whole game is that everybody who does well on it, is so delighted by their good fortune that they don’t want to attack it. And they are the people in charge. Because of course, the way you get to be in charge is by having high test scores. So it’s this terrific kind of rolling scam that every so often, somebody sort of looks and says–well, you know, does it measure intelligence? No. Does it predict college grades? No. Does it tell you how much you learned in high school? No. Does it predict life happiness or life success in any measure? No. It’s measuring nothing.”
The amazing thing – as amazing as the fact that some people still believe Trump – is that some people, including lots of teachers and administrators, not to mention students and parents, still buy into the goofiness.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Of course, the underlying issue is that we are rationing an artificially scarce resource- quality post-secondary education for all.
It’s like everything else in our society.
“Gatekeepers” decided what is meritorious and what is not and those who get accepted into Club Merit in turn become the gatekeepers.
And on and on to infinity and beyond.
More like a parrotacracy than a meritocracy.
As an advocate for disabled children and their families these last 25+ years, I remember one parent who was concerned about her child not testing well due to ADHD issues. She wanted to opt out of regular testing and the SAT/ACT business. I offered to call the various community colleges and universities her child was interested in to ask about entrance requirements. When asking specifically about how much weight was put upon those SAT/ACT scores, most admissions officers stated little if any. They preferred to see the overall K-12 history and any volunteer service as major indicators.
That being said, just last weekend, a student I’m working with now took the SAT test this weekend with a horrible headache all day. I tried to explain to mom that it’s just a snapshot of one day and not an indicator of her child’s entire educational career. Both are concerned and feel pressure for the need to perform in these tests. It makes me sad to see students giving up Saturdays to provide additional money to a business that sucks the joy out of learning.
Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Education.
Two Thumbs Up!
The “incentive” for schools to use the test scores for admissions is a higher rating for the school by US News and World report as a “highly selective school.” That description is then used to market the school and also create a “pipeline” for aspiring applicants and their parents. One end result is the discovery of parents who will pay others to lie and sully their own and their children’s reputations to get into the right school. CHEATING may work, and in new ways beyond donating big money to the school or legacy admissions. The absence of a unified voice against the aggrandizement of these scores allows these corrupt practices to continue.
Yes, the admissions officers are in bed with the College Board and with US News.
It really is quite the Ponzi scheme these people have going.
the “pipeline” of money: select out and enroll the kids who are likely to pay the bills
Using me as one example: When I was seven in 1952, school district administrative “experts” that were not teachers tested me and told me mother I was so retarded I would never learn to read or write.
My mother cried on the drive home and the next day returned to see my first-grade teacher (I was held back and spent two years in 1st grade) and asked her for advice.
Following that teacher’s advice, my mother taught me to read and write at home.
Eventually, I learned that I wasn’t retarded but only had a severe case of dyslexia. It only took until 1975 when I became a public school teacher to discover it.
Since my student record said I was retarded, I was left out of the college track in high school and had a lot of freedom to read. Most of my teachers pretty much ignored me and that was fine with me. By high school, I was an avid reader. I read a lot of books, sometimes two a day, and even worked in the HS library.
When I “barely” graduated from HS, I had a 0.96 GPA [zero point nine six]. I joined the Marines out of HS and when I left the Marines in 1968 with an honorable discharge I decided to go to college using the GI Bill.
The two-year community college that accepted me as a student-tested my language abilities and discovered I was reading at a college level so I did not have to take bone head English. I did not learn to read at that level in a classroom. That came from literally reading thousands of books. I also never had to take the SAT or ACT. In 1973, I graduated with a BA in journalism on the Dean’s Honor roll with a 3.8 GPA. Then I went on to earn a life teaching credential in California and eventually an MFA.
In my case, GPA did not predict anything and there were no SAT or ACT test scores, but when I started college I had something I didn’t have when I graduated from high school. I was a successful U.S. Marine and the Marines literally beat discipline into me as they were training me to become an efficient killing machine.
What happened to me is not an excuse to force all children to go through a Marine Corps style Bootcamp, because I volunteered to join the Marines and was not forced to go to boot camp. It was my choice.
i once had a special education ESL student in my high school class. He was very smart, but he struggled in reading. This was many years ago, and at the time there was little understanding about dyslexia. This young man was a talented dancer. Someone affiliated with the Alvin Ailey Dance Theater saw one of his local performances, and he was offered a scholarship at the dance company. This young man went on to dance with Alvin Ailey for many years. We should try to nurture students’ talents and interests. Some students are just differently abled, and we need to help them find their way. Academics did not reveal this young man’s true gift and talent.
Two of my siblings inherited our dad’s severe dyslexia. The elder was treated by schsys much as you were, but was precociously talented at dad’s biz & all things trade, so landed on feet w/a running start. Just 7 yrs younger, my sis came thro jrhi in 1975, got dg & plenty of attention/ help, became a gifted teacher & admin.
“Secretary Betsy DeVos
Feb 7
Great to join
@VP
to see firsthand the life changing impact #EducationFreedom has for students at St. Francis de Sales School. When families are empowered to choose the best educational setting for their children, outcomes improve.”
Has the US Department of Education been ordered never to visit public schools?
They are aware public schools exist, correct? Despite what they’ve been told by the ed reform echo chamber, it is NOT actually true that all public schools and public school students are “failing”.
Is there some reason the public should be funding this anti-public school campaign they’re conducting?
Betsy keeps on churning out the pro-choice drivel which has no basis in fact.
My youngest is taking college admission tests now and I’d like to thank all of you for questioning their validity. Every one of my kids have taken them and I just accepted that they were completely valid, because everyone else does.
It never occurred to me that they might be less valuable than we are told they are. The whole discussion has been interesting.
I do worry about not having the tests and relying on admissions staff to admit or deny.
I think that’s probably fine for the wildly wealthy schools with huge budgets and endowments- they’ll spend money on staff- but that isn’t where the vast majority of people go.
The IDEA of a group of well trained and thoughtful people considering each application and applying all kinds of nuance is very appealing, but is that actually how this is going to go? A lot of this is a shortcut, right? It’s easier and more efficient to sort them based on a test and much less expensive for the college.
I think you will find that most schools attempt to do a conscientious job with admissions and use all the available information, including test scores, when making a decision.
Here is an example from my experience as a member of the admission committee for a masters program. I had a student who was an economics major from a strong liberal arts college. The grades were excellent, but looking over the transcript I saw that the student had taken very little mathematics. This might have been because the student did not have an aptitude for mathematics or it might have been that the student had been badly advised and was unaware of the level of mathematics done in economics graduate programs. I used the math standardized scores to judge between those two possibilities. It turned out that the standardized scores were very low, much lower than any of the other applicants in the pool i was responsible for reviewing. I concluded that this student did not have an aptitude for mathematics and had little chance to succeed in the program. It would have been immoral to take this students money.
EVERY college that my child applied to this year was test optional. She now understands why I didn’t care if she took the stupid tests or not. She thought that she had to take them and her teachers and guidance counselors made her crazy about it . And then the proctors talked her into filling out the boxes (before the test) so that every college in the nation would be sending us piles of ads and calling our house during dinner time. USELESS , EXPENSIVE TESTS!!
The whole thing is a money making scam and the colleges and universities are in on it up to to their ears.
Students and their families should boycott the ones who still use the tests for that reason alone.
Make them pay for their racketeering and extortion.
If families did that en masse, you can be sure the test optional college list would grow by leaps and bounds virtually overnight.
I teach at a community college, and I worry about grade inflation in this atmosphere of outcome-based education.
I am an adjunct, hired as a part-time, temporary worker. Remedial classes have recently been eliminated in California, and much is being made of the fact that many of the students who previously took remedial classes are now passing transfer-level or higher-level classes.
However, please consider how difficult it would be for a community college professor, particularly an adjunct, to fail a large portion of the class. Encouraging students to continue their education becomes particularly important because if a part-timer doesn’t have enough students, the class will be canceled and the teacher will lose that income. Also, outcome-based funding is creating a political atmosphere that encourages the increase of graduation rates and certificates.
At least the SAT and ACT give a second point of reference. I almost always agree with you, but in this case, I think the integrity of California’s public colleges and universities depends upon maintaining standards. Our great systems of higher education are under attack by some of the same forces that are going after K-12. If we are not careful, our state systems will become substantially different from our private institutions.
Thanks for this important input. I was about to post something bobble-headed about remedial courses being a $-making scam for the colleges, but you’re requiring me to think again. Overuse of remedial courses for profit no doubt happens. But it’s just a reflection– like grade-inflation consequent to banning them– of upside-down priorities.
Or do they just give us a false sense of security about what we know?
“College enrollment specialists say that their research finds the SAT predicts between 3 and 14 percent of freshman-year college grades”
One has to be very careful how one describes this.
SAT does not really predict freshman year grades. It “explains” or “accounts for” a rather small amount of the variance in freshman grades.
These studies show correlations between SAT scores and freshman grades — and rather low correlations at that.
To say that one variable accounts for between 3 and 14% of the variance in another variable ain’t saying much. In fact, in real sciences (physics, chemistry and even biology) (as opposed to pseudoscience s like economics and psychometrics) this would be dismissed as meaningless drivel. VAM is another case of drivel, saying teachers account for between 1 and 14% of variance in student test scores (depending on details of the “study”)
Perhaps the only people who enjoy mathturbation more than the economists are the psychometricians (with the emphasis on “psycho”).
These people are right up there with astrologers.
Too stupid to become real scientists
Or the emphasis on meretricians, eh!
Sorry, we need competent psychometricians with integrity to help identify when evidentiary claims hold up to scrutiny and when they are influenced by biased interpretations. Like any profession, they range from awful to terrific. Bash their claims, not all the people.
Sometimes AC, humor is necessary to survive the insanities with which we are forced to deal with. Psychomeretricians is the proper term for those who practice pscyhomeretrics, otherwise known as psychometrics.
The old, what was good for me is good for my kids, too.
But, that was then, this is now. I had decent scores on my SAT, my children did average (yet they make more money than I did.) we all went to SUNY schools. My grand daughter doesn’t see the need to put herself through that nonsense.
My husband had some family issues which kept him from doing well in high school. However, he’s a genius in math and science, receiving numerous degrees in subjects such as Biochemistry, Microbiology, Mathematics, Statistics, and even Electrical and Computer Engineering. He had to struggle to prove himself worthy, but in the end he aced the coursework, putting others to shame.
He would have made a great doctor, but unless you are on the right track with high SAT scores, top notch grades in high school, and no gaps in your education – forget it.
Who knows what discoveries he could have made with his science background, mathematical abilities, and his mechanical skills (he can fix anything)? Too bad he didn’t fit the “mold”.
Standards and standardized testing–all bunk and chunk!
Brief outline of Wilson’s “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” and some comments of mine. (updated 6/24/13 per Wilson email)
1. A description of a quality can only be partially quantified. Quantity is almost always a very small aspect of quality. It is illogical to judge/assess a whole category only by a part of the whole. The assessment is, by definition, lacking in the sense that “assessments are always of multidimensional qualities. To quantify them as unidimensional quantities (numbers or grades) is to perpetuate a fundamental logical error” (per Wilson). The teaching and learning process falls in the logical realm of aesthetics/qualities of human interactions. In attempting to quantify educational standards and standardized testing the descriptive information about said interactions is inadequate, insufficient and inferior to the point of invalidity and unacceptability.
A major epistemological mistake is that we attach, with great importance, the “score” of the student, not only onto the student but also, by extension, the teacher, school and district. Any description of a testing event is only a description of an interaction, that of the student and the testing device at a given time and place. The only correct logical thing that we can attempt to do is to describe that interaction (how accurately or not is a whole other story). That description cannot, by logical thought, be “assigned/attached” to the student as it cannot be a description of the student but the interaction. And this error is probably one of the most egregious “errors” that occur with standardized testing (and even the “grading” of students by a teacher).
Wilson identifies four “frames of reference” each with distinct assumptions (epistemological basis) about the assessment process from which the “assessor” views the interactions of the teaching and learning process: the Judge (think college professor who “knows” the students capabilities and grades them accordingly), the General Frame-think standardized testing that claims to have a “scientific” basis, the Specific Frame-think of learning by objective like computer based learning, getting a correct answer before moving on to the next screen, and the Responsive Frame-think of an apprenticeship in a trade or a medical residency program where the learner interacts with the “teacher” with constant feedback. Each category has its own sources of error and more error in the process is caused when the assessor confuses and conflates the categories.
Wilson elucidates the notion of “error”: “Error is predicated on a notion of perfection; to allocate error is to imply what is without error; to know error it is necessary to determine what is true. And what is true is determined by what we define as true, theoretically by the assumptions of our epistemology, practically by the events and non-events, the discourses and silences, the world of surfaces and their interactions and interpretations; in short, the practices that permeate the field. . . Error is the uncertainty dimension of the statement; error is the band within which chaos reigns, in which anything can happen. Error comprises all of those eventful circumstances which make the assessment statement less than perfectly precise, the measure less than perfectly accurate, the rank order less than perfectly stable, the standard and its measurement less than absolute, and the communication of its truth less than impeccable.”
In other words all the logical errors involved in the process render any conclusions invalid.
The test makers/psychometricians, through all sorts of mathematical machinations attempt to “prove” that these tests (based on standards) are valid-errorless or supposedly at least with minimal error [they aren’t]. Wilson turns the concept of validity on its head and focuses on just how invalid the machinations and the test and results are. He is an advocate for the test taker not the test maker. In doing so he identifies thirteen sources of “error”, any one of which renders the test making/giving/disseminating of results invalid. And a basic logical premise is that once something is shown to be invalid it is just that, invalid, and no amount of “fudging” by the psychometricians/test makers can alleviate that invalidity.
Having shown the invalidity, and therefore the unreliability, of the whole process Wilson concludes, rightly so, that any result/information gleaned from the process is “vain and illusory”. In other words start with an invalidity, end with an invalidity (except by sheer chance every once in a while, like a blind and anosmic squirrel who finds the occasional acorn, a result may be “true”) or to put in more mundane terms crap in-crap out.
And so what does this all mean? I’ll let Wilson have the second to last word: “So what does a test measure in our world? It measures what the person with the power to pay for the test says it measures. And the person who sets the test will name the test what the person who pays for the test wants the test to be named.”
In other words it attempts to measure “’something’ and we can specify some of the ‘errors’ in that ‘something’ but still don’t know [precisely] what the ‘something’ is.” The whole process harms many students as the social rewards for some are not available to others who “don’t make the grade (sic)” Should American public education have the function of sorting and separating students so that some may receive greater benefits than others, especially considering that the sorting and separating devices, educational standards and standardized testing, are so flawed not only in concept but in execution?
My answer is NO!!!!!
One final note with Wilson channeling Foucault and his concept of subjectivization:
“So the mark [grade/test score] becomes part of the story about yourself and with sufficient repetitions becomes true: true because those who know, those in authority, say it is true; true because the society in which you live legitimates this authority; true because your cultural habitus makes it difficult for you to perceive, conceive and integrate those aspects of your experience that contradict the story; true because in acting out your story, which now includes the mark and its meaning, the social truth that created it is confirmed; true because if your mark is high you are consistently rewarded, so that your voice becomes a voice of authority in the power-knowledge discourses that reproduce the structure that helped to produce you; true because if your mark is low your voice becomes muted and confirms your lower position in the social hierarchy; true finally because that success or failure confirms that mark that implicitly predicted the now self-evident consequences. And so the circle is complete.”
In other words students “internalize” what those “marks” (grades/test scores) mean, and since the vast majority of the students have not developed the mental skills to counteract what the “authorities” say, they accept as “natural and normal” that “story/description” of them. Although paradoxical in a sense, the “I’m an “A” student” is almost as harmful as “I’m an ‘F’ student” in hindering students becoming independent, critical and free thinkers. And having independent, critical and free thinkers is a threat to the current socio-economic structure of society.
Duane,
It was my understanding that you thought all student evaluations, be they standardized tests or teacher written exams were bunk, along with things like exam scores, teacher assigned grades, high school gpa, etc.
Is that still true or have you changed your mind? If you have not changed your mind, what would you suggest colleges and universities use for admissions? It seems to me that one possibility that you would find appealing is a lottery, but that would potentially leave a college with no tenors for the chorus, bassists for the orchestra, and no students interested in studying history.
You’re understanding that I think all student evaluations are bunk is well “bunk” (LOL- 🙂 )
The only valid assessment of student work is one in which the main emphasis is on helping the student know where they are in the learning process. What the teacher gleans from the activity should be secondary at best, probably a tertiary consideration at most.
Now, where it seems our differences in the purpose of assessment has to do with the levels to which we are referring, you to post secondary and me to K-12-two totally different contexts. And that points to the other problem you mention of what should post 12 institutions do about admitting students. As a K-12 teacher I don’t care what they do. I do care that we in the public schools are fulfilling our fundamental charge in ensuring that ALL students can receive/earn/learn the education that they need to succeed in how they choose to live their lives.
That purpose (as gleaned from the various state constitutions that give a reason) being: “The purpose of public education is to promote the welfare of the individual so that each person may savor the right to life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and the fruits of their own industry.”
Anything, but especially discriminatory policies as mandated by the standards and testing malpractice regime should be rejected as state sponsored discrimination against the students.
You are advocating state sponsored discrimination which I cannot support.
Duane,
I should have been more specific in my comment. I think that you believe final exams in classes are bunk because they have nothing to do with students knowing where they are in the learning process. I think that you believe grades, gpa, and class rank are bunk because they have nothing to do with where they are in the learning process and instead are used to rank students against each other. Is that correct?
Well, TE, Duane can answer for himself. This is my answer. In English, tests should never be used to hold students accountable to remember everything they were taught. Tests should also not be a major part of the grade. The teacher made tests should be a tool the teacher uses to determine if what he or she taught worked or not. Not a weapon to destroy children.
During my thirty years as a public school teacher, the only reason I gave a final exam was to cement what my students had been taught all year. It wasn’t to grade them on how much they remembered from all of my teachings. That and the fact that the final was given the last week of the semester, and the week after school was out, the teachers had to turn in their grades, store everything away (or take it home), and check out for the summer. During the open book exam, I was finishing up correcting all the classwork and homework that had poured in the last few weeks before the semester ended.
The exam was graded on a curve from the second-highest student grade. If the highest grade was 70 percent of the total possible answers, that one earned extra credit. It was the second-highest exam grade that set the curve. Since every child is different and they all do not have the same ability to remember things, I wasn’t about to punish them for it.
The final exam that I created was only worth ten percent of the total grade, and I gave my student a detailed study guide listing all the stories in the text that would be on the exam. Students earning A’s going into the final exam could not lose the A they had earned and were excused from the exam unless they wanted to take it for fun. Some did.
It was also an open book test so they could look for answers. Since I provided the study guide a few weeks before the exam, my students had a second chance to go over everything we had read and discussed over the semester. In short, the finals I gave were more of a review session that took place over two to three hours of exam time.
Lloyd,
Duane can certainly correct me if I am wrong, but I think he objects to the grade itself, the number that you assigned to each student that you taught.
It is certainly true that my colleagues in the English department give few or no exams. My colleagues in the math department give many exams. As far as I can tell, frequent poster Mate Wierdl bases his grades entirely on exams (though I have to admit it is not clear given the extremely minimal syllabus he uses). I am somewhat in the middle, though more like math than English. Most of the weight in my grades comes from my four exams as those are the assignments that I can be reasonably confident are the work of that individual student, but I have frequent low stakes assignments (about 4 a week) that overall contribute about 20% to the student’s grade.
I am not a fan of grading on a curve based on individual student’s performance in the class. My middle child’s AP chemistry teacher based the final exam curve on the highest exam score. My middle child decided not to sandbag on that exam and scored 50% higher then the second highest exam. This did not endear him to his fellow students in the class.
I think I should clarify what a curve meant to me.
If there were 100 assignments in a semester of equal value (in reality, the assignment in my class were not all equal. Some were worth a lot more than others, especially essays and research papers), and a student completed 90 percent of them, that student earned an A- in the class.
To pass my class, a student had to earn 55 percent of the value of all the assignments. To earn a C-, a student had to earn 70 percent of the value of all the assignments, et al.
That final exam I described in my previous comment did little to change most grades by the end of the semester since it was only worth 10-percent of the grade.
What I call a curve on that final exam is this: If the exam was worth 100 points and the send highest grade earned 72 points than that was the A+, and ever other grade was computed from that 72.
90% of that 72 was an A-, 80% was a B-, 70% a C-, 55% a D-.
I do not think that actually fits the definition of a curve. In a few of the classes, I taught during my thirty years as a public school teacher, no students earning failing grades. because in those few (emphasis on few) classes, every student completed enough work to earn a passing grade. During the seven years, I taught one section of HS journalism, there was so many A’s earned in that class, that a B was considered low by my journalism students.
To me, I think the grades represented how hard the students worked to learn what I taught. If a student turned in less than 55 percent of the work, they didn’t work hard enough to earn a passing grade.
I mean, what would an employer do if he/she scheduled his/her employees to work 40 hour weeks, but some of them did not show up to work, didn’t work when they were there, or called in sick so much, they worked less than 22 hours a week?
In fact, I had a few students throughout the years that missed so many days of school and never made up the work they missed that the grade they earned was preordained. Then there were the children that showed up every day but never turned in an assignment, nada. The FAILING grade they earned represented their effort to learn what I taught.
GPA should represent how dedicated students were to learn what they were taught.
I remember the debate over PASS or FAIL and no letter grades. I never agreed with the PASS, FAIL concept.
Depending upon what a final exam entails, it may or may not be bunk. For instance, I used the first semester cumulative final (on which grade wise was almost always a grade level or two worse than what the student’s grade for the whole semester was.–I had ways to mitigate that negative effect-LOL) as a review at the beginning of the second semester. Now at the end of the year, I couldn’t do that, so in a sense, yes it was bunk for the teaching and learning process.
Yes, grades, rankings, GPA are as Wilson puts it “vain and illusory” or bunk even though many assign a meaning to them that is not warranted.
Again, what “works” at the post secondary level can be and is quite different than what occurs at the K-12 level.
Replying to bethree5 who replied to CC adj above:
CC adj was not talking about “remedial courses being a $-making scam for the colleges”, he said that WITHOUT remedial courses and without SAT/ACT drawbridge everyone who wants to enroll college goes straight to transfer-level or higher-level class, hurray! But these students are not able to handle typical college-level material, so the choices are either to fail them, or to water down the course. If a prof fails too many students, it would not look good on him, and if he does not have tenure, he will likely be booted out.
What is scam is reliance on school GPA, because schools and teachers are interested in increasing graduation rate and in making themselves looking good. Even countries with national curricula have graduation exams, which often serve as a college entrance test. These tests are even more important in the U.S., where there is no national curricula, so “A” received in one school may not correlate at all to “A” in another school both in terms of preparedness of the students as well as in terms of what they actually studied.
If the SAT and ACT were better tests, there wouldn’t be so Much Resistance to them.
“If the SAT and ACT were better tests. . . ”
And if wishes were fishes I’d never get skunked when I go fishing!
BA alleged that “schools and teachers are interested in increasing graduation rate and in making themselves looking good”
And my reply to BA is “I think your brain is constipated!” BA’s alternative fact is WRONG and here is why:
I was a public school teacher for thirty years (1975 – 2005), and I did not know one teacher interested in increasing graduation rates to make themselves look good. Instead, the average teacher works more than fifty hours a week and teachers like me worked more than that. If students didn’t do the work, they earned poor grades. Every teacher I knew wanted their students to learn what they were being taught. They also wanted the students to earn their HS graduation. HS degrees are not gifts to make teachers look better.
Every year, many seniors do not graduate because they did not earn the privilege to do it and they did not walk. The freshman class at the HS where I taught started with 600 to 800 students and four years later the graduating class was closer to 500 (a bit above or below).
And that explains why HS graduation rates never hit 100 percent. Since I taught in California, I’ll focus on that state where 83 percent of the high school students graduated on time in 2010-11, but 90 percent of Americans end up earning an HS degree or its equivalent by age 25.
Click the link and check the fast facts map showing the HS graduation rate for each state that year.
https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=805
If you looked at that map, you would notice that New Mexico has a HS graduation rate of 71 percent.
But what percent of the US population finishes high school?
90 percent
For the first time in history, 90 percent of Americans over 25 years of age have finished high school. In addition, more than one-third of Americans over the age of 25 have a college degree or higher.
https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2017/educational-attainment-2017.html
Many young adults do not graduate on time for a variety of reasons but continue working after 18 to earn that HS degree by 25.
Thanks for the links. Read your personal story. Simper Fi Marine!
I am U.S. Army retired.
My youngest, born in 1996 was diagnosed as autistic before he was two. Medical professionals suggested he be institutionalized. He is currently working on his masters and should graduate this year. Speaking as a parent, it has been an interesting experience. He is one of many reasons I started studying education.
My work is unconventional. I have been translating SAT and ACT results since 2008, and I do not believe they are great predictors as normally published. The link is to my translated write up of the 2019 SAT results. And none of this accounts for students that settle down and work, work, work when they get to college.
http://theafterclap.com/2019/10/04/america-earns-a-big-fat-f-on-2019-sat/
Yes I am one of the goofy ones I truly believe in Donald Trump our president he’s as real as can be no bull crap you got to love him
He’s real all right. A real liar. A real racist. A real pawn of Putin. A real incompetent. A real narcissist. Nobody realer than him.
RB, I am willing to die defending the U.S. Consitution against both foreign and domestic enemies of the United States. In fact, I took that Constitutional Oath decades ago when I joined (voluntarily – I was not drafted) the U.S. Marines and ended up fighting in Vietnam.
Are you willing to die fighting for Donald Trump, because he is not the U.S. Constitution and he never will be?
“IF” it comes down to a Civil War between Trump Loyalists and the forces defending the U.S. Constitution, what side will you join?