Word: maths
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...what the College Board was and, more important, what it could be, I saw the power to do much more than they were doing in the past to improve education." Under his watch, the board is issuing quite specific recommendations about what schools should teach--for instance, math lessons should include radical equations (such as 5 (square root of x) + 14 = 20; x = 1.44). Also, the board says most students should double the amount of time they spend writing (a laudable but pricey goal: some schools will have to initiate a round of hiring, since their teachers barely have time...
...technical language will also increase in math. For instance, in the past, an SAT item might have stipulated that group A has 10 members and group B has 10 + 5x members, where x = 3. What's the total number in both groups? Add the 10 from group A and the 10 + (5 x 3) from group B. You get 35. But on the New SAT, the question might read, "What is the union of sets A and B?" Union and set are terms of art for mathematicians; a "union of two sets" is everything in both sets. The answer...
...statistical analysis of one math question that had been rewritten to include a specialized math term. We can't print the question because it may appear on a future SAT, but I can report this: when the specialized term was added, the percentage of students who got the right answer in a field trial fell, from 68% to 21%--a staggering decline of 47 percentage points. Who are all those students who could do the math but didn't know the specialized language...
...test that measures verbal, quantitative and figural reasoning abilities, irrespective of any one curriculum. (In the quantitative section, for instance, a question asked students to figure out the next number in the following series: 2, 7, 11, 14, 16. You can get the answer without knowing much math. Notice that the numbers ascend by 5 (7 - 2), 4 (11 - 7), 3 (14 - 11) and so on. The answer...
Reliability is a measure of a test's precision from one administration to the next--a gauge of how much noise, or measurement error, it has eliminated. The standard error of measurement for a typical SAT is about 30 points for the math section and 30 for the verbal. That's why the College Board tries to get students and admissions officers to think of scores not as pinpoints but as ranges: if you get 510 on the SAT's math section, your "true" score is anywhere between...