The minute you standardize something, you make it meaningless.
Sometimes tests show you how naturally bright students are (I didn't prepare for the SATs and got a 2190, including one "perfect" score category). More often they indicate who spent the most time preparing - learning how to "cheat" the system, in other words. Some students take years of SAT prep, and that completely ruins the idea of it being an aptitude test.
The minute you standardize something, you make it meaningless.
Indeed. Expressing units of measurement in terms of feet or meters? Standardization makes them meaningless. Instead, I'll just wave my hands in the air and say "roughly this long." And (X)HTML standards? Don't get me started. Lets all just throw angled brackets to the browser, that's far more meaningful.
Incidentally, your actual complaint seems to be that some existing standardized tests are poorly designed. This is a problem of test design, not standardization.
That's not a bad thing for a sufficiently well designed test. Here are examples of decent tests which I taught to. "Teaching to the test" and "teaching calculus" were basically identical.
"Teaching to the test" and "teaching calculus" were basically identical.
I'd argue that if that's how math is being taught, there's a problem. "Teaching to the test" taught me to hate math in high school. In middle school, we were given a brilliant teacher who was allowed to teach however he wanted, and we left 8th grade understanding trigonometry better than most of the high schoolers we were with.
Have you read Paul Lockhart's "A Mathematician's Lament"? That highlights the problems fundamental with the current math curriculum. From the tests that you linked me to, with all due respect, it doesn't look like you're doing anything different: you're spitting out formulas to be memorized. That's not math: that's mechanics. I hate that students are taught like that.
The mechanics are important, and calc 1 is the course in which they are taught. If the mechanics of algebra and calculus are not second nature to you, everything that follows will be almost impossible. Similarly, when learning programming, you need to learn to write syntactically correct code, and when learning a foreign language you need to memorize vocabulary. It isn't fun, but it is necessary.
Later courses are more focused on mathematical reasoning, and tests reflect this as well. For example:
These exams are also pretty tough to game (even though they are standardized); the easiest way to teach to the qual is to teach how to reason about real/complex analysis and algebra.
You don't seem to agree with the curriculum. Lockhart's article claims that courses like Calc are not well suited for elementary school math (and I agree). That's an orthogonal issue.
The calc tests do a decent job of measuring what they are trying to measure: how well students understand the mechanics and concepts of differentiation and integration.
The minute you standardize something and use it as a method of competition - be it GPA or SAT score or pretty much anything else where you accept people into something based on a number - you make that number meaningless. The presence of numbers means that people are suddenly able to hack the system, and that means that the numbers don't mean a thing at all. They are no longer indicative of good performance.
I would be willing to bet that there is some correlation between a student's performance on the SAT and their ability to complete college-level coursework. After all, it is not mandatory that colleges accept it, and most seem to think it is worth their while.
Do you think the difference between an 800 and a 1400 student is "meaningless"?
It depends entirely on what kind of person that 1400 student is.
Maybe I have a 1400 without studying. Or maybe I spent an hour a day every day for three years so that I could get that 1400. I have a friend who got a 2390 on the SATs, 800s in something like 6 SAT2s, all because she studied for them nonstop. If she hadn't studied, she wouldn't have that same score.
The insidious part is that we're taught that the difference between a 2390 and a 2400 is more than the difference between a 2380 and a 2390. Either you're "perfect", or you're not. That doesn't mean perfect people rise to the top. It means that "perfect" students are the ones who waste their lives studying to look better on paper, when in reality they're just wasting their time on something meaningless.
I would be willing to bet that the student with the self-discipline necessary to study until he raises his grade by 600 points (a near impossibility) and the student who is bright enough to score a 1400 without studying are both better college prospects than the student that scored an 800, on average.
I agree that too much can be read into tests, but to say they are meaningless is to overstate the case.
I have an undying dislike for standardization, because it's what influenced my application decisions and I'm not very happy where I am. So there's definitely some bias.
That said, I (and a few students in my college who were in the same situation as me) had a very, very low grade point average considering I wanted to apply to snooty upper class schools. (A 3.1 unweighted means you have a hard-as-hell time getting into any of the really elite places.) Beyond that, many colleges wanted SAT 2s, and I bluntly refused to take any more standardized tests senior year. I was sick and fed up with taking tests just to place into schools. I still think it's a terrible system that wastes students' time for the sake of assigning a number. And so I, and many other extremely bright and talented kids, ended up merely going to a good public school, hoping that it would be what we wanted out of college. As it turns out, a lot of us are dissatisfied. And it annoys me that a lot of kids that aren't as comparatively bright as that tiny group got into much more prestigious schools, because while we were doing our own things (one kid went to Colombia senior year to do work with their science labs, another was a multiintrumentalist in a variety of different-genre bands, so on and so forth), other kids were spending every minute of the day studying and looking for ways to peak out their GPA. The kids who were cramped and rebellious and spent their time going their own way as decisively as possible almost all wound up at public schools (the musician went to Rutgers, the scientist went to Penn State, I and a few artist/musicians went to TCNJ), and while the schools we're at aren't bad, they're certainly mediocre compared to what the best schools have to offer. We wound up there because we hated the useless, monotonous system and so our scores were lower and while I think if I could do it again, I'd make sure to do better in school - it would have been worth the tedium - I hate that that's the choice, either play to a really shitty system or get subpar results. So in my mind I imagine a system that focuses exclusively on finding those exceptions to the rules.
I understand your distaste for standardized tests. But I also sympathize with the impossible job of admissions officers sifting through thousands of applications to find the best students for their school. At the end of the day, an extra data point helps, especially if they find that data point is correlated to graduation rates or other student performance metrics in college.
You might be more awesome than your grades indicate, but it's hard for them to know that. I agree that what you do outside of class should count, and count alot! But as far as I know, they already do take that into consideration. Admissions folks are just trying to do the best they can.
Sure, the system sucks, but it is set up to solve a fundamentally hard problem for which there exists no good solution. But I don't think the grass is that much greener on the other side. The public schools you mentioned are very good, and it won't hurt you to go there unless you are trying to become President of the United States. I think you'll turn out okay regardless. It sounds like you and your friends are very bright and capable (It scares me slightly how smart the younger folk are on Hacker News. I blame the internet) . I don't think a top 10 college makes that much of a difference versus a top 20 college for a bright and capable person.
Bucking the system doesn't really help. Nobody in a position of authority knows that you are doing it, and if they did they wouldn't care. It only hurts you. Also, the irrationality of the systems you are involved in will only get worse after school, so you might want to start practicing your patience for stupid systems with power over you. You oughta see the application I had to fill out to get my passport (I think I got randomly flagged by the DHS. I had to provide a photo-copy of my high-school yearbook! And I'm 25! How the hell am I supposed to find a copy of my high school yearbook?!!?! As it turns out: not easily).
You might be more awesome than your grades indicate, but it's hard for them to know that. I agree that what you do outside of class should count, and count alot! But as far as I know, they already do take that into consideration. Admissions folks are just trying to do the best they can.
That's exactly the problem! The system should be designed specifically for those exceptions - they're the people with the most to offer society.
The public schools you mentioned are very good, and it won't hurt you to go there unless you are trying to become President of the United States.
They aren't necessarily bad. They're just unpleasant. Public schools attract a sort of apathetic student that private schools don't, and despite the constantly-made comparisons, the lack of funding shows. I'm about 30 minutes away from Princeton, and every time I visit is a slap in the face.
I don't like standardized rankings for anything. I dislike the SAT as much as I dislike the GPA. As it happens, the SAT doesn't matter much at all for college applications as far as I'm aware. Other factors play a much more important part.
The year I took the SATs (1600 scale back then) someone on the Educational Testing Service board threw in a knuckle-ball with an analogy question in the Verbal section that used the term winnowing. I wish I could remember the question..
Post-test, there were quite a few complaints from the super students (some of them confident in scoring in the 1450-1500 range), as it was a curve ball because as suburban-bred kids how could we be expected to know what winnowing meant and more importantly, the correct multiple-choice answer.
Winnowing is not a terribly esoteric word. This whole comment thread is a discussion on winnowing. It's often used in literature, and I believe it is used in certain translations of the Bible.
Post-test, there were quite a few complaints from the super students (some of them confident in scoring in the 1450-1500 range), as it was a curve ball because as suburban-bred kids how could we be expected to know what winnowing meant and more importantly, the correct multiple-choice answer.
That's what I hate: this idea of a "perfect" test, or a test that has an "acceptable" range.
Perhaps I'm drawn to the things I am - art, entrepreneurship - because they're harder to measure and can't as easily set standards. Or perhaps I'm drawn to those things because they're more meaningful than things that you can judge by assigning a number or plotting a chart of scores. In either case, it annoys me when people take numbers too seriously in that regard. The only numbers that really ought to matter are personal numbers: not your numbers compared to somebody else's.
Sometimes tests show you how naturally bright students are (I didn't prepare for the SATs and got a 2190, including one "perfect" score category). More often they indicate who spent the most time preparing - learning how to "cheat" the system, in other words. Some students take years of SAT prep, and that completely ruins the idea of it being an aptitude test.