Post#64 » by shrink » Mon May 26, 2008 7:07 am
There is a good debate going on right now regarding the usefulness of the ACT, SAT and other standardized tests. Many colleges and universities have decided to remove mandatory testing for its applicants.
First, you should know that both tests are only created to predict success in a student's first year of college, so be careful about saying it doesn't predict how well you'll do in college (as a whole) because its not designed to. Each question in the test is constantly tested against the success of the college freshmen. If a question tends to be answered correctly by high performing freshmen, and answered incorrectly by low performing freshmen, it is kept in the test. If "right or wrong" it doesn't identify (seperate out) those people, it is removed. For example, a question like, "What's 1 + 1?" would be thrown out because good and bad performing freshmen would get it right. A question like "Convert Rosie O'Donnell's weight into stones." would be tossed because everyone gets it wrong.
Even though each question is tested, they aren't all perfectly reliable. For example, maybe most successful future collegiate freshmen can find the area of a semi-circle with a perimeter of 12 inches, but maybe the poor student who delivers pizzas for Papa John's just happened to read it in a corporate memo. Anyway, that's why you have to answer a bunch of questions -- so that a poor future student doesn't just happen to know just enough to answer those specific questions.
And even when you consider that, the overall score is only 50% reliable at predicting future freshmen success. "Class rigor" is a better indicator than the test, and GPA is close. However, the latter is hard to quantify, and different schools may inflate their grades, so you can see why colleges looked to standardized testing to get the kids out of their high school and compete on a more level playing field, all answering the same questions.
Mayo's high score may, or may not be because of hard work. It has been proven that kids can increase their scores with hard work, tutoring, etc. However, we don't know if Mayo did these things to get a high score.
I am still happy to see he did so well. I think good players become stars in the NBA because they want tio do their best. however, some limit that part of their character to just basketball. Perhaps Mayo wants to do everything as well as he can? He was going to get in to college even if he got a low score.
