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http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/sats/interviews/katzman.html

This is a pretty good link, an interview with the founder of 'princeton review'. He explains his perspective on the SAT. First of all, I am currently a junior in college, so this doesn't affect me. However, I am studying psychology, and find the SAT exam a very fascinating topic. A friend of mine was doing a psych. experiment involving the math section of the P-SAT test. Another friend and myself took the test just for fun, and I was quite suprised. I have taken several quarters of calculus, and several of the questions on that test were TERRIBLE, many involved 'made-up' mathematical symbols, other questions used the same symbol to denote two different things, it was bad. It should also be understood that researchers have debated for years about what 'intelligence' is, and how to define it. I have 3 lengthy books on this issue sitting at home, all written by experts, all with differing perspectives. No one seems to agree on exactly how to define 'intelligence', nor how to 'test' it. We do know the SAT does NOT measure 'intelligence'. For those of you in high school, I have some advice for you: The SAT is an imortant test, it's used for admissions, scholarship apps. etc... Get the highest score you can.

However, don't believe that reading historical literature or calculus textbooks will help you! The 'math' section of the SAT is not a 'math test', not really. It's mostly about inductive logic, familiarity with the type of questions being asked and being a good test-taker. The SAT scores can fluctuate dramatically if re-taken. ETS (educational testing services) makes a lot of claims about the SAT, sometimes even with statistics. They will tell you the increase in test/Re-test populations, but these numbers don't include students who used coaching services vs. those who didn't. Indeed, ETS seems to be quite secretive about their 'research'. ETS conducts all research 'in-house', and in these 'objective studies' they won't disclose their research methodologies or raw data to anyone. When an organization (like ETS) conducts research about the validity of their own product all by themselves, without showing anyone what methods they employed or what their raw data looks like, it's impossible to know if the research is valid or not. Further, the company 'princeton review' has asked ETS to collaborate with them and examine the data of students who take the princeton review course vs those who didn't, to see what the score differences are. Well, ETS has refused this offer at least 50 times! To quote John Katzman (president of princeton review) from the above interview:

"ETS has refused easily 50 times to do an
independent study that we both get involved
in, because it would be so easy, right? We
say, here's a list of our kids. Here's
exactly when they took the course from and
to. Go put it in a computer. ETS, you supply
all the numbers. And let's look at the prior
and the post and we'll know. Right?... It's
an easy study. And they don't want to do it.
The only time they do a study is by
themselves, not asking for any help, not
showing anybody their methodology or showing
anybody the raw data."

-Nathan

By Peach (Peach) on Friday, March 21, 2003 - 10:43 am: Edit

I agree...the SAT definitely does NOT test intelligence. Have you done any similar research on the ACT? It seems to be a better test all around. Any thoughts?

By Haiyaa (Haiyaa) on Saturday, March 22, 2003 - 08:08 pm: Edit

SAT measures a person's ability to conform to a stupid test.**

**Does not apply to all people.