Okay, so I just heard a whole bunch of American students on another forum I go to complaining about the essay portion of their SAT, which appears to require them (and I admit I don’t know much about the SAT) to write 5 paragraphs on a subject in 25 minutes. I’ve seen their maths questions too and I’m not very impressed with the standards they seem to set but come on, is it that hard to write five paragraphs? Over here we have to pass an English course just to graduate, and if we want to go to university we need to pass the second hardest English course. The final exam for it is 3 hours long and we have to write two essays and two comprehension questions. It’s recommended that we write about 3 pages for each question. This seems like an incredibly far cry from 5 paragraphs. I mean, I understand that not everyone should be expected to be a genius with a pen (I personally admit to sucking at essays) but I have also heard that the entire SAT is around 3 hours. Here exams for each subject are 3 hours (most people take 5 or 6 subjects) and a lot of exams besides English require us to write more than 5 paragraphs too. So I don’t get how these students can find this hard. What kind of education system allows students to graduate unable to write 5 paragraphs in their native tongue? I have never believed the whole “Americans are stupid” thing but now I’m wondering if it could be true? :S
Big confusion here. The SAT is not a graduation test, it is a standardized aptitude test and shares some qualities with an IQ test. It is based on a normal curve which means that it gets more and more difficult to get additional points as your score climbs higher. Students don’t have to take it at all. There is a competing test called the ACT that is popular in some regions. The SAT is used to give colleges a common yardstick to measure students from all across the country by. Thnigs like grades vary by school district.
So what is the SAT for then? I thought you had to pass to get into university?
The SAT is designed given by a private company . There is no pass or fail. It is based on a normal curve and it shows whether you have average ability or are that 1 in 10,000 student. It is extremely difficult to score at the high end of the test. That math you saw can be deceptive in its difficulty. Easy and very difficult questions often look alike on the SAT. It is used to supplement grades as a predictor for college success. High school grades vary accross the country. Colleges and univeristies want a common yardstick to measure students by. In addition, grades show how hard a student works. They also want a rough measure of raw ability. The SAT is the single biggest predictor of freshman year grades in college.
I am pretty sure the questions I did were easy, but they were from Encarta and probably aren’t actual SAT questions. But they said they were similar to the ones found on it. In any case they were not very hard. So does the SAT have any purpose besides telling you where you stand? Because our TEE is a ranking test as well but it determines what university courses you qualify for.
In the US the SAT and ACT are used by most universities as a part of the admissions evaluations. A higher score improves ones chances of getting into better schools. But, cynically, so does ones ability to pay without loans or grants.
In Illinois, all high school… juniors? seniors? I’m to lazy to look it up… are required to take the ACT, I guess to allow the Educational Powers That Be some standardized data with which to compare how well-educated students from different schools are. But traditionally, the SAT and ACT have been used by colleges as one factor in their decision whom to admit (and sometimes, whom to offer scholarships to), their advantage being that, unlike high school grades and such, they hold everyone taking them to the exact same standards.
If I understand correctly, in relatively recent times the “A” of SAT and ACT has changed from standing for “aptitude” to “achievement” or “assessment.”
Moving thread from IMHO to Great Debates.
Oops, sorry Czarcasm. But then that does sound like the TEE. Here things work like this: You do school work, you take tests and exams. Your last set of school exams are called your mock exams are set up to be exactly like the TEE. You combine these scores to get your final school mark, and if you’re not going to uni then that’s that. You MUST complete a certain number of subjects, and you MUST pass a certain number out of those (failing counts as completing a subject, as long as you do all the work) and you MUST pass an English subject (there are 5).
If you are going to uni then you need to take the TEE. School subjects are divided into TEE and non-TEE, and if you want to take the TEE you need to do at least 4 TEE subjects (out of six) because they’re all that count. TEE subjects are divided into list 1, the “arts” subjects and list 2, the “science” subjects. Your raw score for each subject is an average between your final school mark and your TEE mark. Then you take your 4 best scores, add them up and that is your TES (tertiary entrance score, I think). You must take at least one subject from each list and one subject from each list always counts towards your TES and if this means your best 5 subjects would give you a better score then that is used instead. Then they send this score into the curriculum council where they do all sorts of weird crap to it (it involves normal distributions, but other stuff too) and out the other end comes your TER which stands for Tertiary Entrance Rank and is a number from 0 to 99.95, don’t ask why. It shows where you stand compared to other students in the state, e.g. a TER of 90.00 means you are in the top 10%. They compare how different schools do too, and a student’s school mark, TEE mark and their school’s average TEE mark all affect their TER. Different university courses have different cutoffs for TER, which change from year to year. Oh and once again you MUST pass English to get into uni.
Now… suppose I am an American high school senior in your state. What happens at the end of the school year?
Prior to the end of the school year (about midway through, in my case) one takes the SAT or ACT. I suppose one could skip it as it’s voluntary but skipping it would make it extremely difficult to get into any worthwhile college the following year.
Beyond that point the system is the same as always. One takes courses, goes through tests, etc. If a moderate level of acheivement is reached (and the standard isn’t all that high) one gets a High School diploma.
The college application process may begin as much as a year before that diploma is granted. Applications, SAT or ACT scores, high school grades, all are taken into account along with other applicants and so forth to see which schools one applies to send acceptance letters.
But beyond one’s grades little in high school leads directly to college admissions. That’s largely outside the purview of high school. The school might offer college counseling (how to get into college) or SAT/ACT test preparation courses but that’s pretty much it.
OK, first of all it certainly varies from state to state. Here in Tennessee, there are tests which Freshmen and Juniors have to take, but we have no “final graduation test.” if you’ve gotten the grades and passed the Fresh and Junior tests, you graduate.
If you want to apply for college, it’s more or less required that you take the SAT or ACT (again, different colleges have different desires). But neither is required for all colleges or universities; some have other requirements. Nor are they (as in most countries) run by the government. We have state, local, and private universities, and each may set its requirements independantly (though state and local colleges are answerable to the state or local governments). Many pay relatively little attention to the SAT score, except to note whether or not you totally screwed it up. In addition, you can take the tests as often as you wish; they have testing days about four times a year, IIRC, in pretty much every city in the US, and some overseas.
Unless your high school was ***-awful, the actual length of the SAT’s essay is not an issue. It’s simply really annoying, with a short time limit, for very little purpose, especially as many colleges still require you to write your own essay for them. The SAT is shorter than you tests, but it is quite accurate at predicting college performance. The ACT is very similar and has a “science” seciton, which actually covers basic logic.
csharpmajor, one of the important differences between the two countires is the fact that Australia has 6 states, each who run their own education systems. Each state has a pretty similar final year exam, so Australian universities (the majority of which are public, as opposed to the States, which has a mix of both public and private) have a pretty easy job of working out what a test result means in regard to the student’s ability.
In America, though, there are 50 states, and god-knows how many school boards within each state. How is Clemson in South Carolina meant to compare the high school marks of a student from Upstate New York with those of a student from the suburbs of Denver?
Compare this to Australia, where the University of Melbourne can quite easily compare a student from Fremantle, WA and a student from Broken Hill, NSW because they know that they both have a UAI (not TER - they changed to the University Admissions Index around '99). Because there are fewer bodies in charge of our education systems, we can have a more centralized system.
Also, I think in the States, because of the size of the place, there is a much bigger range in quality between institutions. An Ivy League school like Harvard can essentially have its pick of any students who could score a 100 UAI and still turn away plenty. Thus, they can look at other criteria. There is no Australian University, to my knowledge, that could do this.
Another important distinction is, (and I’m not 100% sure, but this is how it appears to be), in Australia, students choose a degree in a particular field (B. Science, B. Economics, B Communication, B. Business, etc.) straight from high school, and the more highly sought after a degree is, the higher the minimum UAI will be. In America, students will apply to the University rather than a specific degree within the University. Once they are accepted, they will undertake a more general degree, such as Arts or Science, and the specialization will occur a couple years in when they declare their major. Hence another main difference - American colleges tend to require students study a broad range of subjects before they specialize; in Australia, an Arts students doesn’t have to do any math or science to get a degree.
The U.S. system is way more simple than that. There are four years of high school. Individual school districts set the requirements fo what classes you must take to finish. These would include several years of English, math, an science, maybe phsical education, and maybe a foreign language. Each class is fairly self-contained. You do the work, take some tests and get a grade at the end of each semester and maybe a final grade for the year. Many school districts have Advanced Placement classes which may let you get some college credit if you do well enough on a standard test. You do that for four years and if you pass the great majority of your classes, you graduate. However, some states have high school exit exams that students must pass to graduate or graduate with a full diploma.
During high school, it is largely up to the student to make themselves marketable to whatever colleges he or she chooses. The U.S. has a huge range of colleges including the best in the world. A student that wants to go to Harvard or MIT is going to have to be much more focused and deliberate than someone that wants to go to North-Central South Dakota State College annex campus. Almost everyone can “get into college” somewhere because there are some with virtually no admissions requirements.
Junior and Senior Year of high school, students take the SAT or ACT or both. They now say that these are “achievement” tests for PC reasons but they really aren’t. The older scale used to be a 1600 point scale with the mean around 1000 and a standard deviation of 100. That means that a score of 1400 would be 4 standard deviations from the mean and be pushing the person into the most elite school range. I say that it is not an achievement tests because students generally can’t study themselves out of a certain range of scores. A person that was fairly well prepared the first time and got a score of 1000 would probably never be able to score a 1200 let alone a 1400 or 1600 in a retest. The SAT score correlates highly with IQ test scores.
During senior year of high school, students apply to colleges. The appliaction includes high school transcripts, SAT scores, letters of recommendation, essays, and things like extracurricular activities. Colleges are all over the place when it comes to what they consider the most important. Almost all consider grades and SAT scores (or ACT) but there are a few that don’t.
Basically, it is up to the student to make themselves marketable at the end of high school. I think that the U.S. is different than most places because we consider anything before college to be just a warmup and college to be the real deal. High School standards are lower than many countries but our college standards can be higher and we have many of the best colleges in the world.
In case it wasn’t clear from previous posts, there is no one cutoff of any kind for admission to American colleges and universities. Each college or university sets up its own criteria, independently. These criteria usually include one’s academic high school record, extra-curricular activities, and results of standardized tests such as the SAT.
I believe that one of the requirements for HS graduation, at least here in NJ, is passing four years of English. Students are usually counseled about what type of English might be most beneficial. There may be, for example, a “general” class for those not planning further education, a college prep, and possibly an advanced class for super achievers.
Obviously, colleges will look at the types of classes an applicant took. If Joe’s transcipt includes 4 years of foreign languages, a number of advanced classes, and a schedule generally full of academic challenges, he’s going to stand a better chance than Sam, who took only just the minimum basic requirements, even if both have similar GPAs.
It also depends what type of higher education one is seeking. A person intending to be a music major is not going to suffer too much from not having taken any advanced science classes. Some schools want to see a “well-rounded” applicant who is involved in more than just academics. Others couldn’t care less whether the student was into chess club or community service. It varies all over the place.
As to the question of what happens after one finishes high school – if you intend to go to college, you had better have done something about that months ago. In fact, other than passing, one’s second semester of senior year is virtually meaningless. Most aspirants to higher education have already gotten their college admissions results long before the semester ends; some have achieved “early admission,” which means they got accepted to a college in the fall of their senior year based entirely on their first 3 years of high school. This leads to the nightmare of “senioritis” toward the end of the year, since the graduates-to-be know that almost nothing they do, or don’t do, will affect their future in any way.
Okay, I’m an SAT prep tutor (and mathematics tutor), so I’ol try to answer this as well as I can.
The reason you are likely to hear complaints about the writing section of the SAT is that it is new. Really, there’s no other reason. When I took it, people complained about the analogy sections… no more complaints about that is it’s no longer on their. The sutdents talking about writing 5 paragraphs are incorrect: it’s only required to cover the topic in an organized manner. Most top scoring (12/12) essays are in fact 4 paragraphs.
Also, many students in high school are unused to timed essays. I’d had quite a bit of experience with them before finishing high school myself, but I took advanced courses and won a few minor essay-writing contests, so my experience wasn’t typical. The time for the SAT essay is relatively short (25 minutes), and people that are not accustomed to completing an essay in this brief interval are likely to run into problems.
The SAT grades it’s own questions as Easy, Medium, or Hard in difficulty. An Easy question is answered correctly by the majority of students. A Medium question is answered correctly by (roughly) half of test-takers. On Hard questions, students scores average out to only slightly better than chance.
Shagnasty, I hate to disagree with you on this, but services like mine wouldn’t thrive if studying for the SAT did as little good as you claim. Even The College Board has stopped making this claim (though the more cynical might argue that this is so that they can sell their line of SAT prep books). The SAT does still test application of knowledgte rather than knowledge itself, but a person can be taught to better apply their knowledge to the types of questions on the exam. You are correct in that you cannot study for the SAT in the same way that you can study for a course exam, however, studying for the SAT by practicing for certain question types that come up repeatedly on the exam does improve scores.
What they said – In the USA, the student makes his/her own desision as to whether and where to apply for higher education and s/he is the one who has to bother with taking the necessary steps to get in – which the High School will aid and facilitate to the extent of its available resources; if you’re at PS102 in the Projects you’ll have a different level of support than if you’re a resident at Phillips-Andover, surely. Each university/college has its own entrance standards, based on any combination of academic school grades, standardized test, and individual evaluation of the applicant’s personal strengths and weaknesses. The latter ranges from a simple “applications essay” to an on-site interview worthy of hiring a corporate VP, and includes such elements as whether the applicant is a “legacy” (child of alummni, donors, or schools staff), if he/she is a potential sports star, if there is an “affirmative action” consideration, and whether dad is the President of the USA. 
Many schools, by the way, have set up a “need-blind” admissions process, in response to the (cynical, as Johnathan said) presumption that your ability to pay may influence their decision to admit you (I know my entire extended family was in no position to pay for JHU, and the school came through with a full financial aid package after admission).
“State” schools in the various states MAY have a statutory mandate to admit all applicants from within that state that are above X grade average and/or Y class-ranking and/or Z score in whatever standardized test it recognizes, up to filling up a number of class seats. A few states, for example, guarantee any “B” student from a public school in the state a seat at a State College and a grant to pay for it. But again, there is no one-size-fits-all USA-wide rule on that, and different schools in the same state may have different mandates.
Please tell me this isn’t true. Please. Even if you are only teaching mathematics. Lie to me if you have to.
The elementary and secondary education system in the U.S. is controlled locally. Some school districts may choose a balanced curriculum, some may emphasize math and science, some may emphasize language arts, some emphasize “practical arts” or vocational classes, while others may only provide the bare minimum to meet state requirements.
Here in Missouri, which is at best only a middle-sized state, there are more than 500 local school districts, plus hundreds of “private” (not government regulated) high schools, each of which has their own standards and requirements for graduation.
Things get hairy when trying to judge students by any sort of rigid requirement. Two of my kids, for example, had three years of foreign language in high school. The state requirement is two years. However, the University of Missouri requires four years* for admission. So, despite having extremely high grades, my kids were not eligible for admission. One went to a private school which would accept her three years of study, but required that she take additional foreign language and math courses, the other went to a different university which required no additional courses in either foreign language or math. (My third child studied four years of foriegn language in high school and was accepted at a state university that required no additional foreign language.)
You have yet to get one comprehensive answer to your question. I’ll take a shot.
As has been explained, the test you were looking at is not a requirement for graduation. It isn’t even designed for the purpose of proving what you’ve learned. Rather, it’s designed to show how well you are able to learn, a difference that can seem to be without distinction. In short, doing well on the test is supposed to augur well for doing well in college.
Why is it given? Because back several decades (actually, 1901), colleges began to wonder if there wasn’t a better predictor of success in college than high school grades and evaluations. Several Northeast colleges got together and founded the College Board, a not-for-profit organization designed to help identify for colleges the ability of students to succede in college. They put together the Scholastic Achievement Test, or SAT.
In 1941, the College Board changed the test, and called it the Scholastic Aptitude Test. The changes were designed to demonstrate aptitude, not achievement. After all, a student might pass a pre-calculus math class, but that didn’t mean that the student had a high aptitude for mathematical study. After the war was over, increasingly large numbers of students wanted to attend college, using benefits given to them in thanks for their service in wartime military duty. The use of the SAT to identify potentially “good” students for college increased substantially. A competing test, the ACT (originally standing for the American College Test), developed at the University of Iowa, began being administered in 1959 and is used primarily by colleges in the Midwest and South. The two tests differ in what type of questions are asked as well as in format.
Both tests are “normalized.” That is, a base statistical population of results was used to set the scores. In the case of the SAT, each section was set originally so that the median would be a score of 500, with each 100 points to either side representing a standard deviation. The test maximizes at 800 and minimizes at 200. Over the years, the median tended to slide downward as more “less-able” students started taking it. It has been re-normalized about 10 years ago.
In the 1980’s, the College Board began to come under increasing fire from those who challenged the assertion that the test measured “aptitude.” Several test preparation programs, especially the Kaplan and Princeton Review programs, were able to demonstrate significant increases in scores for individuals who used the programs; theoretically this would be impossible for a true aptitude test. In response, the College Board in 1990 renamed the test the “Scholastic Assessment Test;” in 1994 they gave up and now just call it the “SAT” (which they assert is not an acronym or initialization, simply a meaningless grouping of three letters). Despite all these shenannigans, and despite repeated assertions that the test inherently discriminates against various ethnic, racial and gender groupings through how it asks its questions, the test continues to be used as one of the most important qualifiers for colleges that don’t admit just anyone. In addition, some states use the scores of the SAT and the ACT to establish the level of state scholarships (Ohio is one).
Now, as has been indicated, these tests have nothing to do with graduating from high school. With few exceptions, graduating from an American High School involved simply obtaining enough passing grades to get a diploma. A notable exception for some time has been the state of New York, which administers the Regents Exams to all high school students who wish a Regents Diploma.
However, in recent years, the trend towards attempting to standardize education has lead some states to introduce graduation tests for high school students. In Ohio, the Ohio Graduation Test is now administered to sophmores; students have three chances to pass each of the sections or a diploma will not be issued (for LD students there can be alternate methods of determining sufficient achievement for graduation). These new tests are, in general, much less rigorous than the SAT or the ACT. However, I have scored practice OGT tests (administered to 9th graders in an attempt to see what would have to be taught if they were to pass the next year) and I have to say that they represent a significant step up in what required content we ask our high school students to understand some amount of in order to graduate. For example, they are required to demonstrate some understanding of the underlying causes and the effects of the Industrial Revolution in England, both economic and social, and that is something I would have been hard-pressed to accomplish as a high school senior, even though I was by American standards very knowledgeable and into that sort of subject.
Now, as far as getting into college goes, really top tier schools take only those with very high grade averages and very high SAT/ACT scores. Of private colleges, you can find everything from schools like Harvard and the California Institute of Technology which skim the very top, to schools like Lourdes College in Toledo, which take almost anyone who is able to pay and has a high school diploma. Among state schools, there is often a tiering, sometimes intentional (California, e.g.), sometimes not (Ohio, e.g.). Ability to enter such schools will depend upon scores and grades, though rarely are the state schools as picky as the top private schools.
I didn’t say you couldn’t improve them at all. I qualified in my statement by saying that the test taker was prepared for the test for the first time. Under those conditions, you aren’t regularly going to see large fluctuations in test scores from one test to the next.
The SAT correlates with other test besides itself too (that is why it is used as a predictor). I took the SAT in high school. I was barely prepared but I still got a pretty good score. I went off college and worked my ass off. I decided to go to grad school so I needed to take the GRE (the graduate version of the SAT). I thought, “I’m so much smarter now, I will do much better”. My score was within 20 points of my SAT score. That graduate school didn’t work out. Fast forward to last year when I wanted to apply to a different type of grad school. I had to atke the GRE again. I was unemployed so I studied solid for weeks. They also had really computer software that wasn’t available when I took it before (the test itself is now given on a computer). I did everything I possible could for that test. Test day came, it sweated out the test, and finally the computer said “Now Press a Button for Your Score”. I pressed it and saw that while my score was better, it still started with the same two numbers as the last one. I improved by 40 points. That is the way it is supposed to be.