Reply to Practice SATs vs the real thing

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]With the caveat that there is variability among actual tests, the practice tests tend to be easier both for difficulty and for scoring than the actual tests.

My guess is that there is something goofy going on with adaptability, whether a student gets the hard section 2.

Students are reporting big increases and big decreases even with a short time between test dates, which shouldn't happen to this degree if the test is well standardized. Essentially, there seems to be some luck involved.

My kid scored 180 pts lower on the August test than on the practice tests. The difficulty was slightly harder, but student thought they did ok, so we don't know what happened - maybe didn't get the hard section 2? A student posting on reddit had a similar score to my kid's for August and a 160 pt increase in September, so certainly there is hope. Multiple retakes will be the name of the game for this inconsistent digital test.[/quote]

That’s wild. Your kid must have been really disappointed. [/quote]
Yes. And then later told me that their friends who took August were also disappointed with their scores. We don't know why it worked out this way. Retaking is the only thing to do.

I was formerly against lots of retakes, back in the days of the paper test. I'd say just don't take the real thing until your practice test scores are where you want them to be, because back then the practice tests were more representative. I'd wonder if College Board were trying to use surprise difficulty to differentiate among top scorers, perhaps, but the variability between test dates may point more to quality control in their equating or standardization processes. It's a shorter test, which may make consistency in construction of the test more difficult for College Board.

If multiple retakes now turns out to be beneficial, that is going to benefit certain students who are already advantaged, i.e., those who know to retake and those who can afford to do so. My kid is advantaged, but I can already hear the complaining to come.[/quote]

Why would paper vs digital make any difference in consistency?[/quote]
The test construction is completely different. With the paper test, each question held the same weight for points. There would be a scoring scale based on the total number correct, but particular questions did not have different weights, so missing an easy one or missing a hard one did not matter. With the digital test, the question difficulty comes into play.

In addition, the digital test is adaptive. If you miss too many on the easy section 1, you are given an easy section 2, and your score is capped somewhere in the high 600s. I am wondering what the heck happened with my kid's test and suspect the low score may have something to do with this aspect of the scoring system.[/quote]

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