The SAT

[hardblue.livejournal.com]

The College Board recently announced a shift in how the SAT will gauge students’ talent for vocabulary. The days when a commitment to flash cards could get young people a good score are coming to an end in 2015. Starting in 2016, students won’t be asked about obscure, 10-dollar words with fill-in-the-blank questions; they’ll be asked about “high utility” words, much more common terms with multiple meanings that can only be identified by looking at the word’s context.

-- How Would You Do On the New SAT Vocabulary Questions?

Comments

[fizzyland.livejournal.com]

There's the dilemma of the "low paying service-sector jobs" Vs. people who don't want to raise the minimum wage and how exactly does one climb out of that hole?

[hardblue.livejournal.com]

You know, there's a book that gives us the answer,
and it is most fitting for Easter: Pray, my son!

[fizzyland.livejournal.com]

The Book of MC Hammer?

"You've got to pray just to make it today."

[peristaltor.livejournal.com]

In what part of the Communist Manifesto is prayer required?

[hardblue.livejournal.com]

WRONG book!

[telemann.livejournal.com]

A friend posted about a internship for Performance Today at NPR two days ago, at their headquarters in Washington, D.C. They wanted "passionate" candidates to send in resumes, for no pay. Performance today has about 1.2 million listeners and its on over 250 radio stations and so NPR can't afford to pay even minimum wage? I understand it was an internship, but even still.

[fizzyland.livejournal.com]

A restaurant in Vancouver just got eviscerated for posting an ad wanting musicians to play for free. With the hope of someday getting paid. Internships are a similar sucker ploy.

[anfalicious.livejournal.com]

It's common here to have to do "volunteer work" to get teaching jobs. If you have no volunteer work in your resume they question your "community commitment" (i.e. that you're willing to work for free after hours) and will often prioritise interviews to candidates who have volunteered at that particular school. This is a heavily regulated, public sector professional that has absolutely no glamour (like media and journalism). At the very least our union has gained very firm restrictions on doing any work that the school should be paying someone for (i.e. volunteers can't take a class on their own or do a yard duty on their own for example, but they can be the extra adult on camps and excursions) and we have good relations and agreement with the principals union (i.e. the people who manage things on the ground). I expect to be seeing ongoing "internships" and "voluntary" roles in most professions and trades going forward.

I honestly believe there needs to be stronger regulation around this. It's all very well for us to say as individuals we should just refuse to work for free, but if you're looking to find work and have an opportunity to make good with a potential employer then it's mad not to. If you're not getting paid to work then you should either be a) helping a non-profit or b) be there in an observational role only; any "work" you may do independently for "experience" should have to be observed by the person who should have been doing that work (meaning they're not being reassigned to other productive work).

Otherwise think about it, we're working for free, but not even getting food and board. Slave masters of yesteryear would be looking on in awe.

[lafinjack.livejournal.com]

The minimum wage is only for young people (http://www.nbc15.com/news/state/headlines/Walker-speaks-out-against-raising-minimum-wage-241691411.html) therefore the minimum wage should not be raised (http://www.whas11.com/community/blogs/political-blog/McConnell-endorsed-against-raising-minimum-wage-245603921.html).

[fizzyland.livejournal.com]

And then there's Oklahoma's Troll-Governor, who just signed a ban on minimum wage increases, to stop a grass-roots movement to increase the minimum wage in one of the cities.

[anfalicious.livejournal.com]

Then it's easy, just have an "adult" wage and raise that. Of course, that would result in millions of wal-mart and mcdonalds employees losing their jobs to teenagers, and they would then probably set fire to the streets, but that can be a productive move forward for a nation.

[lafinjack.livejournal.com]

Yeah, some states have regulations that let employers pay minors, usually 16 and under, a lower minimum wage. Dunno how that will change with a higher federal minimum wage.

[brother-dour.livejournal.com]

Hey! Those vocabulary questions are the only thing that saved my no-math-comprehending butt!

[hardblue.livejournal.com]

I guess one would have to get some extra tutoring:

[drivebyluna.livejournal.com]

Same with me for the GRE.

[moonshaz.livejournal.com]

Me, too, man!

My math score was actually not quite as abysmal as I expected it to be--but my overall still wouldn't have that great if I hadn't had very high verbal scores to go along with it.

[drivebyluna.livejournal.com]

I actually did average on math when you look at actual points but considering how many STEM majors take the GRE i comparatively didn't do as well. Ultimately it didn't matter because the two schools I wanted, I got in to, and neither required the GRE.

[cinnamontoast.livejournal.com]

Same here. The new context questions are much easier though. Did you try the quiz?

[yes-justice.livejournal.com]

I did. 90% sigh. I "finagle" when I should have "winnow".

[cinnamontoast.livejournal.com]

I missed the same question, I "overhaul".

[peristaltor.livejournal.com]

I mistook a ranconteur for a dilletante.

[moonshaz.livejournal.com]

Dare I admit that I got 100%? *looks around furtively*

In my defense, I DO have a BA in English (as well as an MA in Library/Information Studies), and I've always read voraciously. And I suck at math. (As in, didn't even pass freshman algebra in high school--mind you, there IS an explanation for that, but it's a rather long story). So if I wasn't pretty damned good at verbal stuff, I'd be a pretty pathetic human being! (Or feel like one, anyway.)

[oslo.livejournal.com]

I did too - but I don't know that I would have fresh out of high school. That was a long time ago, now.

[johnny9fingers.livejournal.com]

Almost everyone who was a convert_me member would have gotten 100% on that test.

[anfalicious.livejournal.com]

I definitely wouldn't, but we don't test for things like that in our senior assessments so I wouldn't have bothered learning it, I was doing the things that got the grades here.

[angelcerv25.livejournal.com]

I did too but I just read too damn much...

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

The fact that that's "dare I" is sad.

(He said, as someone who hasn't been in high school for a very long time.)

I *think* I would have aced it then, as now. Because man, those questions were easy. But they were also vocabulary questions, and very simple vocabulary questions, and very simple vocabulary questions GIVEN CONTEXT. And I read, so.

But it's easy to miss "are you as smart as a 5th grader" style questions, because the questions you expect a 13-yo to memorise the answers to are not the questions you expect an adult to answer.

[anfalicious.livejournal.com]

I did too, and have similar quals (BA History and Philosophy, M.Ed), but we should be getting 100% of that :P

[anfalicious.livejournal.com]

Yet the new questions better test thinking skills that are higher up the order of progression. The old requires a crap load of memorising, the new a crap load of reading widely and deeply.

[cinnamontoast.livejournal.com]

Well, I've more or less done both, so I'd probably done fairly well either way.

[anfalicious.livejournal.com]

Yeah, if you can do the higher stuff you can usually do the lower stuff, but there's a significant subset of people who have memory deficiencies and in the lower-only testing they miss out, even though they have more useful/productive/intelligent minds, especially in these days of always being connected to the collected knowledge of humanity. Remembering things is a pre-21st century skill, it's using and creating knowledge that is important now.

[cinnamontoast.livejournal.com]

You're right; memorizing things is an outdated way to learn. It is sort of silly. (Although folks my age tend to whine about the lack of memorizing and whacking asses in schools.)

The exceptions to this are grammar and spelling. I've gone over them a million times and I still can't remember certain rules for grammar. I'm grateful for spell-check. I'm terrible at memorizing things and getting worse as the years go by.

[badlydrawnjeff.livejournal.com]

You and me both.

[anfalicious.livejournal.com]

I got all of the questions right on the test, but I should given my education and occupation.

The old questions all reward lower order thinking (knowledge, a bit of comprehension), whilst the new reward middle order thinking (application and analysis). The new is better than the old, but still isn't great at determining who has the best higher order thinking skills (an essay would probably be necessary to do that in a linguistic test). I guess it all depends on what you're testing for. Things like the SAT have a primary testing purpose of ranking students. They tend to fail at testing "as" or "for" learning, and do poorly at the third point of assessment "of" learning, as they're context specific, so they test how well you learnt the things that will be on the SATs.

The big problem with a ranking test is that it tends to distort the whole curriculum towards getting good results on the test, rather than teaching people to be independent, creative and active learners. "Knowing that" is going to be useless in a 21st century knowledge economy, where "Knowing how", primarily knowing how to find out new "thats", is going to be the most important skill. In this regard, the new test is significantly better than the old test, even if it is not perfect.

Unfortunately, the alternatives to ranking testing are problematic in themselves, as they tend to require on peoples' subjective evaluation of the student's skills. If this is done at a tertiary (university) level, then you run the risk of the process being corrupted by nepotism (which is common amongst elite universities in the US). If it is done at a secondary level then a student who has brilliant skills, but poor relationships with their school, will miss out.

For me, the best solution so far is to restrict standardised ranking tests to the final year of high school only and to leave assessment for the ongoing learning of primary and high school students to teachers. Of course, this requires teachers to have high professional standards and ongoing professional development to keep pace with what is a rapidly evolving field, which of course requires paying professional wages.

[hardblue.livejournal.com]

I think part of our problem in the States is that we have so little faith at this point in our educational system that there is not a lot of trust in teachers and subjective evaluation, especially when we want to compare students from across the vast nation. So, I think we favor something that is relatively objective and straight-forward. It generates easy, reliable numbers, and it at least works to keep the schools somewhat honest in putting out a minimally acceptable performance and output.