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Standardized tests only one thing. How well you can take a standardized test. They don't truly measure one's intelligence or their potential. No one has died or failed at their career because they couldn't think of an 18 letter word that defines something. Many of the words on the English SAT are NEVER used in life outside of that test. I know many people who did not do well on the SAT who did well in life and vice versa.
We have several decades of experience refutting your thesis.
IQ tests measure intelligence quite well.
You cannot find a single SAT word that hasn't been used outside the test. That's a silly claim on your part.
The SAT isn't designed to ID people who are likely to do well in life. It's designed to help decide how high schoolers will perform in college.
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IMO people who hate high stakes tests tend to fall into a few groups:
1. A small number of people are genuinely concerned because these tests are very important and doing poorly has consequences.
2. Many school teachers and related unions........teachers tend to hate anything that might shine a light of accountability in their direction.
3. People who struggle with high stakes tests and parents of kids who struggle with high stakes tests.
4. Overlapping with the above.......there is flatly an element within all of this that isn't notionally fair. Unlike the stupid claims on TV and in the press talent isn't distributed equally.
5. Finally, related to three.....many parents after employing a laissez-faire educational ethos with their children can't stand to find our that doing so often does not work out very well and these tests oft. prove it. I have a cousin in CO. going through this right now with her son.......her thought bubble has been akin to this, "I don't want JR. to work too hard in school", "AP classes are just too demanding", "I want JR. to have plenty of time to just be a kid." JR. graduates high school this year and his grades are great ~3.9 on a 4. scale. His ACT and SAT scores are weak. And I'm not surprised a bit. His dream of going to CU Boulder is out the window certainly for now.
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To me the other side of all this even is more important. We should use tests to ID talent early and cultivate talent when we find it.
I'll rehash a story...after our son was labeled delayed and a cheater by his 2nd grade school teacher (she used the r-word and one of her quotes was, "no child his age can do these problems in his head") we had his IQ tested. His score was very, very high. We removed him from public school and into a private school in-which the elementary math department was run by a woman who was an electrical engineer by education. Three grades but two years later our son scored an 800-800-780 SAT math & math subject tests progression, then summer school sessions at Harvard, 4.00 in college + a 40 MCAT with very little prep., 99th percentile USMLE Step 1 and 2 scores etc.
The IQ test and the SAT math & subject test scores highlighted the potential. Once we knew kiddo wasn't a cheater and/or delayed but instead had unusual potential my wife and I did everything we could to challenge him.
Although too less extreme degrees I've seen the same general logic play out with a number of young relatives.
IMO every kid should take either the SAT, ACT or ISEE test around 7th grade. And every kid should take at least one IQ test.
That's what they should have told the teacher to do. So sorry to hear about all this, OP. Still, you scored in the end. At AP Chem, too--I'm impressed!
And thank heaven high school is over!
While I agree with my parents that learning how to get along with people I don't like is a valuable skill, it should go both ways: teachers need to learn how to get along with students that they don't like. In any other profession, you are going to have bosses, coworkers, subordinates, and clients that you may not like, but still have to get along with them. Why are teachers the only profession that gets a pass?
So at the end of the day, after several days and almost 150 posts, your complaint isn't about standardized tests but teachers you didn't like.
Oh, your parents' advice is pretty good. And true.
Yes, but why don't teachers need to learn to get along with students that they don't like? As I said, in any other profession, you will have bosses, coworkers, subordinates, and clients that you don't like, but you have to learn to get along with them. Why are teachers the only profession that gets a pass?
We have several decades of experience refutting your thesis.
IQ tests measure intelligence quite well.
You cannot find a single SAT word that hasn't been used outside the test. That's a silly claim on your part.
The SAT isn't designed to ID people who are likely to do well in life. It's designed to help decide how high schoolers will perform in college.
_____________________
IMO people who hate high stakes tests tend to fall into a few groups:
1. A small number of people are genuinely concerned because these tests are very important and doing poorly has consequences.
2. Many school teachers and related unions........teachers tend to hate anything that might shine a light of accountability in their direction.
3. People who struggle with high stakes tests and parents of kids who struggle with high stakes tests.
4. Overlapping with the above.......there is flatly an element within all of this that isn't notionally fair. Unlike the stupid claims on TV and in the press talent isn't distributed equally.
5. Finally, related to three.....many parents after employing a laissez-faire educational ethos with their children can't stand to find our that doing so often does not work out very well and these tests oft. prove it. I have a cousin in CO. going through this right now with her son.......her thought bubble has been akin to this, "I don't want JR. to work too hard in school", "AP classes are just too demanding", "I want JR. to have plenty of time to just be a kid." JR. graduates high school this year and his grades are great ~3.9 on a 4. scale. His ACT and SAT scores are weak. And I'm not surprised a bit. His dream of going to CU Boulder is out the window certainly for now.
______________
To me the other side of all this even is more important. We should use tests to ID talent early and cultivate talent when we find it.
I'll rehash a story...after our son was labeled delayed and a cheater by his 2nd grade school teacher (she used the r-word and one of her quotes was, "no child his age can do these problems in his head") we had his IQ tested. His score was very, very high. We removed him from public school and into a private school in-which the elementary math department was run by a woman who was an electrical engineer by education. Three grades but two years later our son scored an 800-800-780 SAT math & math subject tests progression, then summer school sessions at Harvard, 4.00 in college + a 40 MCAT with very little prep., 99th percentile USMLE Step 1 and 2 scores etc.
The IQ test and the SAT math & subject test scores highlighted the potential. Once we knew kiddo wasn't a cheater and/or delayed but instead had unusual potential my wife and I did everything we could to challenge him.
Although too less extreme degrees I've seen the same general logic play out with a number of young relatives.
IMO every kid should take either the SAT, ACT or ISEE test around 7th grade. And every kid should take at least one IQ test.
I NEVER said words on the SAT weren't ever used outside of the SAT. I said people don't use them. Most people learn them ONLY for the test. They never make it into everyday conversation.
I did terrible on my SAT's - less than 1000. I graduated with my bachelor's degree with a 4.0. My husband did just ok on his. Meanwhile he was in AP and honor's courses. He graduated from college with honors. SAT's do NOT mean much in life for most people. Haven't you noticed many colleges are no longer requiring them for admissions? This started before Covid. There's far more to a person than grades and tests.
Nothing like adding a little pressure on children by having them take even more tests. Why can't they be children? Good grief!
I NEVER said words on the SAT weren't ever used outside of the SAT. I said people don't use them. Most people learn them ONLY for the test. They never make it into everyday conversation.
I did terrible on my SAT's - less than 1000. I graduated with my bachelor's degree with a 4.0. My husband did just ok on his. Meanwhile he was in AP and honor's courses. He graduated from college with honors. SAT's do NOT mean much in life for most people. Haven't you noticed many colleges are no longer requiring them for admissions? This started before Covid. There's far more to a person than grades and tests.
Nothing like adding a little pressure on children by having them take even more tests. Why can't they be children? Good grief!
Good for you but across large numbers of people poor SAT/ACTs ID lower college performance and many majors are out of the question.
The pre-covid test optional trend is overstated significantly by people who dislike tests and not nearly as clear as presented. For example many test optional schools are really only partially test optional with the most desirable and difficult majors test required.
There is far more to people than tests and grades but in a world where we need our doctors to be competent and our engineers to build bridges that won't regularly collapse we are going to have various levels of high stakes testing.
I NEVER said words on the SAT weren't ever used outside of the SAT. I said people don't use them. Most people learn them ONLY for the test. They never make it into everyday conversation..........................
Nothing like adding a little pressure on children by having them take even more tests. Why can't they be children? Good grief!
For the first point: Over the course of my 30+ year career in the classroom I noticed a serious degradation of vocabulary knowledge among the students, the last ten years is was markedly worse.
Every year I taught, including my first year in 1984 at a middle school, we were required to use SAT Words of the Day every day, so even back then my school system recognized a loss of vocabulary skills.
Kids by age 5 should have a working vocabulary of 5000 words (adults 15,000+). Many kids come to Kindergarten now with less than 1000. That then meshes with the fact that many kids don't know their real name.
For the second, don't blame the SAT solely for test anxiety. More blame should be aimed at the testing requirements that started with NCLB. And yes, there is too much pressure put on 7 year olds for testing.
Last edited by North Beach Person; 03-10-2021 at 03:41 PM..
I NEVER said words on the SAT weren't ever used outside of the SAT. I said people don't use them. Most people learn them ONLY for the test. They never make it into everyday conversation.
I did terrible on my SAT's - less than 1000. I graduated with my bachelor's degree with a 4.0. My husband did just ok on his. Meanwhile he was in AP and honor's courses. He graduated from college with honors. SAT's do NOT mean much in life for most people. Haven't you noticed many colleges are no longer requiring them for admissions? This started before Covid. There's far more to a person than grades and tests.
Nothing like adding a little pressure on children by having them take even more tests. Why can't they be children? Good grief!
Quote:
Originally Posted by North Beach Person
Fir the first point: Over the course of my 30+ year career in the classroom I noticed a serious degradation of vocabulary knowledge among the students, the last ten years is was markedly worse.
Every year I taught, including my first year in 1984 at a middle school, we were requires to use SAT Words of the Day every day, so even back then my school system recognized a loss of vocabulary skills.
Kids by age 5 should have a working vocabulary of 5000 words (adults 15,000+). Many kids come to Kindergarten now with less than 1000. That then meshes with the fact that many kids don't know their real name.
For the second, don't blame the SAT solely for test anxiety. More blame should be aimed at the testing requirements that started with NCLB. And yes, there is too much pressure put on 7 year olds for testing.
I've noticed the same thing in my experience, also well over 30 years, but not just in the students but in the younger generations of teachers. I am convinced that it is at least somewhat related to the unintended consequences of NCLB in low-SES schools. With test results no longer tied to the student, but to the teacher, the school, and the district, districts like mine all over the country adapted, then changed the curriculum to focus more on the narrow skills tested by the new explosion of standardized assessments.
One of the many unintended consequences is that reading full-length literature has been dropped (at least in H.S.) outside the widely ignored summer reading book. Where each English class had once required one book per term, mostly from the traditional canon of the time, a graduate would have purportedly read a minimum of 16 books in high school. Now students routinely graduate without having read a single book cover to cover, because as I said, most ignore the summer reading book until their teachers prep them on the test.
As North Beach noted, the vocabulary of children is far below what is needed for school. In our area, kindergarten children typically arrive with the vocabulary level of a two- or three-year-old. The reasons for this are a topic for another thread, but I believe it is because the children are generally raising each other while their parents are working minimum-wage part-time jobs around the clock to keep the lights on. The kids start out 50% behind, and over the course of their academic careers, that remains fairly stable, with our typical seniors reading on an elementary school level. In contrast, a much-maligned study several decades ago observed that the children in high-SES families had a larger vocabulary than the PARENTS in low-SES families. These children start out ahead linguistically and generally remain ahead throughout their academic careers.
This was borne out with the experience of our son, a difficult child who rejected school, reading, and anything academic. He never made it out of middle school due to choosing a life of delinquency which resulted in him completing his GED at a National Guard Youth Challenge Program facility where he scored a perfect score on vocabulary on the ASVAB, surprising everyone but us.
The question is how does a non-reader know words on vocabulary tests? The answer is my response to ss. I read to him from the time he was young, even when he was literally running around the room as I read. He could repeat verbatim the text when I complained that he wasn't listening. Around the family dinner table every night, we talked about life, the universe, and everything. As our kids grew older, our daughter's boyfriend, now husband, joined us nearly every night as the topics grew more abstract.
As the child of a doctor myself, I don't really do baby talk. Kids can understand nearly everything at some level. So when my children were just toddlers, I talked to them about how God is ubiquitous. That might very well be a word that ss would say that people just don't use. But my son the future delinquent knew that it meant everywhere all at the same time, which is an easy concept to understand. He didn't know that it was a big word. As a teen and young adult, his friends would sometimes complain about him using big words, but he would just tell them that he wasn't going to dumb down his vocabulary for them. Now a OTR driver, he spends his leisure time watching science and history videos on YouTube, making up for the high school education that he never got.
As I mentioned earlier, my biggest concern is that the younger teachers themselves have a vocabulary deficit, along with a distinct lack of awareness of basic grammar suck as subject-verb agreement. It is distressing, because while most of them are obviously intelligent, the moment they open their mouths it is evident to anyone who speaks standard English that they don't. As I used to tell my students: People who don't use standard grammar don't notice people who do; but people who do use standard grammar definitely notice those who don't. It's a little like table manners.
I am very interested to see what is going to happen in the test/test-prep/test-remediation industry if their cash cow is slaughtered due to Covid. That might be the best thing to come out of a pandemic.
People are opposed to standardized tests because it gives an opportunity to those that are more prepared, whether through long term effort, studying, or cramming.
People are lazy and don't want to work.
People don't want to give up any privilege that they are uncomfortable about having that is unearned.
The fairest thing for any poor minority kid to make it out is the standardized test.
However, the standardized test doesn't pick and choose people that fit a particular agenda.
Bingo! But that is no a politically correct answer these days so the test must be the problem......
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