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Do you not think the SAT/ACT work well for measuring aptitude? Quite a bit of research has gone into these tests, although the organizations behind these tests
by rlanday 12y ago
Do you not think the SAT/ACT work well for measuring aptitude? Quite a bit of research has gone into these tests, although the organizations behind these tests are not very forthcoming about what they measure (for example, the FAQ on the ACT’s website claims that the ACT is an “achievement” test and the SAT is an “aptitude” test, which is a bunch of crap, since they’ve both been shown to be highly g-loaded and are pretty similar tests). Unfortunately, the College Board is yet again making changes to the SAT, presumably for political reasons (e.g., no longer asking questions about “obscure” vocab words) and won’t really have the data to know how these changes affect the test until they’ve been giving it for several years, so that sort undermines my confidence in the groups behind these exams, and/or makes me think that they’re useful only because it’s apparently pretty difficult to make a test with absolutely no correlation with aptitude, despite the political factors at play, not because they actually have a coherent model of what they’re trying to measure and how to do it.
- llllllllllll 12y agoAs someone who did well on the SAT precisely because I knew all those obscure synonyms, this is a good move. Prior changes to make the test more fair for speakers of dialects other than Standard American English were also good, even if they were "political".
- thaumasiotes 12y ago> the FAQ on the ACT’s website claims that the ACT is an “achievement” test and the SAT is an “aptitude” test, which is a bunch of crap It gets funnier than that. The SAT IIs, with near-identical characteristics to the SAT, are also supposed to be "achievement" tests.