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Truth About Standardized Test Scores
The College Board home page has this glowing news about how "SAT� Math Scores for 2005 Highest on Record", which of course they know is the mantra du jour which will be repeated ad infinitum by mediots who wouldn't dare check with the College Board's own data, much less challenge such a "positive" statement about the state of US education. After all, we have a war on terror to fight, so how does accuracy in media advance THAT cause (plus isn't it racist and sexist to do so)? Let's be racists and sexists and analyze the FACTS on the College Board's own web site which by themselves prove the headline to be a LIE--without even correcting how they LIED with statistics on top of that. Their page "Table 2: Mean SAT Scores of College-Bound Seniors, 1967–2005*" reports that SAT Verbal scores between 1967 and 2005 for girls dropped a whopping 40 points from 545 to 505, and for boys a whopping 27 points, from 540 to 513. They also hope that the mediots who repeat the mantra du jour don't question the following simple truths:
Between 1967 and 2005, there was no increase in math scores, even by the SAT's own biased estimates. The combined 67 point drop in verbal scores can hardly be described as "higher than ever". Had they been HONEST about it, they would have included the 69 point drop in scores from 975 in 1960 to 906 in 1975 by the old scale. Instead, by the new, or "recentered" scale, between 1967 and 1974, they report only that verbal scores dropped from 543 to 521 or 22 points and that math scores dropped from 516 to 505, or 11 points, for a total drop of only 33 points. The lion's share of the drop in scores, another 36 points, occurred BEFORE the 1967 starting point of this table. It's precisely this knee jerk change in the statistic, the critical part of any statistical analysis, which the College Board omits from its charts, data, tables, reports, and analyses, and this is called "LYING With Statistics 101". For "men" [read: the American couch potato who WILL believe this feminazi LIE] to understand this, let's put the stats in sports terms. This would be like reporting the three points the Forty Niners got in the last three quarters while ignoring the 12 points the Rams got and the zero points that the Forty Niners got in the first quarter. Unless you know the first part, how would you know that the Forty Niners had already
lost the game? Unless you consider WHY scores suddenly started to drop, and WHEN,
howcan you even begin to trace the source of the problem?
Numbers in Red are estimates.
From 1960 to 1980 SAT scores decreased 85 points, from 975 to 890, an "inexplicable" event which some have attributed to the banning of school prayer by the Supreme Court in July 1963. In addition, the National Association of Scholars reports in "Academic Questions" that a person taking the SAT in 1990 would have scored 23-35 points higher than he scored on the 1960 test. Between 1980 and 1995, the scores increased 20 points, for a net decrease of 88-100 points.Was this 20 point increase real? This is hard to determine for certain because of changes in the questions on the test, and re-centering of the test scores. Was there an improvement in academic performance? A disclaimer by NCES that SAT scores increased 14 points during the same timeframe that ACT scores remained flat suggests that at least 14 of this 20 point increase was not due to improved academic performance after 1991:
The actual state of US education in 1995 was 102-114 SAT points lower than it was in 1960, the equivalent of 51-57 TIMSS points, and 20-23 NAEP points.
http://nces.ed.gov/pubs/ce/c9622d02.html
NUMBER OF TEST TAKERS DECLINES Educators almost uniformly insist that this 102-114 point decrease in SAT scores is due to an increase in the percent of students taking the test, which implies that a decrease in the median quality of the students taking the test is the root problem. But, at the least, between 1972 and 1980, this was definitely not the case. The number of test takers declined from 1,023,000 to 992,000, while scores decreased 36 points, and as the number of both 18 year olds and high school graduates increased. If this had been a factor, then the larger number of students graduating combined with a smaller number taking the SAT should have caused an *increase*, rather than a 36 point decrease, in scores. In addition, the percent of the US population which took the SAT during that time decreased from 0.5% to 0.41%.
INCREASE IN MINORITY TEST-TAKERS REDUCES SCORES 35 POINTS The percent of test takers who are minorities increased from zero in 1973 to thirty one percent in 1995. Minorities' median SAT score is 833, which is 113 points lower than the 946 SAT score for whites in 1995. If all test takers in 1995 were whites, average SAT scores would have been 36 points higher, or 946 rather than 910.
COMPARING TIMSS TO SAT AND NAEP International comparisons can be made between education factors like classroom size, education spending, teachers' sex, and school prayer by correlating these standardized test scores as follows:
CLASSROOM SIZE When the eighth grade TIMSS Math scores are correlated to the average number of students per classroom for the various countries for which all of the data is available, it is seen that adding one additional student to a classroom increases TIMSS scores by four points. Thus it is likely that the decrease in the average number of students in US schools from 29 in 1960 to 24 in 1996 caused a decrease in math skills which is equivalent to 20 TIMSS points, or 10 SAT Math point.. EDUCATION SPENDING A similar analysis of the relationship of education spending to eighth grade TIMSS Math scores shows that a one percent increase in the percent of GDP a country spends for education reduces scores by forty TIMSS points. Thus it is likely that the increase from 4.8% to 7.6% of US GDP spent for education in the last four decades caused a decrease in math skills which is equivalent to a 112 TIMSS point decrease, or 56 SAT Math points. PERCENT OF GIRLS TAKING TEST The percent of test takers who are girls increased from 49.5% to 52.5% which decreased the median SAT Math score by 2 points. TEACHERS' SEX Similarly, each 1% increase in the percent of teachers who are men in the countries whose eighth graders participated in TIMSS increases their score by five points. Thus it is likely that the decrease in the US in the last 4 decades of the percent of teachers who are men from 31.3% to 25.6% caused a decrease in math skills which is equivalent to 28.5 TIMSS points, or 14 SAT Math Points. This means that the actual state of US education after taking into account the increase in minorities taking the SAT test was 66-78 SAT points lower in 1995 than in 1960:
STATE OF US EDUCATION WITHOUT DECREASE American 13 year olds scored second from last in the International Assessment of Education Progress taken in 1991, ahead of only Jordan. The crosslink studies between the National Assessment of Education Progress and the IAEP show that the District of Columbia ranks behind Jordan, that California ranks lower than the US average, and that the highest scoring state, North Dakota, ranks between the US average and Taiwan.
North Dakota scored 107 SAT Math points higher than California and 100 points higher than the national average. Had it not been for this 67-78 point decrease in SAT scores, the US would have been 22 to 33 points lower than North Dakota on the above graph. The distribution of scores between California and North Dakota, whose average SAT Math scores are different by 107 points, would look like the following with a standard deviation of 70 points. In other words, there might be only a small overlap between the high end of California's students and the low end of North Dakota's, which may be the case between the various countries participating in TIMSS.
TIMSS (The Third International Math and Science Study) This study shows a similar relationship of American 8th grade math scores to the rest of the world. California and Louisiana were below the US average, which was one of the lowest scoring countries in the study. North Dakota ranked ahead of the US average, about midway between us and the highest scoring countries. Had US education quality not decreased the equivalent of 20-23 NAEP points since 1960 we would have ranked ahead of France and Israel and slightly behind Hungary and Switzerland. Because the majority of the non-public schools are religious schools which teach religion, ethics, morals, spirituality, and Christianity (just as the public schools in most of those countries which rank so far ahead of us do, and just as our schools did prior to the banning of school prayer) this is approximately where most of them rank today:
EIGHTH VERSUS TWELFTH GRADE SCORES Comparing 8th grade scores understates the problem because the last four years of a student's education is the most important part, and 8th grade scores miss that part. Of fourteen countries whose 12th graders participated in TIMSS Math, the boys in eight of those countries scored higher than the 8th grade math score, and those in 6 countries scored lower. In the US, 12th grade boys scored 45 points lower and 12th grade girls scored 76 points lower. Where Swiss 8th graders scored 46 points higher than ours in math, their 12th grade boys scored 102 points higher than our boys and 133 points higher than our girls.
GRADUATE RECORD EXAMINATION VERBAL SCORES DOWN 57 POINTS Between 1965 and 1996 scores on the verbal section of the GRE decreased 57 points, while the scores in some subjects http://nces.ed.gov/pubs/digest97/d97t311.html like education and chemistry increased. Education majors scored consistently 150 to 200 points lower than chemistry majors until 1994 when education majors' scores suddenly jumped 31 points. As there was no national program to improve the quality of education majors or teachers which would have been responsible for this jump, it's likely that this is due to a change in the test itself.
The US Department of Education makes a big issue of the reported 12 point "increase" in the SAT Math scores of blacks and Whites between 1986 and 1997. The problem is that other test scores like ACT show that test scores during that time remained flat or even decreased. The scoring of the SAT clearly changed, which means that the SAT is no longer valid in comparing data prior to this change to data after the change. It is intentionally misleading. They also ignore that "multiculturalism" in education caused an increase in inter-racial marriages, and that the offspring of blacks and Whites are still characterized as "black" even though their test scores fall between the average for blacks and the average for Whites. The upper two percentile of college bound black women score in the same range as the median scores of college bound White men. It's more significant that this race mixing did not cause black scores to increase. CONCLUSION: SCHOOL PRAYER To deny that SAT scores are down, thus denying that education quality in the US is abysmal, is to insist that US education quality has always been in last place in the world. There is no question that the US had a reasonable education system before the Supreme Court banned school prayer in 1963. The only question is whether or not this reduction in SAT scores is representative of an actual decrease in IQs. Only those countries which banned or de-emphasized school prayer have experienced such severe problems in education as the US has. Nobody can claim to have benefited from the resulting decrease in education quality and incomes and personal savings, and the increase in crime and prisons and illegitimacy and divorce, which resulted from this single heinous act.
CRIMINAL JOHN MOORES FLAUNTS PROPOSITION 209, AGAINST THE WILL OF WE THE PEOPLE
A PUBLIC STATEMENT TO STATE ENEMY JOHN MOORES Not a single unqualified nigger, latrino, chicano, Hispanic, or other mud has a *right* to attend public universities at taxpayers' expense. Our public universities receive tax dollars for the express purpose of educating the educable, not social engineering to make the uneducable "feel good" about themselves If you enjoy this open discussion web site, you are welcome to in any amount to enable it to expand |
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Modified Wednesday, August 08, 2007 Copyright @ 2007 by Fathers' Manifesto & Christian Party
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