Word: sat
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Another concern raised by the work is the fact that the College Board sponsored it. The College Board is, of course, also the sponsor of the SAT. The study's positive results are likely to be welcomed by the Board, which added a writing section to the SAT in 2005, extending the test from its previous three-hour length to three hours and 45 minutes. The move elicited criticism from educators and parents, who said the test had gotten too long to be a fair assessment of an exhaustible student's true abilities...
...many factors that contribute to poor performance on standardized tests like the SAT, nerves and exhaustion, surprisingly, may not rank very high. In fact, according to a new paper published in Journal of Experimental Psychology, a little anxiety - not to mention fatigue - might actually be a very good thing...
...study was conducted by psychology professors Phillip Ackerman and Ruth Kanfer of Georgia Tech. They recruited 239 college freshman in the Atlanta area, each of whom agreed to take three different versions of the SAT reasoning test given on three consecutive Saturday mornings. The tests would take three-and-a-half hours, four-and-a-half hours and five-and-a-half-hours, and would be administered in a random order to each of the students. To boost the stress level in the students - who had already taken the SAT in the past and gotten into college - Ackerman and Kanfer...
Certainly, the subjects' increasing familiarity with the test may have helped account for the improvement; this is just what happens in the real world, after all, when students take the SAT multiple times in an attempt to boost their scores. But in the real world, the test doesn't keep getting longer; here it did - and yet the scores marched higher all the same. What the researchers believe explains the improvement is fatigue - or more precisely, what the fatigue represents. A feeling of exhaustion is often a stand-in for anxiety. Most students - particularly comparatively high achievers who have already...
...that more students respond to feelings of fatigue by increasing rather than decreasing their efforts." This, however, could reveal a flaw in the study. By limiting the sample group to college freshman, the researchers did not get a look at an entire category of kids: those who took the SAT in high school, did poorly, and never went on with their education. There's no way of knowing whether achievement motivation was absent in those students or whether they redoubled their efforts too, but got low scores for other reasons...