4 ms·

'All the tests most students take their whole lives are at least as bad, including, most spectacularly of all, the test that gets them into college.' If the SA

'All the tests most students take their whole lives are at least as bad, including, most spectacularly of all, the test that gets them into college.' If the SAT were so easily hackable by using the right test-taking techniques, rich parents would have hired tutors to teach their children the tricks, rather than paying people to actually take tests for them, which caused several famous people to go to jail.

BeetleB 5y ago
> rich parents would have hired tutors to teach their children the tricks, rather than paying people to actually take tests for them, which caused several famous people to go to jail. I would wager over 95% of rich people do hire tutors (or send children to expensive tutoring programs). Since they don't get sent to jail, we overestimate the percentage of the latter. The SAT is hackable. In my time, both the SAT and the GRE analogy questions had the same "flaw": You are given 5 choices. Two of them will always have identical relationships - so neither can be the answer. There is always a nonsensical choice (something like "Dog : mathematics"), so you can rule that out. You're left with two choices. Even if you don't understand the question, you now have a 50% chance of getting it right. Similarly, for quantitative questions, a number of problems are easily "solved" by working backwards. I don't need to know how to solve a quadratic: I just plug in the choices into the equation and see which gives the correct answer. This is so "common" that people consider the strategy as legitimate. However, the goal of the question is to see if you can solve a quadratic - not evaluate one. A lot of quantitative problems tend to have at least one nonsensical answer. You can rule it out. And so on.
- tharkun__ 5y ago
  At my university someone ran all the available old exams of the standard first semester "filtering courses" in economics through some simple statistical tests. These were always 5 answer multiple choice exams where you had to copy your results from the actual test sheets onto a scanable matrix sheet. Long story short, if you simply checked answers A, C, E for every question you apparently had a very good chance to get a passing grade.
- Blammar 5y ago
  Indeed. As a high school and college student, I was very good at "hacking" multiple choice tests. I did manage to crush my SATs (800's in the achievement tests), win local and state chemistry competitions, and came in second on the national college level math test (whose name I forgot, but it gets you an entry into the Actuary Guild.) I remember these, but I am actually most proud of being one of the top 100 scorers on the Putnam competition, definitely not a hackable test! Sadly, I didn't know Microsoft hired top Putnam scorers, no questions asked, at the time (1970), so I missed out on being a Word programmer. Oh, wait! That's a good thing!

BeetleB 5y ago

> rich parents would have hired tutors to teach their children the tricks, rather than paying people to actually take tests for them, which caused several famous people to go to jail. I would wager over 95% of rich people do hire tutors (or send children to expensive tutoring programs). Since they don't get sent to jail, we overestimate the percentage of the latter. The SAT is hackable. In my time, both the SAT and the GRE analogy questions had the same "flaw": You are given 5 choices. Two of them will always have identical relationships - so neither can be the answer. There is always a nonsensical choice (something like "Dog : mathematics"), so you can rule that out. You're left with two choices. Even if you don't understand the question, you now have a 50% chance of getting it right. Similarly, for quantitative questions, a number of problems are easily "solved" by working backwards. I don't need to know how to solve a quadratic: I just plug in the choices into the equation and see which gives the correct answer. This is so "common" that people consider the strategy as legitimate. However, the goal of the question is to see if you can solve a quadratic - not evaluate one. A lot of quantitative problems tend to have at least one nonsensical answer. You can rule it out. And so on.

tharkun__ 5y ago
At my university someone ran all the available old exams of the standard first semester "filtering courses" in economics through some simple statistical tests. These were always 5 answer multiple choice exams where you had to copy your results from the actual test sheets onto a scanable matrix sheet. Long story short, if you simply checked answers A, C, E for every question you apparently had a very good chance to get a passing grade.
Blammar 5y ago
Indeed. As a high school and college student, I was very good at "hacking" multiple choice tests. I did manage to crush my SATs (800's in the achievement tests), win local and state chemistry competitions, and came in second on the national college level math test (whose name I forgot, but it gets you an entry into the Actuary Guild.) I remember these, but I am actually most proud of being one of the top 100 scorers on the Putnam competition, definitely not a hackable test! Sadly, I didn't know Microsoft hired top Putnam scorers, no questions asked, at the time (1970), so I missed out on being a Word programmer. Oh, wait! That's a good thing!