8 ms·

Awesome comment. One question - you write "The top colleges are skeptical of all the standardized tests and most of the high school curriculums." and then " I

Awesome comment. One question - you write "The top colleges are skeptical of all the standardized tests and most of the high school curriculums." and then " I can't say much about it other than this: the kids you think would do well on the tests do incredibly well. The kids you think will do badly, do very, very badly." Why does this make you skeptical of the tests? Do you think the tests are testing the students' socioeconomic background rather than ability/potential?

unalone 18y ago
The minute you standardize something, you make it meaningless. Sometimes tests show you how naturally bright students are (I didn't prepare for the SATs and got a 2190, including one "perfect" score category). More often they indicate who spent the most time preparing - learning how to "cheat" the system, in other words. Some students take years of SAT prep, and that completely ruins the idea of it being an aptitude test.
- wallflower 18y ago
  The year I took the SATs (1600 scale back then) someone on the Educational Testing Service board threw in a knuckle-ball with an analogy question in the Verbal section that used the term winnowing. I wish I could remember the question.. Post-test, there were quite a few complaints from the super students (some of them confident in scoring in the 1450-1500 range), as it was a curve ball because as suburban-bred kids how could we be expected to know what winnowing meant and more importantly, the correct multiple-choice answer. Winnowing: the act of separating grain from chaf
  - unalone 18y ago
    Post-test, there were quite a few complaints from the super students (some of them confident in scoring in the 1450-1500 range), as it was a curve ball because as suburban-bred kids how could we be expected to know what winnowing meant and more importantly, the correct multiple-choice answer. That's what I hate: this idea of a "perfect" test, or a test that has an "acceptable" range. Perhaps I'm drawn to the things I am - art, entrepreneurship - because they're harder to measure and can't as easily set standards. Or perhaps I'm drawn to those things because they're more meaningful than things that you can judge by assigning a number or plotting a chart of scores. In either case, it annoys me when people take numbers too seriously in that regard. The only numbers that really ought to matter are personal numbers: not your numbers compared to somebody else's.
  - jacoblyles 18y ago
    Winnowing is not a terribly esoteric word. This whole comment thread is a discussion on winnowing. It's often used in literature, and I believe it is used in certain translations of the Bible.
    - yters 18y ago
      The irony is that the word "winnowing" winnowed the students.
- yummyfajitas 18y ago
  The minute you standardize something, you make it meaningless. Indeed. Expressing units of measurement in terms of feet or meters? Standardization makes them meaningless. Instead, I'll just wave my hands in the air and say "roughly this long." And (X)HTML standards? Don't get me started. Lets all just throw angled brackets to the browser, that's far more meaningful. Incidentally, your actual complaint seems to be that some existing standardized tests are poorly designed. This is a problem of test design, not standardization.
  - tome 18y ago
    No, his actual complaint is once you standardize a test, schools with a lot of resources will "teach to the test", giving their students an advantage.
    - yummyfajitas 18y ago
      That's not a bad thing for a sufficiently well designed test. Here are examples of decent tests which I taught to. "Teaching to the test" and "teaching calculus" were basically identical. http://cims.nyu.edu/~stucchio/classes/fall2008/2005Spring1aFinal-pub.pdf http://cims.nyu.edu/~stucchio/classes/fall2008/2005Spring1aF... http://cims.nyu.edu/~stucchio/classes/fall2008/2007Fall1aFinal.pdf http://cims.nyu.edu/~stucchio/classes/fall2008/2007Fall1aFin... http://cims.nyu.edu/~stucchio/classes/fall2008/2008Spring1aFinal.pdf http://cims.nyu.edu/~stucchio/classes/fall2008/2008Spring1aF...
      - unalone 18y ago
        "Teaching to the test" and "teaching calculus" were basically identical. I'd argue that if that's how math is being taught, there's a problem. "Teaching to the test" taught me to hate math in high school. In middle school, we were given a brilliant teacher who was allowed to teach however he wanted, and we left 8th grade understanding trigonometry better than most of the high schoolers we were with. Have you read Paul Lockhart's "A Mathematician's Lament"? That highlights the problems fundamental with the current math curriculum. From the tests that you linked me to, with all due respect, it doesn't look like you're doing anything different: you're spitting out formulas to be memorized. That's not math: that's mechanics. I hate that students are taught like that.
brandnewlow 18y ago
You are wrong to use a slash between ability and potential. The kids with strong socioeconomic backgrounds do well and go on to do well. The kids who don't, don't.
- time_management 18y ago
  So who is a better bet, from an admission's office's perspective, a kid from a poor background or a kid from a very wealthy background, assuming their grades, quality of high school education, test scores, et al are identical? (I'm assuming that the main concern is the student's academic performance in college, NOT his career afterward; obviously, the rich kid will pwn in that aspect.) I would bet on the poor kid, because he's likely to have higher "g", to so speak. Are you arguing that the rich kid is the better bet, because his advantaged background will continue to pay off in a way that's underrated by the standardized tests and grades?
  - brandnewlow 18y ago
    Well, that's not really a fair question. Each kid would get looked at one his own. The rich kid might make a great impression. The poor kid might make a great impression. They would never be set side by side for an either/or. It just isn't done that way. Also, your assumptions are pretty out there. 1. The odds of a poor kid getting the same quality of education as a rich kid are very, very low, especially if you knew just HOW good of an education rich kids in the U.S. can get. The most informative part of my two years in admissions was the week I spent visiting elite boarding schools in New England to meet with students thinking about applying. My meals and conversations with the students there were astounding. Their teachers all had PhDs. There was not one ugly or overweight kid in any of the schools. The students were years ahead of where I'd been in math and science coming out of a public high school in the Midwest. And they aggressively questioned me about every aspect of Princeton's curriculum and admission process. When I would visit public high schools in the Midwest, the kids rarely, if ever had questions for me. They had no clue what to even ask me about. "Princeton" was just so completely foreign to them. Not so for these kids, who all had friends currently studying there. Many of them had siblings who'd graduated from there already. So this was a real eye-opener. You can be the best kid in a crappy school, but the fact that you were in a crappy school is going to have an impact in the grand scheme of things. That's why we'd never compare kids across contexts. It just made no sense. Similarly, the test scores, grades "et all" for the rich kid would probably all be higher. If there was a "poor kid" who had incredible credentials AND didn't sound like a basket case, then he'd be hotly pursued by every top school in the country. But those kids are very rare, so it's not realistic to pit a student like that against a "rich kid with good grades and scores" which is as common as air in these applicant pools. If I did have to pick, I'd take the more precocious kid every time. I'd pick the kid who's able to make stuff happen for him. There are poor kids that can do this. There are rich kids that can do this. It's much, much rarer to find a kid from a less privileged background with this mindset though.

unalone 18y ago

The minute you standardize something, you make it meaningless. Sometimes tests show you how naturally bright students are (I didn't prepare for the SATs and got a 2190, including one "perfect" score category). More often they indicate who spent the most time preparing - learning how to "cheat" the system, in other words. Some students take years of SAT prep, and that completely ruins the idea of it being an aptitude test.

wallflower 18y ago
The year I took the SATs (1600 scale back then) someone on the Educational Testing Service board threw in a knuckle-ball with an analogy question in the Verbal section that used the term winnowing. I wish I could remember the question.. Post-test, there were quite a few complaints from the super students (some of them confident in scoring in the 1450-1500 range), as it was a curve ball because as suburban-bred kids how could we be expected to know what winnowing meant and more importantly, the correct multiple-choice answer. Winnowing: the act of separating grain from chaf
- unalone 18y ago
  Post-test, there were quite a few complaints from the super students (some of them confident in scoring in the 1450-1500 range), as it was a curve ball because as suburban-bred kids how could we be expected to know what winnowing meant and more importantly, the correct multiple-choice answer. That's what I hate: this idea of a "perfect" test, or a test that has an "acceptable" range. Perhaps I'm drawn to the things I am - art, entrepreneurship - because they're harder to measure and can't as easily set standards. Or perhaps I'm drawn to those things because they're more meaningful than things that you can judge by assigning a number or plotting a chart of scores. In either case, it annoys me when people take numbers too seriously in that regard. The only numbers that really ought to matter are personal numbers: not your numbers compared to somebody else's.
- jacoblyles 18y ago
  Winnowing is not a terribly esoteric word. This whole comment thread is a discussion on winnowing. It's often used in literature, and I believe it is used in certain translations of the Bible.
  - yters 18y ago
    The irony is that the word "winnowing" winnowed the students.
yummyfajitas 18y ago
The minute you standardize something, you make it meaningless. Indeed. Expressing units of measurement in terms of feet or meters? Standardization makes them meaningless. Instead, I'll just wave my hands in the air and say "roughly this long." And (X)HTML standards? Don't get me started. Lets all just throw angled brackets to the browser, that's far more meaningful. Incidentally, your actual complaint seems to be that some existing standardized tests are poorly designed. This is a problem of test design, not standardization.
- tome 18y ago
  No, his actual complaint is once you standardize a test, schools with a lot of resources will "teach to the test", giving their students an advantage.
  - yummyfajitas 18y ago
    That's not a bad thing for a sufficiently well designed test. Here are examples of decent tests which I taught to. "Teaching to the test" and "teaching calculus" were basically identical. http://cims.nyu.edu/~stucchio/classes/fall2008/2005Spring1aFinal-pub.pdf http://cims.nyu.edu/~stucchio/classes/fall2008/2005Spring1aF... http://cims.nyu.edu/~stucchio/classes/fall2008/2007Fall1aFinal.pdf http://cims.nyu.edu/~stucchio/classes/fall2008/2007Fall1aFin... http://cims.nyu.edu/~stucchio/classes/fall2008/2008Spring1aFinal.pdf http://cims.nyu.edu/~stucchio/classes/fall2008/2008Spring1aF...
    - unalone 18y ago
      "Teaching to the test" and "teaching calculus" were basically identical. I'd argue that if that's how math is being taught, there's a problem. "Teaching to the test" taught me to hate math in high school. In middle school, we were given a brilliant teacher who was allowed to teach however he wanted, and we left 8th grade understanding trigonometry better than most of the high schoolers we were with. Have you read Paul Lockhart's "A Mathematician's Lament"? That highlights the problems fundamental with the current math curriculum. From the tests that you linked me to, with all due respect, it doesn't look like you're doing anything different: you're spitting out formulas to be memorized. That's not math: that's mechanics. I hate that students are taught like that.

brandnewlow 18y ago

You are wrong to use a slash between ability and potential. The kids with strong socioeconomic backgrounds do well and go on to do well. The kids who don't, don't.

time_management 18y ago
So who is a better bet, from an admission's office's perspective, a kid from a poor background or a kid from a very wealthy background, assuming their grades, quality of high school education, test scores, et al are identical? (I'm assuming that the main concern is the student's academic performance in college, NOT his career afterward; obviously, the rich kid will pwn in that aspect.) I would bet on the poor kid, because he's likely to have higher "g", to so speak. Are you arguing that the rich kid is the better bet, because his advantaged background will continue to pay off in a way that's underrated by the standardized tests and grades?
- brandnewlow 18y ago
  Well, that's not really a fair question. Each kid would get looked at one his own. The rich kid might make a great impression. The poor kid might make a great impression. They would never be set side by side for an either/or. It just isn't done that way. Also, your assumptions are pretty out there. 1. The odds of a poor kid getting the same quality of education as a rich kid are very, very low, especially if you knew just HOW good of an education rich kids in the U.S. can get. The most informative part of my two years in admissions was the week I spent visiting elite boarding schools in New England to meet with students thinking about applying. My meals and conversations with the students there were astounding. Their teachers all had PhDs. There was not one ugly or overweight kid in any of the schools. The students were years ahead of where I'd been in math and science coming out of a public high school in the Midwest. And they aggressively questioned me about every aspect of Princeton's curriculum and admission process. When I would visit public high schools in the Midwest, the kids rarely, if ever had questions for me. They had no clue what to even ask me about. "Princeton" was just so completely foreign to them. Not so for these kids, who all had friends currently studying there. Many of them had siblings who'd graduated from there already. So this was a real eye-opener. You can be the best kid in a crappy school, but the fact that you were in a crappy school is going to have an impact in the grand scheme of things. That's why we'd never compare kids across contexts. It just made no sense. Similarly, the test scores, grades "et all" for the rich kid would probably all be higher. If there was a "poor kid" who had incredible credentials AND didn't sound like a basket case, then he'd be hotly pursued by every top school in the country. But those kids are very rare, so it's not realistic to pit a student like that against a "rich kid with good grades and scores" which is as common as air in these applicant pools. If I did have to pick, I'd take the more precocious kid every time. I'd pick the kid who's able to make stuff happen for him. There are poor kids that can do this. There are rich kids that can do this. It's much, much rarer to find a kid from a less privileged background with this mindset though.