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

[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