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Am I the only one here that's bothered by a further narrowing of the expected knowledge of students? A good engineer or programmer isn't a human calculator who

by chroem 13y ago

Am I the only one here that's bothered by a further narrowing of the expected knowledge of students? A good engineer or programmer isn't a human calculator who can bang out hundreds of caclulations per minute or recite petty facts in a very specific area. Good programmers and engineers draw on their wide breadth of knowledge, and the deep understanding it generates, to solve complex and abstract problems. Anecdotally, I'm seeing a substantial number, if not the majority, of CS students who can't code worth a damn, but got into the department solely because they did well in a small number of unrelated subjects. While I'm not terribly concerned with the changes in the SAT, I am concerned about it adding more momentum to this trend.

anigbrowl 13y ago
No. I was also depressed about the approach of 'we're excluding arcane words!' I do really well on those tests - not because I have encountered every word that might come up, but because I do have a big enough vocabulary to draw analogies and guess at the meaning of arcane words by looking at their internal structure, eg Membranous seems to consist of membrane + ous, so I guess it's an adjective to describe something that has a membrane-like quality. I developed a love of etymology from spending many long hours poring over dictionaries as a child, including the bits about word roots and so on. When I see that things like this are being dropped from the SAT, it's like being told that that knowledge and the effort to acquire it lacks value.
- TepidSolarsoul 13y ago
  "Membranous" definitely isn't arcane (membrane is a contemporary word relevant in scientific contexts), but much of the actual SAT-tested vocabulary like "maudlin" definitely are anachronisms (whose etymology root from obscure cultural allusions). How could one possibly make the mental reasoning leap over multiple levels of indirection from "maudlin" to "Old French Madeleine", and then to "Mary Magdalene" in archaic Latin, and THEN to the word's actual meaning of "overly sentimental"? I might have invoked my Roman Catholic upbringing to figure that one out on-the-fly during my exam? Please. In case you think I'm joking, I'm literally not making this convoluted chain of indirections up: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/maudlin#Etymology http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/maudlin#Etymology As further reinforcement, surely, the word's frequency of occurrence in corpora over time peaked in 1900, and then its usage dropped off a cliff. Meanwhile, "membrane" still remains widely used and very pertinent. Corroborating Google n-gram viewer statistics (shortened Google Books URLs): maudlin: http://goo.gl/cfGSZP http://goo.gl/cfGSZP membrane: http://goo.gl/aFK9La http://goo.gl/aFK9La Yet, "maudlin" was among the list of commonly-tested vocabulary words in my SAT prep book, and it was even included in the bundled stack of veritable flash cards for practice drills. However, I can't remember seeing "membranous" in the same stack, probably because the knowledge of hard sciences is underrepresented in the test content (instead, you had to take the completely separate SAT subject tests to demonstrate your command of the more-than-relevant scientific disciplines). Better keep opening Old Nassau's gates to the upper echelons of society for anybody who can ace this sort of trivia.
- anigbrowl 13y ago
  TepidSolarSoul, your account seems to be banned so I can't reply to your comment directly. I certainly agree that 'maudlin' is harder to figure out etymologically, but on the other hand I don't think it's all that unusual either; one would certainly have come across it if one had read any amount of literature from the late 19th/early 20th century, whether than was something by Dickens or a bunch of Sherlock Holmes stories. I personally think the fact that everyday vocabularies are shrinking is a terribly bad thing, and a trend we should be resisting rather than accommodating. I didn't grow up with a silver spoon in my mouth or as the offspring of professional educators, incidentally - indeed they went through a phase of trying to discourage me from reading material that was too advanced or adult-themed. My parents read to me when I was small, my mother enjoyed crosswords, but the main thing they did for me was tell me to go look up a word in the dictionary rather than supplying a definition whenever it was asked for. I enjoyed reading enough to find the dictionary an interest in thing to browse in its own right. Better keep opening Old Nassau's gates to the upper echelons of society for anybody who can ace this sort of trivia. I'm not sure what you're trying to say here, but I'm not holding my breath for an invitation from Princeton.
minor_nitwit 13y ago
I agree. I would actually prefer if the test subjects were considered new to all students, and they were expected to become experts in those subjects before taking the test. What you need to score for is the ability to learn and apply the knowledge that you already have to new subjects, not to repeat the basics. You're ready for college when you're able to learn new things and apply them quickly. It's a good thing IMO that people have to learn 'SAT words', it filters out the ones that are able to put in the effort to expand their vocabulary, and also retain this new knowledge.
watwut 13y ago
"I'm seeing a substantial number, if not the majority, of CS students who can't code worth a damn, but got into the department solely because they did well in a small number of unrelated subjects." Isnt that argument for more relevant testing? If the current selection picked up people with poor aptitude for programming or whatever, then it makes sense to change it. Engineers needs ability to think hard and solve complex problems. So, lets measure those instead of how many arcane words they memorized, how great are they in writing self promoting essays, how much irrelevant facts they memorized or how fast they are in solving simple memorizable math problems. There is nothing wrong with adjusting expectations to current world.

by chroem 13y ago

anigbrowl 13y ago

No. I was also depressed about the approach of 'we're excluding arcane words!' I do really well on those tests - not because I have encountered every word that might come up, but because I do have a big enough vocabulary to draw analogies and guess at the meaning of arcane words by looking at their internal structure, eg Membranous seems to consist of membrane + ous, so I guess it's an adjective to describe something that has a membrane-like quality. I developed a love of etymology from spending many long hours poring over dictionaries as a child, including the bits about word roots and so on. When I see that things like this are being dropped from the SAT, it's like being told that that knowledge and the effort to acquire it lacks value.

TepidSolarsoul 13y ago
"Membranous" definitely isn't arcane (membrane is a contemporary word relevant in scientific contexts), but much of the actual SAT-tested vocabulary like "maudlin" definitely are anachronisms (whose etymology root from obscure cultural allusions). How could one possibly make the mental reasoning leap over multiple levels of indirection from "maudlin" to "Old French Madeleine", and then to "Mary Magdalene" in archaic Latin, and THEN to the word's actual meaning of "overly sentimental"? I might have invoked my Roman Catholic upbringing to figure that one out on-the-fly during my exam? Please. In case you think I'm joking, I'm literally not making this convoluted chain of indirections up: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/maudlin#Etymology http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/maudlin#Etymology As further reinforcement, surely, the word's frequency of occurrence in corpora over time peaked in 1900, and then its usage dropped off a cliff. Meanwhile, "membrane" still remains widely used and very pertinent. Corroborating Google n-gram viewer statistics (shortened Google Books URLs): maudlin: http://goo.gl/cfGSZP http://goo.gl/cfGSZP membrane: http://goo.gl/aFK9La http://goo.gl/aFK9La Yet, "maudlin" was among the list of commonly-tested vocabulary words in my SAT prep book, and it was even included in the bundled stack of veritable flash cards for practice drills. However, I can't remember seeing "membranous" in the same stack, probably because the knowledge of hard sciences is underrepresented in the test content (instead, you had to take the completely separate SAT subject tests to demonstrate your command of the more-than-relevant scientific disciplines). Better keep opening Old Nassau's gates to the upper echelons of society for anybody who can ace this sort of trivia.
anigbrowl 13y ago
TepidSolarSoul, your account seems to be banned so I can't reply to your comment directly. I certainly agree that 'maudlin' is harder to figure out etymologically, but on the other hand I don't think it's all that unusual either; one would certainly have come across it if one had read any amount of literature from the late 19th/early 20th century, whether than was something by Dickens or a bunch of Sherlock Holmes stories. I personally think the fact that everyday vocabularies are shrinking is a terribly bad thing, and a trend we should be resisting rather than accommodating. I didn't grow up with a silver spoon in my mouth or as the offspring of professional educators, incidentally - indeed they went through a phase of trying to discourage me from reading material that was too advanced or adult-themed. My parents read to me when I was small, my mother enjoyed crosswords, but the main thing they did for me was tell me to go look up a word in the dictionary rather than supplying a definition whenever it was asked for. I enjoyed reading enough to find the dictionary an interest in thing to browse in its own right. Better keep opening Old Nassau's gates to the upper echelons of society for anybody who can ace this sort of trivia. I'm not sure what you're trying to say here, but I'm not holding my breath for an invitation from Princeton.

minor_nitwit 13y ago

I agree. I would actually prefer if the test subjects were considered new to all students, and they were expected to become experts in those subjects before taking the test. What you need to score for is the ability to learn and apply the knowledge that you already have to new subjects, not to repeat the basics. You're ready for college when you're able to learn new things and apply them quickly. It's a good thing IMO that people have to learn 'SAT words', it filters out the ones that are able to put in the effort to expand their vocabulary, and also retain this new knowledge.

watwut 13y ago

"I'm seeing a substantial number, if not the majority, of CS students who can't code worth a damn, but got into the department solely because they did well in a small number of unrelated subjects." Isnt that argument for more relevant testing? If the current selection picked up people with poor aptitude for programming or whatever, then it makes sense to change it. Engineers needs ability to think hard and solve complex problems. So, lets measure those instead of how many arcane words they memorized, how great are they in writing self promoting essays, how much irrelevant facts they memorized or how fast they are in solving simple memorizable math problems. There is nothing wrong with adjusting expectations to current world.