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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Honestly, the more I think about it, the more it seems to me that the supposed adaptive aspect of the test introduces an element of unfairness and calls into question the quality of standardization.[/quote]

I took the digital GMAT during the first year it was released and there was a lot more official paper and digital study material available for that test.

I feel the College Board is being deliberately opaque.

I distrust the mechanisms for passing to the harder questions.  That seems like a real opportunity for screwing up your score.[/quote]

I agree, given that this is for college admissions I don't really much benefit of steering the kids who struggle with the harder questions to the easier/capped lower score modules.  The SAT hardly seems the place for participation trophies and theoretically nerves could cause poorer performance on the first module, but that student doesn't have the chance to recover because they have already been shunted off to the easier module. [/quote]

It's not about participation trophies.  This is how they are differentiating relatively small differences in students' capabilities *with a shorter test.*.  The old test was a good deal longer and had more easy questions and more hard questions.  The many easy questions didn't do anything to differentiate a 700 from an 800 because both 700 and 800 scoring kids got them 100% correct.  Same for low scoring kids-- they got 75% of the hard questions incorrect (since they got 25% of their guesses correct).

By having the two paths, they can give the 450-550 kids more easy questions to differentiate the 450 from the 480 from the 520 from the 550.  And can give the higher scoring kids more hard questions to differentiate the 700 from 730 from 760 from 800.[/quote]

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