SAT Challenge
drorzel | December 6, 2011A blog run by the Washington Post featured a post on Monday about an adult taking and failing a standardized test, who was later revealed as school board member Rick Roach:
Roach, the father of five children and grandfather of two, was a teacher, counselor and coach in Orange County for 14 years. He was first elected to the board in 1998 and has been reelected three times. A resident of Orange County for three decades, he has a bachelor of science degree in education and two masters degrees: in education and educational psychology. He has trained over 18,000 educators in classroom management…
drorzel | October 10, 2006We had a general faculty meeting today at work. As a general rule, I don't talk about the details of internal campus politics, and I am not going to discuss the substance of the meeting here. The new SAT was brought up, though, and a couple of people made comments of the general form "Nobody knows what to make of the new SAT writing test..."
I'd be lying if I said I wasn't tempted to mention the Blogger SAT Challenge. Discretion is the better part of tenure, though, so I kept my mouth shut...
It's a pity. That kind of opportunity doesn't come around often...
drorzel | October 9, 2006The Blogger SAT Challenge made the front page of Slashdot last week, making a huge spike in the traffic here, and bringin this blog to the attention to this blog-- I've had a half-dozen emails and comments from students and colleagues who hadn't seen the blog before.
Of course, after a blitz of posts associated with the unveiling of the Challenge, I pretty much reverted to being the King of the Physical Science Channel, and didn't post anything more about it. Dave Munger has kept talking about it, though, and has posted a lot of interesting material, including comments on his own essay, an…
drorzel | October 2, 2006Visit the Official Blogger SAT Challenge site.
After the grading was finished, a few of our volunteer graders made general comments about the essays they read. One thing that really jumped out at me about this was the way that the problems they described sounded like exactly the sort of thing you would expect from a bunch of bloggers:
(Continued after the cut.)
I'll leave the names off, to be polite, so here's Grader One:
I was struck by the number of people who wrote essays without apparently thinking the directions applied to them. They made assumptions about the assignment, or decided…
drorzel | October 2, 2006So, how did I score in the Blogger SAT Challenge? (Because this is all about me, after all...)
Here's my entry. I'm not terribly proud of it, but it got a score of 4 from the graders. Looking more closely, one grader generously gave it a 5/6, while the other gave it a 3/6, presumably because it didn't have a clear enough argument.
All in all, I think that's fair. It wanders around a bit, and equivocates about whether to agree or disagree with the quote. Reading it, you pretty much get to see my thought processes while writing it-- I stared at the question for a minute or two, then started re-…
drorzel | October 2, 2006Visit the Official Blogger SAT Challenge Site
The graph shows a histogram of the scores for the essays entered into the Blogger SAT challenge. It's really a pretty nice distribution, with an average score of 2.899, a standard deviation of 1.28, and a standard deviation of the mean of 0.123 (so I'd make my students write it as "2.9 +/- 0.1"). The median and mode were both 3.
(Well, OK, we cheated a little on the stats to make life easier-- the scores were averaged and then rounded up. If we keep the half-integer scores, the mean drops to 2.7 +/- 0.1, and the distribution looks a little more…
drorzel | October 2, 2006We're very pleased to announce the unveiling of the official Blogger SAT Challenge web site. "We" in this case meaning "me and Dave Munger, plus some other people who know more about computers than we do."
The site, run on the ScienceBlogs framework, allows you to view each of the 109 entries submitted to the Challenge, and rate them for yourself hot-or-not style. You can also see the score given to each essay by the expert graders, a fine collection of volunteers who each read a big stack of these things for no other reason than we asked. Thanks again, David Bruggeman, Suzi D, Elisa Davis,…