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"The view from the trenches on David Coleman's plan to revamp the SAT"

9 Comments -

1 – 9 of 9
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Of course, the best way to learn vocabulary is by doing a lot of reading. Students who read for pleasure are likely to do well on this aspect of the test, and they'll probably do well in college. I had no trouble with the vocabulary on the SAT or GRE, and I barely prepped for that at all - I've just read a lot of books and picked up those words along the way.

10/31/13, 12:26 AM

Anonymous Education Realist said...

Those comments are dead on, except I believe the essay is a third, not a quarter, of the writing score. It was originally going to be half, if I remember my Kaplan training, but they killed that after the field test.

There's actually one SAT prep place that gives, for $800, a list of 200 words that are "guaranteed" to be on the SAT. They claim they do it by analyzing the previous tests, although I wonder if they are paying off a College Board official. You used to be able to see the kids in the college confidential forum talk about how accurate it was. Most of the times it was extremely accurate but every so often something went wrong (maybe the payoff didn't work!).

It's absolutely true that the SAT's vocabulary has been de-emphasized, and it does worry me that it's now much easier to memorize even 1000 words that have no meaning and then regurgitate. Never used to think it possible, but I'm getting a bit more concerned (again, I've been reading a whole lot lately). I hope I'm too doom and gloomy.

I still think standardized tests are better than anything else. I'm just worried that just as the Chinese broke the GRE, that the Chinese, Pakistanis, and Indians broke or constantly try to break the techie certification tests, that our other standardized tests are under assault in ways we can't fathom.

IN other news, Korea's SAT is under investigation again, a little fact that Amanda Ripley managed to utterly ignore in her recent paean.

10/31/13, 12:51 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

The writing scores also correlate highly with college grades, more than other subtests. Sounds about right for american academia.

10/31/13, 6:46 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Uh, you guys?

I just had a look at the 2013 SAT vocab list. If words like "sermon" or "scrutinise" (ethnic pride forbids me from using Amurkin spelling) or "ornate" or (god help us all) "taxing" are considered words you'll never use again then, well, you weren't going to do well in the test to begin with. (That's the most charitable, least profanity laden way of putting it that I could come up with. And this is coming from a certified moron who just likes to read.)

10/31/13, 8:18 AM

Anonymous jody said...

i read the dictionary. dead serious. got a dictionary, began literally reading it. webster's collegiate, 10th edition. 1300 pages. started reading it in the early 90s, made it all the way through in a year.

part of this way spurred by reading my dad's books when i was a kid, and hitting tons of words where i had no idea. when i was a kid i read neuromancer in 1985, only a year after it came out. 'read' would probably be a better description because gibson's vocabulary was enough to stop me dead in my tracks every couple pages. hard to follow the story until i learned a lot more words.

it took a couple tries to read it, but after i got enough new words, i realized the book was awesome.

i was surprised to hear the verbal analogies were whacked from the new SAT - that was definitely the hardest part of the old SAT. those last couple questions were the real deal, pushed you to the limit. had that feel of an IQ test and those number sequence questions.

you could sit and stare at those last questions for a while and just blank out, no ideas coming at all. even the hardest couple SAT math questions you got glimpses of a slight, furtive idea in your mind, flashing briefly before blowing apart into unarticulated mind fragments as your brain couldn't put the pieces together on how to solve that one.

10/31/13, 11:10 AM

Anonymous jody said...

best way to check whether a word is something any particular person should know is to run a google check on it. number of occurrences should be the guide.

i've seen some of these lists of '100 words any college graduate should know' and their google occurrence rates vary wildly, with a few of the words dipping to 1000 occurrences. meaning ALMOST NOBODY uses them.

i'm not sure what a good rule of thumb should be but i'm guessing if a word occurs less than 20000 times or something along those lines, most people probably don't need to know it.

occurrences for all words may have gone up in the last 5 years or so since i did that experiment, as google inexorably grows, so don't quote me on absolute levels. ratios is what matters. for instance i just ran a check on pecuniary, an uncommon word, and it returns 3.8 million results. scintilla, 3.1 million. bifurcate, 841000. vitiate, 629000. exiguous, 177000. logomachy, 57000.

just grab one of those lists off the web and run a google check on them all. you'll quickly see a few of the words are almost never used. looking over my updated, 2013 results, anything below 1 million results and the average guy probably won't know, anything below 500000 and you're into the obscure. 100000 seems to be the new 1000 as far as 'NOBODY uses THIS word'.

man, google has grown. 57000 results for some really obscure stuff. still remember when i was getting 1000 or 2000 results for some of the most obscure words.

good thesis project for a computer science/robotics/linguistics undergrad would be to run the dictionary through google this way and find the least commonly used words in the english language which are still recognized as words by the authorities (probably have to use scrabble rules here IE the authority will be some particular exact dictionary). results for the most commonly used words would be fuzzy. too much noise.

10/31/13, 11:37 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

The distinction between aptitude and achievement seems less important in practice than in theory.

The smart people I know are not just intelligent, but they actually enjoy learning stuff.

People talk about "hard work" like it's a completely exogenous factor, but it's the naturally smart kids who are more likely to work hard, since they possess the most intellectual curiosity.

I'm sure there are brilliant people who are academically and intellectually lazy, and I'm sure there are dim people who are enthusiastic about learning, but I don't think there are very many of either.

10/31/13, 5:55 PM

Anonymous Difference Maker said...

I scored 800 more than once on the writing and failed both high school and college English

I'm pretty great

10/31/13, 7:07 PM

Blogger Anthony said...

Kids, don't try making up alternate versions of American history if you're not an MIT prankster.

Or Harry Turtledove.

4/7/14, 12:10 PM

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