The Sunday Washington Post featured an article about grading the SAT essays. After being strictly a multiple choice test for so many years, the SAT is now adding an essay.
I don't think adding an essay makes any sense. This doesn't mean I don't think writing is important. I just don't think there's a practical way to accurately judge a person's writing ability based on only a single essay.
The wonderful thing about the SAT is how accurately it measures a person's ability. So many people retake the SAT only to get a new score extremely close to their last score. Maybe it went up by a few tens of points if they prepped really hard for the retest. But that's about it.
Why can't colleges judge applicants' writing ability by looking at their grades in high school English classes? Don't high school grades mean anything? The SAT is supposed to add to high school grades by creating a score that's standardized across all high schools. It's not supposed to replace your entire high school record.
I suspect that unlike the multiple choice sections of the SAT, the essay section will be strongly influenced by test preparation. Students with rich parents will take the expensive test prep courses and learn the proper way to write for the SAT essay.
And what about this statement that the Washington Post managed to slip in:
Bremen, an English professor at the University of Texas at Austin, notes that the writer provides only one real example. Nevertheless, he says, the writer displays "a clear chain of thought" and should be rewarded, "despite his Republican tendencies."
That should raise people's alarm bells! Of course, proper test preparation will teach students to never write anything political, but the English professor was commenting on an essay about squirrels hording food supplies; I don't understand how in the world it could be construed as "Republican."
Somehow, the change to the SAT seems like change for the sake of political correctness. Liberals hate the SAT because it demonstrates quantitatively that people differ in intelligence, and they also hate it because the average black score is significantly lower than the average white score; the difference [possibly] exceeds a standard deviation. (I took statistics in college, I knew it would be useful someday!) [See comments for additional statistics.]
Also in the blogosphere, Betsy complains about the lack of feedback students will receive regarding their essay scores.
7 comments:
"Liberals hate the SAT because it demonstrates quantitatively that people differ in intelligence, and they also hate it because the average black score is significantly lower than the average white score;"
Please expound upon this more. It's quite a statement to make without following it up with more critical thought. I'd like to see where you go with this.
There are many people that have trouble with the concept that your score on this one test will decide so much about a person’s future. My concern is how will this essay be graded? What will they do to make sure the grading is fair and uniform?
I have seen research that shows that on average high school grade point average (HSGPA) is as good a predictor of college GPA as the combined SAT score, and that the combination of SAT + HSGPA is a slightly better predictor of college GPA. As I recall, this held true for minority groups as well. The only interesting thing, is that the SAT score appears to be a better predictor of college GPA for women than it is for men, although the difference is small, where as HSGPA was an equally good predictor of college GPA for both men and women.
On what basis should colleges admit people? Should they admit the most intelligent people? Should they admit the best prepared? Should they admit the mostly likely to succeed in college? Should they admit the people mostly likely to contribute to the community after graduation? Should they admit the people mostly like to bring large endowments to the college?
These are not all the same thing. The most intelligent people are not always to mostly like to graduate. The smartest student I knew in college flunked out because he could not remember to come to class and do his homework, but he could get 100 on tests with 1/10 the work of any other student.
The white standard deviation is 100 verbal and 102 math, and I think the standard deviation for the combined score would be a little lower than the sum of the individual standard deviations.
"Dadahead, unless you've got a PhD in Cognitive Psychology and can back your claims up with substantive evidence, you probably shouldn't post that there’s no such trait as intelligence that can be measured, unless you want to display your own ignorance and naivety."
This is awesome! I didn't know we got to place ridiculous restrictions on specific posters! Okay, okay, let me try!
Jacqueline, unless you can calculate pi to 97 decimal places, in your head, you can't post because you've thus displayed a lack of basic intelligence.
This is fun! It's like I'm back in middle school blowing shit out of my ass that makes me sound much more intelligent than I really am!
Liberals hate the SAT because it demonstrates quantitatively that people differ in intelligence, and they also hate it because the average black score is significantly lower than the average white score; The teeny tiny minor flaw in your gloating is that "black" and "white" in America are cultural constructs, not genetically seperated pools. For all meaningful biological purposes, you're the same people.
Which means that the differences in SAT scores would have to be due to, um, social differentation. They're a demonstration not of any biological differences, but of the biases of your country. The poor [blacks] don't do so well because they get poorer education, because their culture militates against intellectual performance, and because they're told they're dumber than whites.
Proving "liberals" correct. Oops.
Please be explaining how my culture determined the pigment of my skin, or any of a number of other physical, genetic factors that differentiate between the races.Feel free to provide examples of these differences in terms of allele frequencies. Don't forget to provide statistical ranges for said frequencies. And don't forget we're not talking about differences between, say, Norwegians and Zulu; we're talking about the differences between "white" Americans and "black", as in those descended from former slaveowners and former slaves. Please don't try to include more recent immigrants from Africa or the Carribean.
You may want to consider the implications of the "one drop" rule. You may also find this interesting. Or, at a slightly higher level, this.
"This point requires further attention. There is no doubt that there are some important biologic differences among populations, and molecular techniques can help to define what those differences are. Some traits, such as skin color, vary in a strikingly systematic pattern. The inference does not follow, however, that genetic variation among human populations falls into racial categories or that race, as we currently define it, provides an effective system for summarizing that variation. The confused nature of this debate is apparent when we recognize that although everyone, from geneticists to laypersons, tends to use "race" as if it were a scientific category; with rare exceptions,15 no one offers a quantifiable definition of what a race is in genetic terms."
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