Word: testing
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...less than the value of a single question, which is about 10 points. Also, the SAT was radically changed last year. The College Board made it longer and added Algebra II, more grammar and an essay. Fewer kids wanted to take the new 3-hr. 45-min. test more than once, so fewer had an opportunity to improve their performance. Scores were bound to slide...
...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 long debates - sometimes fiery, sometimes soul-crushingly boring - over new questions. I 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 right. For instance, the new test favors girls more than the old test 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, thanks largely...
...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. Theoretically, if a test had a standard error of measurement of 0 points, you would score exactly the same each time you took it. But no test is that good. The pre-2005 SAT had a standard error of measurement of about 30 points for each section. In other words, if you got a 500 on the math section, your ?true? score was anywhere between...
...right, I'm willing to concede this point: Summertime, when the dear ones are out of school, is not the best time to test the limits of our parental guidance skills. We just want to file and forget them for a couple of hours in a place where they're safe from all offense except a plethora of bathroom jokes. But this year even the comedies scored low on the raunchometer. I yield to no one in my admiration for Talladega Nights (how many movies about NASCAR doofuses contain an Albert Camus joke?), but face it, folks...