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I'm not shilling my services here; I've volunteered for free as well, and no where on my profile do I have the name of my company. Fact: I've never had a student go up less than 100 points; my average is 400 points. Classes don't work; good tutors teaching good techniques do.
If it's not teachable, how do you explain the results I've seen? My students aren't geniuses, and neither am I. It's just a simple matter of recognizing the way they test things, and applying what you've memorized. Not sure why you're so bothered by the concept...
The FACT that you think your personal experience is more important than research is why no one should take your word for anything.
Fine, lets pretend you are the single best SAT tutor of all time. All your students go form zeros to perfect 1600. Whatever. That does not change the FACT that the AVERAGE student goes up 30 points. That is what bothers me. Anecdotes do not trump statistics.
I'm not shilling my services here; I've volunteered for free as well, and no where on my profile do I have the name of my company. Fact: I've never had a student go up less than 100 points; my average is 400 points. Classes don't work; good tutors teaching good techniques do.
If it's not teachable, how do you explain the results I've seen? My students aren't geniuses, and neither am I. It's just a simple matter of recognizing the way they test things, and applying what you've memorized. Not sure why you're so bothered by the concept...
Applying what you memorized? Besides vocabulary, how will memorizing anything be relevant to reading new passages and answering questions based on those passages (in the critical reading section).
I can see your point in regards to the writing section since the same rules are tested over and over, but you always have those tricky questions which require critical thinking and in my opinion; no level of preparation can completely prepare you for those questions. You need to apply what you practiced AND use your general intellect.
Lastly, we're not bothered by the concept that significant improvements are possible for some students. But, according to statistical data which uses a large sample size, it can be inferred that tutors and classes do not produce significant improvements on the test. Sure, I believe someone out there increased his/her score by 500, but the average--according to replicated data-- says the amount of improvement is much lower. No amount of anecdotal stories can change that.
I don't think my personal anecdotes are more important than research, but I also think that it's a falsehood to claim the test can't be taught. It can. Will all students learn what they need to, even with tutoring? Of course not. But my point was simply that it's a test that can be taught - and it was in reference to the original conversation started by the OP, and my agreement therein that it is a faulty system for evaluating students. I'll make my point clear:
The SAT is NOT a good evaluator of a student's true intelligence because it can be taught. The SAT is a reasonable evaluator of other skills, like skepticism, creativity, motivation, and memorization. The SAT is not and should not be the only criteria colleges use for evaluation or individuals use to codify their own self-esteem. Those are the only points I was making.
I don't think my personal anecdotes are more important than research, but I also think that it's a falsehood to claim the test can't be taught. It can. Will all students learn what they need to, even with tutoring? Of course not. But my point was simply that it's a test that can be taught - and it was in reference to the original conversation started by the OP, and my agreement therein that it is a faulty system for evaluating students. I'll make my point clear:
The SAT is NOT a good evaluator of a student's true intelligence because it can be taught. The SAT is a reasonable evaluator of other skills, like skepticism, creativity, motivation, and memorization. The SAT is not and should not be the only criteria colleges use for evaluation or individuals use to codify their own self-esteem. Those are the only points I was making.
No matter your rationalizing now, you started by claiming your students went up an average of done 400 points.
That is misleading when the average kid goes up by 30
Fine, lets pretend you are the single best SAT tutor of all time. All your students go form zeros to perfect 1600. Whatever. That does not change the FACT that the AVERAGE student goes up 30 points. That is what bothers me. Anecdotes do not trump statistics.
But pay attention to the statistics. thursdaymcgee's story fits comfortably inside those statistics. Personal tutoring is a small fraction of the test prep industry. Post-test tutoring is an even smaller fraction still, and showed some dramatic results in the study. Why? Because people who seek out post-test tutoring are probably the ones most likely to have major test performance gaps that can be corrected by tutoring. Those people are testing well below their actual ability levels and just bringing them up to their levels can create triple digit gains.
And that is where the real problem comes in, because the students who are able to take the test multiple times and get tutoring in between have financial resources. The ones going in cold for a single test and vastly underperforming their ability do not. Add in some serious bias problems (notice that coaching for the ACT is a lot less effective than coaching for the SAT, part of that may be the SAT's bias issues), and you come up with a nice barrier problem for meritocratic advancement.
But pay attention to the statistics. thursdaymcgee's story fits comfortably inside those statistics. Personal tutoring is a small fraction of the test prep industry. Post-test tutoring is an even smaller fraction still, and showed some dramatic results in the study. Why? Because people who seek out post-test tutoring are probably the ones most likely to have major test performance gaps that can be corrected by tutoring. Those people are testing well below their actual ability levels and just bringing them up to their levels can create triple digit gains.
And that is where the real problem comes in, because the students who are able to take the test multiple times and get tutoring in between have financial resources. The ones going in cold for a single test and vastly underperforming their ability do not. Add in some serious bias problems (notice that coaching for the ACT is a lot less effective than coaching for the SAT, part of that may be the SAT's bias issues), and you come up with a nice barrier problem for meritocratic advancement.
You keep sating that yet the multitude of studies say otherwise
"Contrary to the claims made by many test preparation providers of large increases of 100 points or more on the SAT, research suggests that average gains are more in the neighborhood of 30 points." http://www.nacacnet.org/research/res...ssionPaper.pdf
"The effect of coaching is larger on the math section of the exam (10–20 points) than it is for the critical
reading section (5–10 points)"
"And are you going to seriously tell me that if a student throws some big words out there in his or her but doesn't have a lot of substance, they wouldn't be graded higher than someone who said something meaningful but yet didn't throw in some ridiculous words that may or may not have used correctly?"
I have not graded for SAT, but I have graded for ACT. While a diverse vocabulary helps, big words help veryo little with the score. They are more likely to hurt since using a word inappropriately (and we have dictionaries on the table with us) is a mark down.
Now here is the part you will not like; content does not really matter. The argument itself can be nonsense with little thought, as long as it is well constructed with appropriate citations, appropriate use of transitions, and sentence variety. The reality is that it is far easier to maintain cohesion at the sentence, paragraph, and essay level if you have meaningful content, but you should not waste time coming up with the "best" argument when the quality of the answer is meaningless. Only the quality of the argument construction matters.
Throughout the grading process, psychometricians check to make sure that word count, word size, and other factors not related to argument quality are not biasing scores. Short essays and long essays should both earn a range of scores with both extremes being more likely to produce poor scores. Word size should have no factor on test score, but lack of variety should.
Wow, content, the ideas behind the piece of writing, are irrelevant in high stakes standardized testing. This does strengthen the OP's point. Sad.
Wow, content, the ideas behind the piece of writing, are irrelevant in high stakes standardized testing. This does strengthen the OP's point. Sad.
I don't really buy into that. It's hard to write a good paper with excellent transitions, sentence variety, and cohesion without possessing a strong argument.
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