
How Asian test-prep companies swiftly exposed the brand-new SAT - phsource
http://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/college-sat-two/
======
wodenokoto
Why don't they try and develop a model that takes into account that students
will study directly against the test?

The current model seems to rely on what could be called "security by
obscurity". Of course students shouldn't be able to spend hours analysing a
single text before the test, but if you publish a corpus of 200 texts, then
anyone who read and analysed them thoroughly before the test aren't really
cheating anymore, they are just educating themselves.

~~~
ikeboy
No multiple choice test can protect against a list of questions and answers.

~~~
ATsch
America uses a multiple choice test for university admission?

~~~
ikeboy
Both the SAT and the ACT are mostly multiple choice, with one essay.

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dietrichepp
> We’re working against cartel-like companies in China and other countries
> that will stop at nothing to enrich themselves,

That's how I felt about College Board.

~~~
jaflo
I still don't understand how then can call themselves a non-profit while
charging ridiculous prizes and monopolizing the standardized test market.

~~~
MereInterest
Given that Ikea is legally run and registered as a non-profit charity, I think
that the term is fairly meaningless at this point. We can only judge them by
their actions, just as we do any other company.

~~~
manyxcxi
Not for profit and non-profit are actually different in different tax and law
scenarios. I'm not going to try and butcher the explanation, but it pretty
much boils down to how employees get paid and expenses get deducted- which, in
my opinion, has made me look at not for profit companies as companies that
want to appear nicer than they really are.

~~~
fulafel
That sounds like a US tax law distinction, but the IKEA structure is non-US
(as are the owners/founders).

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roymurdock
Saw an interesting proposal on HN a few months ago WRT entrance exams:

 _My university just allows anyone into first semester, but then has quite
hard courses and exams there already – by the end of the second semester, 90%
have already failed.

That’s another way to solve the >10x applicants issue._

Seems like a great way to reduce administrative overhead, judge based on
merit, and get students to realistically self-select a college (if you don't,
you waste a semester and the associated costs). Problem is that the exams
select only for people that are good at taking exams - not always the most
interesting/well rounded students.

~~~
jtbigwoo
This doesn't sound like a great idea for the U.S. system. Students would have
to pay tens of thousands of dollars and spend many precious months for an
experience with a 90% failure rate. I have a hard time thinking that anyone
with other options would accept that proposal. On top of that, even if you're
in the select 10%, you're attending classes where almost all the other
students are failing. I can't imagine that class discussions are going to be
helpful for you.

If this school was free or very cheap, maybe it's an option for some, but with
the way things work in the U.S., this seems more like a scam than a college.

~~~
iambateman
I agree. The University of South Carolina (and maybe more) has a nursing
program.

They let you into "lower division" for 2 years before giving you a test to
gain admission to "upper division."

Fail that test and you just wasted 2 years. Worst is that there are limited
spots, so qualified people still get cut.

~~~
tenpies
In many ways this sounds identical to the process of becoming a medical
doctor. Fail (to either perform or get lucky enough to get a slot) at any
stage and you wasted X years + Y amount of money.

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guard-of-terra
As a society we should totally rethink how we handle children.

Employment is as personal and customizable as ever, but we increasingly treat
kinds not even as blue-collar workers but as poultry on industrial farm.

Stick them in cage with artificial light, force feed with unnatural excuse for
knowledge, disregard their personality, rank on how good they pass tests (we
weight poultry at this point)

~~~
atom-morgan
I recently wrote about this [http://atom-morgan.github.io/child-labor-laws-
are-outdated](http://atom-morgan.github.io/child-labor-laws-are-outdated)

I'm fairly young (25) and I agree 100%. I think I was treated like a child for
far too long in an environment that doesn't make any sense. From the age of 5
until I was 22-23 I was sitting in a room studying the same shit over and
over.

~~~
alanwatts
I'm in the same boat. It never hit me until my last couple years at
university. I had professors teaching obsolete material who mandated
attendance to fill out missing words on a PowerPoint that they purposefully
left blank. I realized I was paying large sums of money to have my education
actively inhibited.

>The traditional classroom is an obsolete detention home, a feudal dungeon.

-Marshall McLuhan

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epalmer
It is time we abandon SAT and ACT tests.

~~~
threatofrain
SAT II's are more predictive of college performance on their own than 4 years
of high school grades, but standardized tests like these take a fraction of
the time, as opposed to years of intimate teacher evaluations.

The compromised operational security of these exams don't stop them from being
more predictive than teachers. So if we want to retire these tests, then we
need something better. What we should really be talking about is improving
these tests and beefing up operational security.

~~~
EliRivers
Serious question; on what basis is "how well they will do at college" the
right metric to use for selecting who to accept?

~~~
jerf
Flip it around; how is it good to accept someone to college who does _not_
have a good chance of doing well? How good is it to accept their money,
probably put them in debt (even if not the catastrophic $100,000+ debt, even
$20,000 debt can be quite a lot for a young person, and it's hard to get out
of 4 years without at least that much), and claim very significant portions of
some of the most important years of their life [1] if you already have good
reason to believe they are unlikely to do well? (And remember we're judging
lots of people so statistical bases are all we can use.)

It may not be the only criterion of use, but "do we have good reason to
believe they will succeed in college?" is at the very least a critical bar
that ought to be passed. It's can be the difference between college as the
empowering, education experience it's _supposed_ to be, and college as the
meat-grinder wealth-extraction tool it _can_ be when you feed in students who
shouldn't be there.

[1]: Not necessarily "best", but being "earliest" in a world of compounding
interest makes them quite valuable in their own way.

~~~
jtbigwoo
It's also true that the better less-selective (or non-selective) colleges
provide more help than very selective colleges. I went to community college
for a year and then went to a selective private college. The community college
had far more help sessions, tutors, and study aids available. There was even a
program at the community college that specifically sought out first-generation
students to make sure they were getting extra support.

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thrwy_01
The bottom line... with rampant cheating on standardized tests, fabricated
school records, and massive "assistance" in college applications, it has
become almost impossible to accurately measure the merit of most applicants
from east asia.

First order effects arising from this are not that big a deal, those students
will either wash out in in the university setting, or will end up cheating
their way through school to the degree that they will be useless to many
employers afterwards. The bigger issues is that, whether due to malice or not,
schools have limited enrollment spots and people who try to "play fair" will
be left at a disadvantage. Some might say that this is not all bad; that it
prepares students for the real world. But I would like to think that we want
to protect our culture/society from devolving into the sort of low trust free
for all that exists in some other parts of the world. Anecdotally I've heard
that this shift has already started to permeate our universities, where many
students feel immense pressure to cheat because so many other people are doing
it.

I'd be lying if I said that this didn't have a big effect on the way I view
recent east asian immigrants in the workforce. Let you say I'm xenophobic,
"recent east asian immigrant" would accurately describe many people in my
family and social circles, and if I didn't open my mouth, the average
bystander might assume I would be in that category as well.

The college board and individual colleges are not exactly innocent bystanders
in all of this, and I'm glad I got through the system before these issues
became acute, but I feel really badly for students from anywhere who actually
play by the rules.

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iambateman
If a test is this easy to game, perhaps it's not a very good test.

Does Math and Language really correlate to ability? We know the answer is no.
We sent humans into space, we can do better.

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kenshaw
Has IBM/Google/etc attempted to plug Watson or any of the other advanced
knowledge AIs into the SAT/ACT yet? I would be curious to know if they could
consistently score a "high" score on tests without having previously seen the
material (obviously excluding the essay portion).

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tedchs
Broken link.

