Debbie at Ed Week!

I edited! (So I'm bemoaning a couple of too-long-for-onscreen-reading sentences...

Seeking the Top Score (Part I)
By Helen Yoshida on March 25, 2014 5:34 PM

Home stretch! back soon--

Down to the last 100 pages of Debbie's book, which is fantastic.

So still no blogging, but ----- I have bullet points!

• The tuna cure: Surfer and Abby now eat tuna, lentils, and olive oil (plus, starting in the past week, a few carrots). Basically: a low-rent version of palisadesk's high-protein diet for mast cell cancer in dogs. Surfer--who, it turns out, can't tolerate chemo--appears to be fine. (But we'll see.) The younger vet told me mast cell cancer is the dog equivalent of pancreatic cancer: Surfer, with a Stage 3 diagnosis, was a goner unless the Kinavet worked. Older vet, back now from his own brush with death, says: "It's not a death sentence." (Ed says: Can we always see the older vet?) Funnily enough, we encountered the same division of labor during the two years my mother was sick. The younger doctors would waylay my siblings and me for The Talk (Your mother is dying. Let her die with dignity. If she doesn't want to die with dignity, persuade her.) Then the older docs would say things like "In intensive care we support your mother's organs until her body is strong enough to handle those functions again." The older docs were always right. And they never mentioned death with dignity, which was wise because my mother didn't give two figs for dignity.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
• Common Core illustrative texts v. what 7th graders read in my districtxxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
• 4.6% tax increase proposed (I'm voting no, thank you for asking)xxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
• Borrowing to pay teachers: the tax-cert loopholexxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
• SAT score decline (also in bullets)xxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
• Erica Meltzer's book is out!!!xxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
• New high school principal for Irvington who worked for TFA

One board member told me that when the board met the new principal he must have used the word accountability in every other sentence.

Are we the first affluent district ever to hire a TFA person?

We may be. A TFA alum certainly seems out of place here in Westchester, where affluent districts are snapping up superintendents fleeing New Jersey's salary cap.

Our new super replaces the superintendent against whom a number of us waged a running battle for 5 long years (or was it 6?). He is a man in his late 30s or early 40s, trained in elementary education, whose only previous experience--in New Jersey, where his wife and son continue to live--was heading a tiny K-5 district.

We are paying him $250K per year on a 5-year contract. During a minor depression.^* (Did I mention I'm voting no on the budget?)

I think it's possible, perhaps likely, the TFA hire would not have happened without 6 years of citizens' op eds on the Irvington Parents Forum.

Ed told me, when I started the Forum, that revolutions always have writers.

I believe him, and All revolutions have writers has been my essential reason for carrying on. Well, one of the essential reasons, the other essential reason being that both sides of my family came from Ulster.

That said, I don't expect a revolution. The new superintendent has thus far been more of the same, and he was supposed to be The One; all 5 board members said so. The new principal will come into a gatekeeping culture that has been in place for many, many years.

The single best observation anyone ever made to me concerning my district's unshakeable self-regard:

...[W]e're great because 10 kids do spectacular things by senior year. The other 150 will get by and there are no glaring inadequacies.

That's not going to be easy to change.

^* Depression at historinhas

bubble this, part 2

wow

I just checked my October SAT scores and discovered that, as Debbie predicted, I apparently failed to answer an entire chunk of questions without knowing it:

Moreover, as Debbie also predicted, the questions I didn't answer were (C. says) on the 2nd Writing Section, which is the last section of the entire 11-Section test.^*

Debbie really has become the expert on the actual, real-world SAT: what it's like to study for it, what it's like to take it, and even what your score means before the College Board tells you what your score means. (I didn't believe her! Every time the subject of my Writing score came up, Debbie would say: "Section 10. You didn't answer all the questions." I thought that was nuts! Of course I answered all the questions! I obsessively checked and double-checked to make sure I answered all the questions! Wrong.)

For the record: omitting four questions while checking and double-checking to make sure you haven't omitted any questions is not a "careless" error.

Omitting four questions while checking and double-checking to make sure you haven't omitted any questions is a maxed-out biology error. Omitting 4 questions in the final section of the test is the same phenomenon as a runner losing her stride at the end of a real marathon going out way too fast from the gate and falling apart at the end of a real marathon, which Ed says happened to the front-runner in the women's field this year.

By the way, in the run-up to the test, it occurred to me that I needed to start running again. I'm thinking aerobic conditioning would have to help. But I didn't do it.

For parents whose kids will be taking the SAT soon, the bubbling issue is major: it's the reason kids need effective test prep. The SAT is too long and has too many problems jammed into too little time and space^** to be considered a test of content knowledge. The SAT tests test prep as well as content knowledge.

High school students need effective test prep for the same reason runners need effective coaching: they need to learn strategy and pacing, especially on the math sections.

I'm a 10
May 4, 2010: mandatory bubbling session
March 8, 2011: bubble this
April 13, 2011: progress report, part 2
May 7, 2011: the return of bubbling errors

^* 10 sections that count towards your score plus 1 experimental section that does not count

^** Too little space: test font size is too small, white space is too small, desktops in testing centers are too small... I may have left something out.

perfect score

at Princeton, parked on campus

I'm a 10

I probably used too many semicolons.

update: I left out the last 4 grammar questions. Probably failed to transfer my answers from the test booklet to the bubble sheet.

I'm a 10
rat psych: what to do about SAT math (part 1)
rat psych: what to do about SAT math (part 2)
rat psych: what to do about SAT math (part 3)
rat psych: careless reading errors on the SAT

looks like University of Illinois!

Well, Joel. Your stats are very respectable. You've done some solid work, here. But it's not quite Ivy League, now, is it?

liveblogging Risky Business, part 2

Every parent should watch Risky Business on the eve of college apps. Especially if you saw it when it came out.

I have spent the last four years of my life busting my butt in this s***hole! I'm sorry. I don't think I can leave until I get just a little compassion from you.
Joel to the school nurse 

liveblogging Risky Business

omg

We're forcing C. to watch Risky Business with us tonight, and the movie opens with a dream about the SAT!

I had completely forgotten that.

Two scenes later, his mom asks him if he's gotten his SAT scores yet.

He has.

570 math, 560 verbal.

In the car on the way to the airport, his dad tells him he's set him up with an interview for Princeton.

no change in ACT math scores

speaking of rigged...

change in SAT math scores:

Between 1996 and 2005, the average [SAT] mathematics score increased for all racial/ethnic groups. During this time, the score for Asian/Pacific Islander students increased by 22 points, from 558 to 580. Mathematics scores for White, Puerto Rican, and American Indian/Alaska Native students increased between 12 and 16 points, while Black, Mexican American, and Other Hispanic/Latino students experienced smaller increases, between 3 and 9 points. (p. 77)

no change in ACT math scores:

Unlike SAT mathematics scores, ACT mathematics scores have not increased over time. (p. 81)

geography

The majority of students who take the ACT live in the Midwest, Rocky Mountains, Plains, and southern regions of the country (ACT 2005a). The SAT is more prevalent on the east and west coasts and in the Northeast (SAT 2005a).
p. 76
Status and Trends in the Education of Racial and Ethnic Minorities
National Center for Education Statistics
September 2007

Should American parents have their kids take the ACT?

SAT equivalent scores

Convert individual and mean scores from the original scale to the recentered scale

In April 1995, the College Board recentered the score scales for all tests in the SAT Program to reflect the contemporary test-taking population. Recentering reestablished the average score for a study group of 1990 seniors at about 500—the midpoint of the 200-to-800 scale—allowing students, schools, and colleges to more easily interpret their scores in relation to those of a similar group of college-bound seniors.

A 700 on critical reading today was a 640 prior to 1995.

A 700 on math today was a 710 prior to 1995, and the math test today covers more material.

Are Schools Preparing Students Well for the SAT?

The College Board's website says in many different places that the best way to prepare for the test is to do well in school:

Keep in mind that the foundation of a student's SAT and college preparation is a rigorous curriculum of English, mathematics, science, history, and other academic subjects. Students should read extensively and develop good writing skills.

I want that for my children.

My question is, are schools really teaching this rigorous academic curriculum that the college board says is the best prep for the test ?

I took my son's 10th grade PSAT the other day, and found myself aghast (again) at how darn hard this test is. I'm not opposed to rigor, by the way; just wondering if our schools are on the same page.

There were passages dealing with Descartes, dualism, genomes, and neuroscience. Students had to compare two passages that were extremely sophisticated, with both authors agreeing on the main point, but from different perspectives, and their distinctions were subtle.

Not easy......

Cross posted on Perfect Score Project

gaps

From the reading and math, math and reading comments thread:

Erica writes:

You can tell C. that I beat him: 220 point gap between CR and math (800/580), and I actually knew a couple of people with even larger gaps (800/560, 800/490!).

Independent George wrote:

I scored a 420 on my Writing achievement test (waaaay back in 1994). I had a 720 on the SAT-Verbal, and a 5 on the AP English test, but I scored 420 on the writing test.

C. has a friend who got an 800 on reading and a 550 on math.

He's still only at 670 on writing, which is equally ridiculous! (Ridiculous because he's losing his points on the grammar section.) Erica's going to shape him up.

reading and math, math and reading

via Marginal Revolution:

To an economist, the most important fact to know about mental abilities is that across large populations, different mental abilities are positively correlated.1 In other words, people who are above average in arithmetic tend to perform above average in vocabulary tests, block puzzles, as well as in memorizing lists of numbers and then repeating them in reverse order. This positive correlation conflicts with the commonsense view that abilities are negatively correlated, that for instance while some people are good in math, others are good in verbal tasks.

This positive correlation is at the heart of the psychological concept of intelligence. Quantitatively, it is at the heart of psychometric methods that extract a principal component from a broad variety of mental ability subtests. This principal component is formally called g, or the g factor. Lay persons, and most routine psychological research, refer to IQ instead of g, but it is worth keeping the concept of g in mind. Across thousands of studies on the correlation across mental abilities across populations, no one has yet found a reliable negative correlation.

This fact should strengthen our priors when we come across new mental tasks and we ask ourselves, “Will high IQ groups be better than average at this new mental task?” For every mental task so far that involves any level of sophistication, the answer has been yes.
National IQ and National Productivity: The Hive Mind Across Asia
Garett Jones
January 2011
[Published in Asian Development Review, June 2011]

Serendipity!

Since last Thursday, I've been trying to explain to C. that a 190-point gap between your reading score & your math score is ridiculous. Ridiculous because a 190-point gap between a reading score & a math score is not consistent with the way a person's brain is built. On IQ tests, everything goes with everything; if you're good on one task, you're good on another.

C's math scores, I keep telling him, like my math scores when I was his age, are a measure of the math teaching and math curriculum he's had, not of his innate ability to do math. His math tutor told him the same thing this morning, but C. claimed later not to have heard. So I was in need of fresh ammunition, and now here it is.

I love the internet.

400 point gain on SATs

Ms. Xu, who was born and raised in China before emigrating to suburban California at age 9, had high hopes that she would be the first in her family to go to college. But poor results on a practice SAT and a dearth of extracurricular activities convinced Ms. Xu, 17, that she needed a scholastic makeover if she were to make it into a school her parents could brag about to relatives.

ThinkTank sent her to a public speaking camp, helped her improve her college essay and gave her the e-mail addresses of all the members of the Stanford University history department. At the company’s prompting, she found two internships with department professors. She also enrolled in ThinkTank’s college prep courses, which helped improve her SAT score 410 points to 2160 out of 2400. Next autumn, she will start at Harvard University.

Coaching and Much More for Chinese Students Looking to U.S.

By DAN LEVIN
Published: May 29, 2011
NY Times

Bostonian on college readiness & state tests

"College readiness" is not a binary but a continuous measure, as Pondiscio says. Why doesn't New York state have all high school students take the SAT I (reasoning) and three SAT II (subject) tests, report the results on transcripts (including percentile equivalents), and let students, parents, employers, and colleges use the results as they see fit?

State universities should create online calculators predicting a student's chance of graduating based on his SAT scores and high school grades, based on their experience with past students, so that potential students can make informed decisions before enrolling in college.

fyi

SAT percentiles

Does the quality of a student’s handwriting affect SAT essay grading?

After reading chemprof on handwriting, I caught a thread on collegeconfidential that asked, How much does handwriting affect SAT essay grade?

I would say probably yes, because I agree with this comment:

Officially, it's like jgraider says. They're professional graders, handwriting quality is not one of the things being judged, so it has no effect.

Unofficially, essay grading is by its nature subjective. An essay where all the letters are beautiful and flowing will look better than an essay of chicken scratching, whether or not it's officially used as a criterion.

SAT scores predict grades in individual courses

contra FairTest....

Individual Differences in Course Choice Result in Underestimation of the Validity of College Admissions Systems
by Christopher M. Berry1 and Paul R. Sackett2

ABSTRACT—We demonstrate that the validity of SAT scores and high school grade point averages (GPAs) as predictors of academic performance has been underestimated because of previous studies’ reliance on flawed performance indicators (i.e., college GPA) that are contaminated by the effects of individual differences in course choice. We controlled for this contamination by predicting individual course grades, instead of GPAs, in a data set containing more than 5 million college grades for 167,816 students. Percentage of variance accounted for by SAT scores and high school GPAs was 30 to 40% lower when the criteria were freshman and cumulative GPAs than when the criteria were individual course grades. SAT scores and high school GPAs together accounted for between 44 and 62% of the variance in college grades. This study provides new estimates of the criterion-related validity of SAT scores and high school GPAs, and highlights the care that must be taken in choosing appropriate criteria in validity studies.
Psychological Science
Volume 20—Number 7

pull:
Thus, to the degree that prediction of grades is a goal of college admissions systems, SAT scores and high school GPA are clearly useful tools for deciding which college applicants will achieve the greatest levels of academic performance.

Inside the same class, the student with higher SAT scores/h.s. grades does better than the student with lower SAT scores/h.s. grades. High school grades were a slightly stronger predictor than SATs.

speaking of SAT scores...

Colleges Acknowledge SAT and ACT Score Cut-Offs in Admissions

This is news only because journalists continually write articles quoting college admissions officers saying SAT scores don't matter, or are going out of style, or are used holistically, or are "optional," or god-knows-what.

Trust nothing a college admissions officer tells a newspaper.

Some of the comments are great.

I was “waitlisted” at two of my top schools and when I called to follow-up, I was told point blank it was for my SAT scores. Sorry, but I have a hard time buying the holistic bit. Particularly given the number of applications some of these schools receive. They need to have an initial filter; test scores give it to them.

On a related note, I was also shown a list of applicants, while applying to grad school, and they were sorted by GRE score. Again, the person who showed me the list said, point blank, we sort first by scores.

— erin


When my first child and oldest daughter was readying to choose a college, I asked the admissions department of my alma mater whether she should apply. I was told, first, before any other topic was raised or question was asked, that the college board cutoff was such and such–about fifty points higher than my daughter’s score.

She had gone to a pricey progressive private high school, where her grades were not bad, though not straight As. She did well in English, but also in biology and math–her only really weak course was chemistry.

Her guidance counselor, a Harvard graduate, was unable to interest the admissions departments of any major ivy league school in considering my daughter.

I asked the college admission department if a legacy mattered at all. “Somewhat,” I was told. Eventually, my third child was admitted, but he made the board score cut.

This practice has at least one side effect that has not been well understood. It is actually part of the decline of the humanities in American colleges and Universities, because the boards emphasize quantifiable ability–obviously so in mathematical skills, but still true in the “verbal” part of the exam: what else could such an exam do but quantify? Even the writing exam is graded, not on quality of the writing, but on quatifiable features, e.g. whether it has topic sentences at the beginnings of paragraphs (a custom universal in America but nowhere else, and only due to college entrance exams, including AP English), whether it has a standard three-paragraph form, whether it has an intro and a conclusion, and so on. THe content can be invented; can be virtually nonsense, but the template of the essay form to which all high school English writing is now taught can be measured, counted, and scored. Likewise the multiple choice questions which test for information processing ability only. There is no way to build a standardized test for humanitas.

— droll


Our child is a high school senior. He scored very well on his ACT but his cumulative GPA at the time of applications was just below 2.5. He was, nonetheless, offered scholarships and entrance into honors programs at different schools. You don’t need to convince me that these test scores are really where it’s at.

— jay


Having retired from the college counseling field, I recall when it became non-PC to use a single test score as a cutoff for admissions. There was some discussion of this being racist and not being the purpose for which tests were standardized (and thus leaving schools open to lawsuits). So colleges were coached to say they viewed test scores as “only one factor in a holistic assessment.” It my observation that some college admission teams actually employ holistic assessment and some only pretend to do so. Some admissions staffers value test scores because they value tests but don’t know an instrument’s limitations; others are racists. It’s hard to discern who is who isn’t it?

— George


The holistic approach apparently does not apply to the NJ state schools. My sister’s twin daughters did not do well on the SATs, but they each have excellent gradepoints, extra-curriculars, outside jobs, sports, and stellar course grades for the college courses they have taken in their junior and senior years of high school. They and my sister were each told flat out that it was meet the cut-off score or we don’t look any further. Luckily, the non-state schools that they each applied to accepted them(2 acceptances each). I wonder if this policy is linked in any way to the budgetary issues in NJ government?

— Jim McNerney


I have had years of experience at graduate school admissions for my department. First, the TOEFL had an institution-imposed minimum for admission, and experience told us that it was too low. Also, there is doubt about testing conditions in some countries.

Second, we came to understand that there are only three scores on the General portion of the GRE: high, middle, and low. Enough students take the GRE more than once, so we were able to see the variances in scores not attributable to additional education.

Third, subject-area GRE scores are useful. Since we did not require them (but were encouraged), when good scores showed up we regarded applicants as confident in their disciplinary knowledge.

Fourth, general and major GPAs are unreliable because they depend on the standards in place where they were earned. From less-highly-regarded institutions, applicants may have perfect GPAs, stellar letters of recommendation, and miserable GRE scores. When admitted, their failure rates were high, unless they dug in and made up for what they had not learned. OK GPAs from top institutions, or from students who had lots of jobs to get through college, were treated as just fine, and that’s mostly how they turned out.

— Leading Edge Boomer

preparation for College Admission Exams

SAT scores & retention: UC Irvine

Second-Year Freshman Retention Rates by Mean SAT Composite Score (pdf file)

Have just begun looking into this.