Neuroscientist explains how the SAT is redefining education

35 year 1v1 private SAT coach…I know more about this than anyone… Does he have a point? Sure, but until the 90s the SAT had passages that had as few as 3 questions… Is the adaptive present day SAT Reading section easier than the old school antonyms, sentence comps, analogy…and longer passage version? Yes, it’s easier and far, far less vocabulary intensive… But it’s the math where the joke begins…forget that students couldn’t use calculators back in the day, now they have Desmos, a graphing utility, as part of the interface…this makes doing a certain cohort of algebra and quadratics ridiculously easy. Here’s a spot on analogy(pun intended)… say I gave you a box that had characters on it as buttons. You read a problem that had five of these strange characters. You pushed the buttons that corresponded to the pictures…and another picture appeared on the screen and you noticed that that picture was the same as an answer choice… That’s what students can now do…they get the right answer but they have near zero idea of what the characters represent or what the answer means.

Great stuff. Do you know who this is or where it came from?

Jared Cooney Horvath

A current Board of Ed member (running for re-election) excused abysmal 'reading' scores by saying 3rd graders can read, but they don't comprehend what they've read well enough to answer 'tough questions'. A designation w/o a difference, imo & a complete failure of his education system.

Sounds like he is actually observing how the SAT, and education, has surrendered to social media. Read, don't skim... 🤨

Results matter. All the blah blah in the world won't change the fact that remedial English and Math are being taught at the college level.

What he is saying is absolutely true. I had to learn skimming in post-grad classes because the volume of reading expected was voluminous. Back in the day, what he’s describing was known as speed reading. Kids need to master the old-school way first before they adopt the quick method.

He did a "that's not X, it's Y"! He did another "that's not X, it's Y"! Is this just an LLM in a skinsuit? Where did it get the skin??

why does he sound like an LLM?

I love it when people passionately deliver speeches clearly written by LLM’s

Constant flashing, changing images that you control hacks and ruins kid's brains by interfering with the ability to focus and concentrate and retain. They don't read books because they can't. It's a chemical dopamine fed process, an addiction. Tech caused it to happen by accident by some designers, then with intent by others. Public ed is designed to create obedient followers, not independent thinker/creators.

that’s no progress, that is surrender

He’s misrepresenting the new format. I’m not saying it’s better or worse, but it’s not just one sentence and a fact-based question. The passages are shorter, but the questions vary from vocab to main idea to main purpose to fact to inference, etc. And the new SAT tests reading comp among a wider range of subject matter, though the old historical passages are gone.

The new format indeed has short passages, but you cannot “skim” and do well. A majority of questions require moderate or high-level inferencing.

@JeremiahWJohn It’s also graphic novels. Kids don’t want to read actual chapter books because they’re “too long.”🙄

"That's not progress, that is surrender" Literally GPT-generated speech. Hot take: skimming is a skill that has become and will continue to be FAR more important than detailed reading comprehension, it's the only skill that allows a young person to navigate the world of big data

I'd like to see the racial breakdown on those reading-comprehension test scores.

We are getting dumber and our education system (along with the SATs) are assisting.

why does he sound like an LLM? "that's not X, that's Y" 😆 🤦‍♂️ 🤨 but otherwise yeah

To add some specifics to the discussion, here is a training question provided by the College Board, to check if it matches the description.

@conservmillen That's been happening for decades. It's called "teaching to the test" and "dumbing down".

Maybe I should go back to handwashing my dishes. The new SAT is flawed in many ways, but this is not an accurate depiction of the test nor is it its greatest flaws.

Bring back the SAT from the 90s.

Kids should be taking the same SAT questions as their parents took and their grandparents took. Or at the least a high percentage (90%) of the questions especially in math should be the same questions.

The REASON why we do it like this is to give stupid ass ni33ers and 3rd world immigrants a way to have less than legally retarded scores. Half of black people are legally classified as retarded based on IQ

read(v.) Middle English reden, ireden, "to counsel, advise," also "to read," from Old English rædan, gerædan (West Saxon), redan, geredan (Anglian) "to advise, counsel, persuade; discuss, deliberate; rule, guide; arrange, equip; forebode; to read (observe and apprehend)

Who is this man

Love the CLT, but this is unlikely to explain why College Board made this change. The SAT is less valuable as a measure of ability; its main value is as a predictor of college success. (If they have diluted the signal value, you should be happy!)

@grok please provide a transcript of this video

I can explain to you how quantum mechanics redefined classical mechanics.

This is funny. We all know how the smart kids got good reading comprehension SAT scores back in the 750 word paragraph days. We never read the paragraph. We read the questions and skimmed to find the answers. No written test can assess reading comprehension.

From inference to reflective repetition

The College Board has driven education for decades and profited by doing so. Tests like the CLT are a better option. More colleges are adopting it.

@conservmillen A placement exam is not teaching kids how to “skim”. Blame that on the entire curriculum.

Is this true? Scary stuff, if so