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...tucked into the reams of data the College Board included with the new scores was some wonderful news: I was wrong. In 2003 I spent six months tracking the development of the new SAT. I sat through hours of test-development sessions and even learned how to grade SAT essays. TIME ran my resulting story on its cover that October...
...story did make some predictions that turned out to be right. For instance, the new test favors girls more than the old one did. It is a long-standing tenet of testmaking that girls outperform boys on writing exams. For reasons I am not foolish enough to speculate about in print, girls are better than boys at fixing grammar and constructing essays, so the addition of a third SAT section, on writing, was almost certain to shrink the male-female score gap. It did. Girls trounced boys on the new writing section, 502 to 491. Boys still outscored girls overall...
...story also predicted that the addition of the writing section would damage the SAT's reliability. Reliability is a measure of how similar a test's results are from one sitting to the next. The pre-2005 SAT had a standard error of measurement of about 30 points per section. In other words, if you got a 500 on the math section, your "true" score was anywhere between 470 and 530. But the new writing section, which includes not only a multiple-choice grammar segment but also the subjective essay, has a standard error of measurement of 40 points. That...
Still, there's good news. The central contention of my 2003 story was that the SAT's shift from an abstract-reasoning test to a test of classroom material like Algebra II would hurt kids from failing schools. I was worried that the most vulnerable students would struggle on the new version. Instead, the very poorest children--those from families earning less than $20,000 a year--improved their SAT performance this year. It was a modest improvement (just 3 points) but significant, given the overall slump in scores. And noncitizen residents and refugees saw their scores rise an impressive...
What explains those wonderfully unpredictable findings? The College Board has no firm answers, but its top researcher, Wayne Camara, suggests a (somewhat self-serving) theory: the new SAT is less coachable. When designing the new test, the board banned analogies and "quantitative comparisons" (flummoxing math questions that asked you to compare two complex quantities). "I think those items disadvantaged students who did not have the resources, the motivation, the awareness to figure out how to approach them," says Camara. "By eliminating those, the test becomes much less about strategy." Because it focuses more on what high schools teach and less...