Word: teste
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...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...
Before the test began on each of the three Saturdays, the students filled out a questionnaire that asked them about their fatigue level, mood and confidence. They completed the questionnaire again at a break in the middle of the test and once more at the end. Together, all of these provided a sort of fever chart of the students' energy and anxiety throughout the experience...
When the researchers scored the results, it came as no surprise that volunteers' fatigue and stress rose steadily as the test got longer. What was unexpected was their corresponding performance: as the length of the test increased, so did the students' scores. The average score on the three-and-a-half hour test was 1,209 out of 1,600. On the four-and-a-half-hour version it was 1,222; on the five-and-a-half-hour test it was 1,237. Virtually all of the students followed that pattern...
...range of the scores was from about 800 to 1,600," says Ackerman. "[But] within the study, lower-scoring examinees were not more or less affected by longer test lengths than higher-scoring examinees." (See pictures of the college dorm's evolution...
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...