Comparison of SAT scores from MoCo vs. HoCo - a look behind the numbers

[Anonymous]

http://www.examiner.com/school-rankings-in-washington-dc/what-can-we-learn-from-the-sat-scores-of-two-maryland-counties

Interesting read, and a good reminder that it's important to look at statistics from many different angles to understand what they really signify.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:http://www.examiner.com/school-rankings-in-washington-dc/what-can-we-learn-from-the-sat-scores-of-two-maryland-counties

Interesting read, and a good reminder that it's important to look at statistics from many different angles to understand what they really signify.

Yes, unfortunately I read it but it was not interesting at all. It was a dumb article and poorly written. I'm not sure what the conclusions were and what his point was about Asians and comparison between thes particular schools.

[Anonymous]

Yeah, consider the source. This guy is constantly pontificating but a lot of his points make no sense at all.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Yeah, consider the source. This guy is constantly pontificating but a lot of his points make no sense at all.

Aren't columnists supposed to pontificate? He probably could use more space to make his points, but his main point is that educators like to use average test scores to show how well they are doing, but that these averages disguise a lot of information about the distribution and they are not very informative about the situation.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Yeah, consider the source. This guy is constantly pontificating but a lot of his points make no sense at all.

Yeah, I was on an email list with him for a while. In general, I found his contributions to be poorly analyzed and inarticulate. Plus, obstinate as hell.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Yeah, consider the source. This guy is constantly pontificating but a lot of his points make no sense at all.

Aren't columnists supposed to pontificate? He probably could use more space to make his points, but his main point is that educators like to use average test scores to show how well they are doing, but that these averages disguise a lot of information about the distribution and they are not very informative about the situation.

Yes but he only showed us a few numbers from the distribution (not the distribution) and came to conclusions that are based off of what? He made 3 conclusions that can not be linked back to analysis.

[Anonymous]

Seriously .... I'm on a listserv with him too, and he is just infuriating. He has his own internal agenda (consisting largely of some scheme he cooked up to identify gifted kids that makes no sense) and he just won't let it go or see others' points of view.

[Anonymous]

The one thing I don't get is [b]On November 14, 2011,[\b] Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS) and neighboring Howard County Public School System (HCPSS) released dueling news releases on the SAT performance of their students.
Isn't it still September 2011? Did I sleep in until November?

[Anonymous]

Agree that the conclusions in the article have nothing to do with the data.

I looked at the MCPS numbers and there is an interesting relationship between percentage of test takers and scores. For a number of the high schools the increase or decrease in scores is inversely related to the percentage of test takers. It makes sense - the more test takers you have the lower you are likely dipping in the student pool and scores end up dropping slightly. The data on the MCPS website is extensive and does show some interesting differences between different student groups and schools when you look behind the numbers. Of course the columnist did not seem to pick up on any of those.