Reply to University Of California Reaches Final Decision: No More Standardized Admission Testing

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]You can prep the heck out of these test and score well.  Any parent with multiple kids knows which ones are academically inclined and which are more challenged.   Yet my own were all able to score well on these standardized tests.  One without much prep at all and others after prep and multiple tries.

On paper from the scores...they look identical but I know quite well that they are not.  This test can be gamed so what good is it?[/quote]

Why not ask MIT?  You can't really game your way into a truly superior SAT score.  [/quote]

"Another popular misconception is that one can “buy” a better SAT score through costly test prep. Yet research has consistently demonstrated that it is remarkably difficult to increase an individual’s SAT score, and the commercial test prep industry capitalizes on, at best, modest changes [13,17]. Short of outright cheating on the test, an expensive and complex undertaking that may carry unpleasant legal consequences, high SAT scores are generally difficult to acquire by any means other than high ability."

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6963451/[/quote]

Whatever this study concluded, and to add to what other parents have already mentioned on this thread about their kids increasing their scores, my DC raised their ACT score NINE points after expensive tutoring in math.  DC scored very high on the other sections on the first try, but bombed the math. DC always hated math and had a lot of math anxiety.  We hired an ACT tutor focusing only on math for the  test and it worked.  DC also attended a private school that did not have standardized testing at all and the ACT was one of the first multiple choice tests DC  had ever taken!  So DC had to get used to that type of test, which the tutoring helped a lot with as well. [/quote]

Because “tutoring doesn’t help” is stated as “fact” all the time, and yet it is contrary to your experience, as well as mine, and many others, I decided to look at the study cited by pp.  The “study” linked to merely cites two other studies for the premise that testing doesn’t help.  The first one cited doesn’t seem to really address that issue as a primary issue, but the second one does. It’s too much to go into here, but suffice it to say that the study goes to great lengths to manipulate the data to “levelize” for other factors (race, socioeconomic status, etc) and does not account for the type of “prep” provided in the final results (tutors vs. self-directed, etc). In other words, by manipulating the data to discount the effect of extensive tutoring for kids who are most likely to get that tutoring (rich Asian/white kids), they “prove” that tutoring doesn’t work as well as advertised.  The premise seems to be that these kids have other advantages and would have done well anyway, so that doesn’t count. At one point, they pick out 10 specific examples of kids that mostly weren’t helped by tutoring, but then go on to admit that the ten examples weren’t statistically representative of their data set. It very much looks like these people went in with a predetermined conclusion, and manipulated the data until it fit.

Are there kids who aren’t particularly helped by tutoring? Sure. Will tutoring take a 20 ACT to a 36? Nope. However, take two equally bright kids with a 28-30 ACT and give one ten (or even better, 20) sessions with a good tutor, there’s an excellent chance that the tutored kid will absolutely score much higher the second time around. Getting into the 34-36 range is key for acceptance to elite colleges, and there are a lot of kids that wouldn’t be there without tutoring. [/quote]

+1 Thank you!  I didn't have the patience to explain the issues with the study. I tell my students all the time to read and evaluate the cited literature before drawing any conclusions about the validity of a study.[/quote]

and I teach people to look for motivated reasoning and bad logic 
. you can pick apart any study if you try hard enough. even if tutoring provides some large benefit to a few that doesn’t disprove the tests’ correlation to intelligence. After all MIT still thinks SAT is important. you simply can’t prep your way to the scores needed for MIT. [/quote]

Nice straw man. No one is arguing that the tests are not correlated to intelligence at all. The point is that they are not a very accurate tool, and the results can be skewed by tutoring, or a lack thereof. As stated above, tutoring is unlikely to take a very low scoring student to a very high score. It can, and does, quite frequently, take a medium high scoring student to a very high score. My DC did it with about ten hours of tutoring. It wasn’t cheap, but had a very high ROI, considering the difference that the new score made on his admission prospects at elite schools.

The “motivated reasoning and bad logic” is in that study. The original premise of the SAT/ACT was that it measured intelligence, not knowledge. Even if that premise was questionable, it has evolved to be more of a test of knowledge, and the authors of the study looked at the data in response to the criticism that the “new” test was even more “preppable.” Of course it is. There is no “logic” to the premise that the SAT/ACT are the only human endeavors for which it is impossible to improve performance through practice. The “perfect” IQ test has never been invented, and the current standardized tests are further away from that ideal, not closer. [/quote]

Agree with a lot here. I was an aspiring first gen college student, parents had no idea about the significance of tests, and eked out average to slightly above average test scores. For grad school, I took a prep class to bolster my weak math skills and improve my English/logic skills. Got the math score up to an acceptable score for a non-math grad program and crushed the other two sections. Could've probably done the same if I had had the same opportunities for undergrad. Hope that going test optional ends up working for schools and students.[/quote]

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