quote:Originally posted by Irami Osei-Frimpong: Dr. Rabbit, I don't have a smoking gun latter from the donors to Richard Atkinson saying, "We have to do something, these asians are kicking my kid's hide."
I do have Pat Buchanan, and I think that he was articulating what quite a few mothers and fathers were thinking.
Pat Buchanan and his supporter get exactly zero weight with college admissions boards.
The funny thing here is that I am a long term proponent of increasing diversity in Higher Education. I have served on various committees to try to increase the enrollment of underrepresented minorities on the campuses where I work. At its root, I agree with the arguement that their is an enormous amount of institutionalized racism in the US education system. I know that there are alot of white males out their, who are POd that they now have to compete with women and darker skinned people for positions that were once reserved for them. Much of their complaining about "reverse discrimination" is childish whining about the loss of an undeserved privilege and a lame excuse for their own failures.
With so many real and documentable things going on which disadvantage immigrants and the poor in our education system, it seems counter productive to complain that changes in the SAT test were motivated by racism.
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posted
The major difference in language skills has to do with one's education, not one's firs language. I can tell you from experience that the son of a Mexican or Turkish university professor will probably speak and write better English than most American children. He will probably also speak French and maybe one or two other languages. Meanwhile, the son of an American blue-collar worker is not nearly as well educated.
English is not the problem, tests arn't the problem, our educational system is the problem. Some educational systems fail the poor, ours certainly does that, but, worse than failing the poor, we fail everybody.
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There is an article about how Richard Atkinson or one of his aides was helping his daughter or nephew with SAT, read and missed some of the questions, and that's what sparked Atkinson's crusade. The funny thing is that Atkinson was right, some of the analogies on the old SAT were ridiculous. Atkinson, then UC President, more than any other man, was the bulldog for the SAT change.
This is the subtle hand of white supremacy in action.
I'm not saying overall change is bad. I am curious how much random things like penmanship now effect scores, but overall, writing should be taken seriously. The SAT is a better test for the change, though I don't know how they can read all of those essays at all well without incurring astronomical overheaad costs.
Rabbit,
I'm always a bit nervous when I'm on the other side of you on an issue, but I think I'm right when I say that white supremacy was one of a confluence of motives which lead to the restructuring of the SAT.
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posted
To be fair, I'm not aware of an educational system that does not fail the poor, and we do a better job than most in that regard. If "we fail everybody," which may, sadly, be an appropriate charge, it is because we try to be all things to all people--without having an infrastructure that is up to making that possible.
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Icarus, we don't just lack an infrastructure, we lack any idea of what the hell we are doing.
Having no centralized idea for education has no advantages. We are just as capable of being totally wrong as ever, but we are now totally incapable of being right, because we are moving in a thousand different directions at once, which might not be so bad if these directions were not mutually exclusive
No wonder students are confuses, they go to schools filled with contradictions. Their lives are shaped by others: people who are, at best ineffectual, at worst hypocritical and fairly universally confused. These people, school administrators and such, are in turn controlled by a system which seems to be using Catch-22 as an owner's manual.
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quote:I'm always a bit nervous when I'm on the other side of you on an issue, but I think I'm right when I say that white supremacy was one of a confluence of motives which lead to the restructuring of the SAT.
Gosh, I hope we win then!
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quote: Anyway, the problem is solved. College admissions are the better for it.
Egad, that's childish of you.
quote:I wouldn't make a good juror or military man because I'm almost always going to vote my conscious.
Irami, that's not the reason you wouldn't make a good juror or military man. The reason you wouldn't make a good juror or military man is that you seem incapable of distinguishing between your conscience and your prejudices.
quote:I think I'm right when I say that white supremacy was one of a confluence of motives which lead to the restructuring of the SAT.
Irami, we've had this conversation before. And at the time these changes were proposed, I was working for the National Council of Teachers of English. At no point in the discussion of this issue did anyone ever mention the possibility of "white supremacy." You want to know why the writing sample was added? It's because educators were concerned that the rigid multiple-choice format was daunting for people who weren't good at testing (in my experience, this is usually a code-word for "minorities"), and there was a demand to more aggressively measure skills that could not be easily quantified by the original five-answer format.
The test was quite consciously and deliberately dumbed down, Irami, mainly out of a desire to make it easier for "under-represented" groups. If I were you, I'd be offended by that instead of clinging to your belief in a cabal of scheming white admissions officers.
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quote:The reason you wouldn't make a good juror or military man is that you seem incapable of distinguishing between your conscience and your prejudices.
quote:Originally posted by Irami Osei-Frimpong: There is an article about how Richard Atkinson or one of his aides was helping his daughter or nephew with SAT, read and missed some of the questions, and that's what sparked Atkinson's crusade. The funny thing is that Atkinson was right, some of the analogies on the old SAT were ridiculous. Atkinson, then UC President, more than any other man, was the bulldog for the SAT change.
This is the subtle hand of white supremacy in action.
. . .
. . .
I'm always a bit nervous when I'm on the other side of you on an issue, but I think I'm right when I say that white supremacy was one of a confluence of motives which lead to the restructuring of the SAT.
That's a bit of a logical leap. Perhaps I misunderstood you but you seem to imply that the fact that Richard Atkinson was leading this fight is clear evidence for white supremacy.
Atkinson's positions and actions regarding minority students in the UC system could be viewed as mixed, but it is far from the white supremicist simplicity you suggest. While Richard Atkinson was President of the UC system when it abandoned afirmative action in admissions, that decision was made by the UC Board of Regents and I believe innitially opposed by Atkinson. To compensate, Atkinson instituted a variety of out reach programs to under represented minorities and assistance programs for schools with a high proportion of black. latinos and native Americans. As a result, the % of under represented minorities in the UC system has grown since affirmative actions was ended rather than dropped. While I would agree that Atkinson has not been a real champion for under represented minorities, he is also in no way a white supremicist.
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Pelegius, I was with you until you seemed to turn your criticisms on the individuals in the system. Specifically, I don't agree that individuals working within the system are "at best ineffectual."
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FWIW, I think the removal of the analogies section was tragic. Of course, I like analogies, so YMMV.
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I never really liked the section where they ask where the comma goes.
Which of the following is correct?
A. But before long, Jim, was dead. B. But, before long, Jim was dead. C. But before, long Jim was dead. D. But before long, Jim was dead.
Only C. jumps out at me as immediately wrong, unless Jim was often called "long Jim" by his friends, though I supposed that's a leap for the test. The other three all look perfectly fine depending on context and the tone the writer was intending to convey, and the style in which he wanted it read aloud.
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quote:That's a bit of a logical leap. Perhaps I misunderstood you but you seem to imply that the fact that Richard Atkinson was leading this fight is clear evidence for white supremacy.
I guess not being clear. The SAT has been bad for 50 years. It hasn't been a great secret.
For the last 10 years, immigrants have been dominating the SAT, with results that are apparent at the better California schools and the Ivy Leagues.
Now the test is changed. My argument is, and this is the controvesial one, if immigrants had not started scoring better than whites on the SAT, the change would not have happened.
Lyrawn, D?
Because the first clause counts as an appositive or an exepegetical something or other, I think.
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posted
This wasn't the first time in 50 years that they changed the test, although it could be argued that this was the most radical change.
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I believe your claim that immigrants as a group have been dominant in the SAT is erroneous. Can you document it?
-o-
I don't think the SAT is all bad; it is the only equalizer (yes, I know that is a controversial claim in and of itself) in a very unequal system. Certainly it was the only thing that helped me overcome some imbalances I faced; it opened a lot of educational doors to me that would have been closed otherwise.
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quote:I don't think the SAT is all bad; it is the only equalizer in a very unequal system.
The problem is not that this is a very controversial claim. It is an absolutely indefensible claim. Virtually everyone who does college admissions or scholarships recognizes that SAT, ACT and any other standardized test scores are neither equalizers or particularly good predictors for success in college. So why do colleges and Universities keep requiring them? For the same reason we keep asking for high school transcripts, and letters of recommendation and personal statements and so on. The hope is that the biases on the SAT (or any other standardized test) are different from the biases inherent in other measures. The hope is that if we look at enough different measures with different biases the errors will cancel each other out and give us a more accurate picture.
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quote:Standardized tests got me into college and law school. I like them.
*laughs* Yeah, it's stockholm syndrome on a countrywide scale.
Rabbit,
This is one of the issues I had working in the Senator's office. For letters of rec for high schoolers going to the service academies, they cut first 90 percent based on scores and grades. That's it. It made me physically ill.
The process subverts your checks and balance system.
posted
I didn't say I think they're good or they should be continued - I don't know near enough to have an opinion. But it would be churlish not to like them on a personal level.
In my case, the SAT was a very good predictor of performance in 7 out of 8 semesters, and the LSAT was a near-perfect predictor of law school performance.
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quote:I believe your claim that immigrants as a group have been dominant in the SAT is erroneous. Can you document it?
I think that what Irami means is "Asians" not immigrants. The majority of immigrants in the past 20 years have been latinos and I haven' t seen any evidence for an SAT bias toward latinos, if anything it goes the other way.
The stats I've seen don't separate Asian immigrants from Asian born in the US so I suspect Irami's use of the the word immigrant is wholely inaccurate.
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I didn't want to say Asians, but yeah, I meant Asians.
quote:In my case, the SAT was a very good predictor of performance in 7 out of 8 semesters, and the LSAT was a near-perfect predictor of law school performance.
Don't you wonder if a flawed standardized test is too good of a predictor, maybe the whole institution is poisoned.
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quote:Originally posted by TomDavidson: FWIW, I think the removal of the analogies section was tragic. Of course, I like analogies, so YMMV.
Ditto.
quote:Originally posted by Lyrhawn: I never really liked the section where they ask where the comma goes.
Which of the following is correct?
A. But before long, Jim, was dead. B. But, before long, Jim was dead. C. But before, long Jim was dead. D. But before long, Jim was dead.
Only C. jumps out at me as immediately wrong, unless Jim was often called "long Jim" by his friends, though I supposed that's a leap for the test. The other three all look perfectly fine depending on context and the tone the writer was intending to convey, and the style in which he wanted it read aloud.
That strikes me as an indication that you don't understand the rules of comma usage. Not a reflection on the test.
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Irami, can you substantiate the claim that Asian students cannot write well, relative to other groups?
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quote:Originally posted by Dagonee: I didn't say I think they're good or they should be continued - I don't know near enough to have an opinion. But it would be churlish not to like them on a personal level.
In my case, the SAT was a very good predictor of performance in 7 out of 8 semesters, and the LSAT was a near-perfect predictor of law school performance.
I'm not sure how you can even begin to talk about good prediction for one case. When people talk about whether standardized test (or anything else) are good predictors for college performance, they mean that there is a correlation between test scores and grades. You can't have a correlation with only one data point. The implication of "good predictor" is that people with higher scores will do better in college than people with lower scores. To know whether or not the LSAT and SAT were good predictors of your college performance, we need to know how compared to people with both higher and lower test scores. Your score alone is not enough to even speculate on a correlation.
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You can't prove a correlation with only one data point, but Dag certainly can indicate that the tests accurately predicted his performance. He's not talking about other people; he's talking about himself.
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quote:Irami, can you substantiate the claim that Asian students cannot write well, relative to other groups?
Relative to whites? Are you kidding me? We are talking about the difference between measuring the english fluency of hungry immigrants who learned english when they were 10 and whose parents who don't speak at all vs. Lowells, Cabots, and Lodges who came over on the Mayflower.
Yeah, I don't know. Are we really going pretend that the latter group isn't going to have a better educated guess on where to place a comma?
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quote:Originally posted by Icarus: You're right, Rabbit. I probably shouldn't have gone to college. *shrug*
It's not polite or ethical to twist another persons words like that.
I never made nor implied anything about your qualifications to go to college, I simply contested the claim that the SAT was in any sense an "equalizer".
I take it that you were able to demonstrate your skills on the SAT than through other measures. Great. What I'm unwilling to concede is that students who did not perform as well on the SAT as you were less deserving of a college education.
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quote:I'm not sure how you can even begin to talk about good prediction for one case.
Because I was making a joke and also bragging a little about how well I did in law school.
However, Icarus's point is well-taken. To extend it a little, standardized tests extended an opportunity to me that likely would not have existed otherwise. I was in the bottom quartile of my entering class for college GPA (see the 1 out of 8 semesters alluded to above). Without the LSATs, I most likely would not have gotten to the stage where my unusual and relevant work experience could have helped me.
In that sense, the standardized test provided the service you described above and let a student who subsequently proved his ability be admitted to the school.
Whatever we do with standardized tests, I hope some mechanism to allow such a result remains.
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quote:Irami, can you substantiate the claim that Asian students cannot write well, relative to other groups?
Relative to whites? Are you kidding me? We are talking about the difference between measuring the english fluency of hungry immigrants who learned english when they were 10 and whose parents who don't speak at all vs. Lowells, Cabots, and Lodges who came over on the Mayflower.
Yeah, I don't know. Are we really going pretend that the latter group isn't going to have a better educated guess on where to place a comma?
Are all Asians recent immigrants now? 'cause I wasn't aware of that one.
quote:Originally posted by Icarus: You're right, Rabbit. I probably shouldn't have gone to college. *shrug*
Um, I think Rabbit was saying that the test was biased against Latinos.
I'm not really approaching it from the standpoint of cultural bias at all. I'm just looking at my own educational experience. The SAT was the one and only positive indicator I had going in. Other kids withy lower SAT scores than I had had the same opportunities because of their higher grades or their better recommendations, but without the SAT, I would have had drastically reduced opportunities. It (i.e., my statement) has nothing to do with the particular happenstance that I happen to be latino. I'm sympathetic to claims of cultural bias, for obvious reasons, but I get annoyed when the SAT's worth is completely discounted, because in my particular case, it was the only accurate predictor.
I went to an extremely difficult school that prided itself on rigorous admissions standards, and to making C the true average grade for kids who would have been on the honor roll anywhere else. I watched classmate after classmate fail out of my school, go to the crosstown rival, and have their grades immediately skyrocket. My school also had vanishingly few AP offerings, because they did not believe in electives, as a general view. So our valedictorian only had a GPA of about 3.9 or 4.1, when those of other schools had GPAs pushing or exceeding 5.0. I graduated high school with a GPA just under 2.0. I also didn't have the luxury of great recommendations. When I was in high school, I was deep in a multi-year depression. I attempted suicide in ninth grade, and I was always a loner, socializing pretty much exclusively with a small group of friends, where none of us really fit into the society at my school. To anybody else, I was a quiet, possibly surly kid, certainly dark, and not involved. I was also a scholarship kid in a rich kid school, and I didn't fit in socially in any way; I was far from being a leader on campus. I didn't have anybody who would write more than a perfunctory letter of recommendation for me.
Without the SAT to say otherwise, what kind of a future would I have had? One in which it was assumed that what I was in high school was all that I could be.
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quote:Irami, can you substantiate the claim that Asian students cannot write well, relative to other groups?
Relative to whites? Are you kidding me? We are talking about the difference between measuring the english fluency of hungry immigrants who learned english when they were 10 and whose parents who don't speak at all vs. Lowells, Cabots, and Lodges who came over on the Mayflower.
Irami, Five percent of the US population or 15 million Americans identify themselves as Asian. Only 4 million of those have immigrated to the US since 1990. This suggest that 2/3 of college age Asians in the US have been hear their whole lives. To equate Asian and immigrant is inaccurate.
I have taught at the University level for more than 15 years and have read reports written by many Asian students. Those who attended high school in the US have no substantial difference in their writing skills than other students who attended US high schools. Those who immigrated to the US post high school sometimes struggle with the language but just as often, there writing is better than that of my native English speakers.
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quote:Originally posted by The Rabbit: I never made nor implied anything about your qualifications to go to college, I simply contested the claim that the SAT was in any sense an "equalizer". [Emphasis added]
It certainly was for me. I saw firsthand that not all high schools were equal, but that all kids had to take SATs of comparable difficulty.
quote:I take it that you were able to demonstrate your skills on the SAT than through other measures. Great. What I'm unwilling to concede is that students who did not perform as well on the SAT as you were less deserving of a college education. [/qb]
I'm not aware of having made this claim.
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thats just terrible, i dont care who you are, politican or regular joe, John Kerry just made a terrible mistake refering to our countrys soldiers as "un-educated", wether or not you are for this war, you cannot disrespect the people who have decided to fight it. John Kerry, I take away kudos from you. Posts: 262 | Registered: Jan 2005
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quote:Irami, can you substantiate the claim that Asian students cannot write well, relative to other groups?
Relative to whites? Are you kidding me? We are talking about the difference between measuring the english fluency of hungry immigrants who learned english when they were 10 and whose parents who don't speak at all vs. Lowells, Cabots, and Lodges who came over on the Mayflower.
Yeah, I don't know. Are we really going pretend that the latter group isn't going to have a better educated guess on where to place a comma?
Heh, I like the dichotomy of Americans there. We're all either poor, hungry and just arrived, or we're sitting on large plantations somewhere, having been here for 300 years.
On one side of my family, we're related to an American Vite President. On the other, my grandpa came over speaking French from Quebec. We must have misplaced our copy of the Mayflower Compact.
And like I said before, no one knows where those damned commas go.
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quote:Originally posted by Icarus: I'm not really approaching it from the standpoint of cultural bias at all. I'm just looking at my own educational experience.
Sorry. I completely misunderstood which part of Rabbit's posts you were responding to.
I happen to think that while certainly not the only thing college admissions should look at, SAT scores are an exceedingly useful tool.
And these days I can say that based on experience from both sides of the desk. Posts: 32919 | Registered: Mar 2003
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posted
We are talking about a test that measures where you put the comma. Look, it doesn't look like I'm doing much good here. I'm going back to my other venue for sticking it to the man.
Rabbit, I think you are great. It's always a pleasure. Everyone else, maybe you are right and I'm wrong, but I don't think so.
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quote:Originally posted by Icarus: You're right, Rabbit. I probably shouldn't have gone to college. *shrug*
It's not polite or ethical to twist another persons words like that.
It's certainly not polite to condescendingly dismiss someone's post by referring to it as "indefensible." Whether it's ethical or not is not something I presume to comment on.
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quote:Originally posted by Lyrhawn: And like I said before, no one knows where those damned commas go.
Uh-huh. And that would explain why a perfect score on the TSWE was only the 95th percentile. That's right, FIVE PERCENT of those taking the Test of Standard Written English got a perfect score.
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quote:Originally posted by TheDisgruntledPostman: thats just terrible, i dont care who you are, politican or regular joe, John Kerry just made a terrible mistake refering to our countrys soldiers as "un-educated", wether or not you are for this war, you cannot disrespect the people who have decided to fight it. John Kerry, I take away kudos from you.
Disgruntled, Did you read or listen to what John Kerry said? He never said that our country's soldiers are "uneducated". He said that if you study and learn you'll have all sorts of option and if you don't, you'll end up in Iraq. He has since clarified that he was referring to Bush and not the soldiers, but even if he had been referring to the soldiers its quite a logical stretch to get from his statements to Mig's claim that "Kerry insults US troops as uneducated". At the very most, a logical interpretation of his statement leads to the conclusion that the military may be the only option for dummies but he never said nor implied that only dummies would join the army. He is after all a veteran himself.
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quote:We are talking about a test that measures where you put the comma.
And your assertion is that Asian students don't place commas as well as white students, despite outperforming white students in every other category of the original test, and that white administrators changed the test to deliberately disadvantage Asians?
Irami, that's absolutely laughable. I understand that you want to make ubiquitous white oppression a premise of your faith, but you have to recognize that this makes you only marginally more credible than, say, a Scientologist.
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quote:And your assertion is that Asian students don't place commas as well as white students, despite outperforming white students in every other category of the original test, and that white administrators changed the test to deliberately disadvantage Asians?
quote:It's certainly not polite to condescendingly dismiss someone's post by referring to it as "indefensible."
I'm sorry you interpreted my post as an attack on you or your post. I thought I had clearly stated that the "claim" was indefensible. This was not intended to be dismissive of either you or your post but a statement of the facts as I know them. Study after study has found that SAT scores are not effective predictors of success in college. They have also found numerous biases in the tests. I have never seen a study which found otherwise. If you think your claim was defensible, defend it but don't start twisting my words into an attack on your person when no such attack was made.
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posted
Despite having absolutely no evidence of any kind for any one of those claims, namely:
1) that Asian students don't write as well as whites 2) that Asian students are doing worse now that the SAT has been changed 3) that the SAT's alterations were initiated and manipulated by a group of racists ?
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