Reply to Is it me or are test scores now more important than ever?

Forum Index » College and University Discussion

Reply to "Is it me or are test scores now more important than ever?"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Grade inflation has reached the point where nearly 60% of students at most "competitive" high schools across the country apply in the fall and winter of their senior year with "an A average", which is more than 3x what that %age was 30 years ago when test scores (adjusted for re-centering) were essentially the same. How has classroom performance increased so dramatically without a reasonably corresponding increase in test scores?[/quote]

Whenever I make this point, the TO proponents attack. Apparently, kids that are “poor test takers” only do poorly on the SAT/ACT. They do just fine on all the tests at school to earn the As that get them at 4.5 GPA. It has nothing to do with test re-takes, equitable grading, lack of deadlines for homework, etc. [/quote]

DP: Not a TO proponent/just a realist. For most colleges, TO is here to stay.

Classroom performance hasn't increased dramatically. Grade inflation is real--but what is your point? A few of the elite schools may find the courage to make testing mandatory, but most want to compete with their peers and will be "test aware" or "test preferred" to benefit from the best of both worlds. Yale and Dartmouth AOs publically admitted that a significant number of TO students are not doing well and the data is becoming clear in their 5-year TO experiments. Dartmouth's AO stated that last year had the highest number of kids on academic probation. They need students to submit at the 25th percentile and for under-resourced kids, even lower. A student scoring 1300 on the SAT can graduate from Yale but a 1100 will struggle and risk failing.[/quote]

Interesting. After my son crushed the ACT the  start of junior year, the initial mailings he got the first few months were all from Ivies.  Yale’s letter specifically mentioned his scores as being the reason he was on the mailing list.  Harvard sent that thick catalog.

[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics