7 ms·

On top of that exam dumps are much less efficient when it comes to SAT IIs, where questions are much more diverse an subject knowledge is essential. SAT I is th

On top of that exam dumps are much less efficient when it comes to SAT IIs, where questions are much more diverse an subject knowledge is essential. SAT I is the one that is easy to game.

jzoch 7y ago
Eh its all easily game-able. The SAT (and ACT) is a joke. So are the subject tests. The only subject test that wasn't laughable are the language ones (since you can't "intuit" spanish as easily as math or physics or chemistry). Its not bad if you are a good test taker (a dumb skill but a useful one) or wealthy. My friends were tutored idiots and did well (2200+ SAT, 700+ subject tests) and i was a good test taker (same scores). Its all garbage
- knzhou 7y ago
  You're just bragging that you hit the ceiling on those tests. That doesn't mean tests don't work; if you wanted to, you could have found much harder ones. (That's what I did, out of necessity. They wouldn't have given my app a second look if I hadn't.)
- mgkimsal 7y ago
  30 years ago, the ACT test changed enough that it was no longer a valid test to use as entry for Mensa. Prior to 1990, an ACT test could be used as evidence for Mensa admission. So... the ACT wasn't always 'a joke', but doesn't have the same impact that it had decades ago.
  - ivalm 7y ago
    A lot of people would argue that Mensa itself is a joke...
    - Der_Einzige 7y ago
      I always tell people this who want "only high IQ" people to run society. "Oh, you want the people at Mensa to run your society?"
      - opportune 7y ago
        Well to be fair, those are the subset of high IQ people who have the time/desire to join a club about having a high IQ. Kind of an adverse selection bias
      - barry-cotter 7y ago
        The overwhelming majority of the high IQ are not Mensa members. They are academics, doctors, lawyers, successful businesspeople, the kinds of people for whom it is more common in their friends group to have a Master’s degree than to be a high school dropout.
        perl4ever 7y ago
        Some people consider a person with a Master's degree to be a dropout. (yes, I know, not necessarily...)
        barry-cotter 7y ago
        Those people are called academics. The kinds of Master’s degrees that are rent seeking credentialism, MBAs, MSWs, M.Ed.s are far more common than consolation prizes for those who didn’t get their Ph.D.
        perl4ever 7y ago
        Perhaps, but the context I heard it in was self-deprecating from someone working in industry, relative to engineers with PhDs.
    - quartzite 7y ago
      That's irrelevant, what matters is that a high IQ society has a vested interest in measuring IQ as a proxy for general intelligence and standardized testing results should reliably correlate to IQ and general intelligence.
      - jschwartzi 7y ago
        But is IQ really a proxy for general intelligence?
        Hydraulix989 7y ago
        Yes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_factor_(psychometrics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_factor_(psychometrics) An individual's performance on one type of cognitive task tends to be comparable to that person's performance on other kinds of cognitive tasks.
        bsanr2 7y ago
        It's not impossible that these tests measure something other than general intelligence, that just happens to correlate with social outcomes (like historical, relative familial wealth). IIRC general intelligence also doesn't simply measure speed of cognition, but also ability to choose what to focus on ("intuition"), which these tests do not measure.
        barry-cotter 7y ago
        Adoptees have IQs in line with their biological parents, not their adoptive ones. It’s heritable like every other psychological variable I’m aware of. Speed of cognition is absolutely correlated with IQ but the difference in speed doesn’t cause the differences in results. Both are downstream of being more intelligent. > Speed of information processing and general intelligence > One hundred university students were given five tests of speed-of-processing, measuring their speed of encoding, short-term memory scanning, long-term memory retrieval, efficiency of short-term memory storage and processing, and simple and choice reaction time or decision-making speed. They were also given the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale and the Raven Advanced Progression Matrices. A number of multiple regression analyses show that the cognitive processing measures are significantly related to IQ scores. Other analyses indicate that this relationship cannot be attributed to the common content shared by the reaction time and the intelligence tests, nor to the fact that parts of the WAIS are timed. It is concluded that the reaction time tests measure basic cognitive operations which are involved in many forms of intellectual behavior, and that individual differences in intelligence can be attributed, to a moderate extent, to variance in the speed or efficiency with which individuals can execute these operations https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0160289683900065 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/016028...
    - llcoolv 7y ago
      This is more of a joke story, but a few years ago a friend of mine who is neither ambitious nor succesful surprisingly scored 165-170 on their test. When they offered him a membership and told him the membership fee, his reaction was - Alright, but as I am in the top 5% of your members - should not you be paying me to hang out with you? :D :D :D
- MichaelDickens 7y ago
  If the SAT were a joke, you wouldn't expect scores to follow a bell curve with only ~0.3% of people getting a perfect score, but they do.
  - disgruntledphd2 7y ago
    This isn't a good argument, because the SAT (and other tests of the same kind) are normalised to have this property. The SAT may not be good tests, but that fact has nothing to do with the presence or absence of a normal distribution.
    - ebrenes 7y ago
      The SATs have a top score, if it were easy to game you'd find many people would clump at the top. That would make it impossible to normalize that distribution into a bell-shape because they're all clustered into the same bucket with no way of spreading them. OP's point was that the perfect scores remain consistently outside of people's grasp despite the variety of resources available to prep for the exam. I only once managed to hit perfect score and my other best scores were one or two questions off. I had been taking the test since I was 11 (for various extracurricular camps/activities) and prepped multiple times for them. The biggest scores jumps were more closely related with my age and academic achievements than anything else.
      - chongli 7y ago
        A lot of the reason the SATs are able to maintain a spread that lets them normalize the distribution is that they fill the tests with stupid tricks that fool people into wasting time. If you do a ton of prep then you learn to spot these tricks and then a lot of the questions become really easy and you can knock them off quickly. A poor smart student may have mastery of the material but their score will suffer if they don't know the tricks.
        barry-cotter 7y ago
        And you can find out about all these tricks for free on Khan Academy or for $20 in a SAT prep book.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

On top of that exam dumps are much less efficient when it comes to SAT IIs, where questions are much more diverse an subject knowledge is essential. SAT I is the one that is easy to game.

jzoch 7y ago

Eh its all easily game-able. The SAT (and ACT) is a joke. So are the subject tests. The only subject test that wasn't laughable are the language ones (since you can't "intuit" spanish as easily as math or physics or chemistry). Its not bad if you are a good test taker (a dumb skill but a useful one) or wealthy. My friends were tutored idiots and did well (2200+ SAT, 700+ subject tests) and i was a good test taker (same scores). Its all garbage

knzhou 7y ago
You're just bragging that you hit the ceiling on those tests. That doesn't mean tests don't work; if you wanted to, you could have found much harder ones. (That's what I did, out of necessity. They wouldn't have given my app a second look if I hadn't.)
mgkimsal 7y ago
30 years ago, the ACT test changed enough that it was no longer a valid test to use as entry for Mensa. Prior to 1990, an ACT test could be used as evidence for Mensa admission. So... the ACT wasn't always 'a joke', but doesn't have the same impact that it had decades ago.
- ivalm 7y ago
  A lot of people would argue that Mensa itself is a joke...
  - Der_Einzige 7y ago
    I always tell people this who want "only high IQ" people to run society. "Oh, you want the people at Mensa to run your society?"
    - opportune 7y ago
      Well to be fair, those are the subset of high IQ people who have the time/desire to join a club about having a high IQ. Kind of an adverse selection bias
    - barry-cotter 7y ago
      The overwhelming majority of the high IQ are not Mensa members. They are academics, doctors, lawyers, successful businesspeople, the kinds of people for whom it is more common in their friends group to have a Master’s degree than to be a high school dropout.
      - perl4ever 7y ago
        Some people consider a person with a Master's degree to be a dropout. (yes, I know, not necessarily...)
        barry-cotter 7y ago
        Those people are called academics. The kinds of Master’s degrees that are rent seeking credentialism, MBAs, MSWs, M.Ed.s are far more common than consolation prizes for those who didn’t get their Ph.D.
        perl4ever 7y ago
        Perhaps, but the context I heard it in was self-deprecating from someone working in industry, relative to engineers with PhDs.
  - quartzite 7y ago
    That's irrelevant, what matters is that a high IQ society has a vested interest in measuring IQ as a proxy for general intelligence and standardized testing results should reliably correlate to IQ and general intelligence.
    - jschwartzi 7y ago
      But is IQ really a proxy for general intelligence?
      - Hydraulix989 7y ago
        Yes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_factor_(psychometrics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_factor_(psychometrics) An individual's performance on one type of cognitive task tends to be comparable to that person's performance on other kinds of cognitive tasks.
        bsanr2 7y ago
        It's not impossible that these tests measure something other than general intelligence, that just happens to correlate with social outcomes (like historical, relative familial wealth). IIRC general intelligence also doesn't simply measure speed of cognition, but also ability to choose what to focus on ("intuition"), which these tests do not measure.
        barry-cotter 7y ago
        Adoptees have IQs in line with their biological parents, not their adoptive ones. It’s heritable like every other psychological variable I’m aware of. Speed of cognition is absolutely correlated with IQ but the difference in speed doesn’t cause the differences in results. Both are downstream of being more intelligent. > Speed of information processing and general intelligence > One hundred university students were given five tests of speed-of-processing, measuring their speed of encoding, short-term memory scanning, long-term memory retrieval, efficiency of short-term memory storage and processing, and simple and choice reaction time or decision-making speed. They were also given the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale and the Raven Advanced Progression Matrices. A number of multiple regression analyses show that the cognitive processing measures are significantly related to IQ scores. Other analyses indicate that this relationship cannot be attributed to the common content shared by the reaction time and the intelligence tests, nor to the fact that parts of the WAIS are timed. It is concluded that the reaction time tests measure basic cognitive operations which are involved in many forms of intellectual behavior, and that individual differences in intelligence can be attributed, to a moderate extent, to variance in the speed or efficiency with which individuals can execute these operations https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0160289683900065 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/016028...
  - llcoolv 7y ago
    This is more of a joke story, but a few years ago a friend of mine who is neither ambitious nor succesful surprisingly scored 165-170 on their test. When they offered him a membership and told him the membership fee, his reaction was - Alright, but as I am in the top 5% of your members - should not you be paying me to hang out with you? :D :D :D
MichaelDickens 7y ago
If the SAT were a joke, you wouldn't expect scores to follow a bell curve with only ~0.3% of people getting a perfect score, but they do.
- disgruntledphd2 7y ago
  This isn't a good argument, because the SAT (and other tests of the same kind) are normalised to have this property. The SAT may not be good tests, but that fact has nothing to do with the presence or absence of a normal distribution.
  - ebrenes 7y ago
    The SATs have a top score, if it were easy to game you'd find many people would clump at the top. That would make it impossible to normalize that distribution into a bell-shape because they're all clustered into the same bucket with no way of spreading them. OP's point was that the perfect scores remain consistently outside of people's grasp despite the variety of resources available to prep for the exam. I only once managed to hit perfect score and my other best scores were one or two questions off. I had been taking the test since I was 11 (for various extracurricular camps/activities) and prepped multiple times for them. The biggest scores jumps were more closely related with my age and academic achievements than anything else.
    - chongli 7y ago
      A lot of the reason the SATs are able to maintain a spread that lets them normalize the distribution is that they fill the tests with stupid tricks that fool people into wasting time. If you do a ton of prep then you learn to spot these tricks and then a lot of the questions become really easy and you can knock them off quickly. A poor smart student may have mastery of the material but their score will suffer if they don't know the tricks.
      - barry-cotter 7y ago
        And you can find out about all these tricks for free on Khan Academy or for $20 in a SAT prep book.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]