Now, if you take the ACT data for 2010, Iowa is around 15th, but with a much higher participation rate.
Look at Maine! Maine is ranked dead last, 51st, on the SAT list, but 5th on the ACT list, up there with a lot of East Coast states whose students didn't do so well on the SAT list. New York is 46th on one list and 4th on the other.
Why the difference in Iowa's rank? And why the huge difference in Maine's rank?
Biases in the test-takers is likely to be at work. ACT has its mothership in Iowa City, meaning that Iowa is likely to be pushing the ACT for political-economic ties. In my experience, only seasoned test-takers in Iowa take the SAT. The ACT is "good enough" for most people, but because of the additional practice and the inherent variance of the tests, you can get a higher personal best simply by more tests (personal note from an MIT grad: I took each test 6 times, once per year from 7th grade to 12th grade). Thus it is likely that Iowans hoping to get into a selective school are more likely to take the SAT. A similar effect is probably at work with the ACT in states like Massachusetts --- lower participations rates in these states are being caused by forces which select for the best test-takers and smartest students.
Making the SAT difficult to take in Iowa might help the state look the best in the SAT rankings, even though the ACT is HQ'ed in Iowa City. But most of all, reading too much into improperly gathered rankings is dangerous.
5 comments:
In Maine ALL students must take the SAT's as a way of doing a state assessment. It basically gives the state a cheap but probably ineffective way of doing assessments.
Anyway the result is that we suddenly are doing more poorly overall compared to the rest of the country. Hmm.. I wonder why?
Yah, dad said pretty much everything I was thinking of. Maine is rather messed up in the testing division. I wonder if these scores could be normalized to participation effectively? I feel like Maine gets enough of a bad rap when it comes to things like this, as it is...
What would be fair in comparing schools? The top 5%? The top 50%? Only the scores of kids who come in with a strong work ethic?
My post wasn't meant to knock Maine at all. Maine scores 5th on the ACT test, which is impressive. My point was that if Maine (or any other state) is awesome or terrible using two very similar metrics, the metrics are probably flawed, rather than the education system of a state being terrible.
Well, if say the upper 30% of the country's high school students take the SAT's and 100% of Maine's students take it, then all of Maine's students are compared to the nation's 30% the results are to be expected.
I had this idea that in MA, the ACT was what you took if you didn't think your SAT scores would get you into the college you wanted -- take the ACTs too in an attempt to beef up your packet with higher scores, leave them out if they didn't improve your case. Judging by how well MA does, though, I'm probably wrong about that...
[I took the SATs once, but I know lots of folks who took them several times the same year, working for better scores. Wonder how that plays into the data -- seemed to me that that the people who did that were usually above the average to start with anyways.]
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