Word: verbalism
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...items. Two types of SAT questions are vanishing: those frustrating little analogies ("somnolent is to wakeful" as "graceful is to clumsy") and the quirky math items that ask you to compare two complex quantities (see chart on next page for an example). Instead of the venerable math and verbal sections, the test will have three segments that will be more familiar to Americans: the three Rs, reading, writing and arithmetic. (Hence a perfect score will go from...
...also says that the "SAT has changed remarkably little over the years," which is true only in the most basic sense: it still examines verbal and mathematical skills. Even so, the question types have changed dramatically. The first Scholastic Aptitude Test, which was given on June 23, 1926, included "Artificial Language" and logic sections that would seem bizarre to today's SAT takers. (A practice question asked students to translate a gibberish sentence--"OK entcola kon"--based on a given lexicon.) Similarly, IQ tests look quite different from the SAT. The Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale, the most widely used...
...exam first published in 1971 that Lohman helped revise two years ago. The ITED is your basic achievement test: it assesses how well kids have learned such class exercises as setting up science experiments, reading social studies passages, and spelling. The CogAT, by contrast, is a 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...
...speech, Atkinson called for U.C. to "require only standardized tests that assess mastery of specific subject areas rather than undefined notions of 'aptitude.'" Why the switch? "Last year," he said, "I visited an upscale private school and observed a class of 12-year-old students studying verbal analogies in anticipation of the SAT. I learned that they spend hours each month--directly and indirectly--preparing for the SAT, studying long lists of analogies such as 'untruthful is to mendaciousness' as 'circumspect is to caution.' The time involved was not aimed at developing the students' reading and writing abilities but rather...
...admissions officers will only compromise so much. The Ivy League uses a number called the Academic Index (AI), which Bowen says he invented, to measure applicants’ classroom qualifications. The index is the sum of three components: the average of students’ highest SAT I math and verbal scores divided by ten; the average of their three highest SAT II achievement test scores divided by ten; and their class rank converted to a 20-to-80 scale. A student who answered every question wrong on every SAT he took and placed last in his class would have...