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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   30254 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 18, 2023

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The core problem with the SAT is that it’s much more common to get high scores on the math section than the verbal section.

780-800 on math is like 97-99th percentile, some places online suggest you need a perfect 800 for 99th percentile. Meanwhile you can hit like 755 or 760 on verbal and that’s 99th percentile for that section. For the most elite colleges, this essentially means that verbal scores matter much more at the ultra high end, and colleges know this. Someone with a 1500 composite score is almost always just another kid with a perfect or near perfect math section and good verbal. Someone with a 1600 is someone with truly exceptional verbal IQ.

The problem lies in inherent issues with spatial IQ as measured by math questions. The SAT math section can’t have math that every high schooler doesn’t know for reasons of fairness. This aside, even adding harder math questions would measure math knowledge as much as pure IQ (a lot of AP math is methods anyway). Raven’s matrices and literal shape rotation problems solve this - the idea is immediately obvious and they can scale in difficulty to pretty insane levels - but that would drop the act about the SAT not being a pure IQ test.

(If you believe theories of group-level verbal tilt, this arguably gives Jews a minor ‘unfair’ advantage for elite college admissions because smart Jews, per that theory, would be more likely to have great verbal and merely good quant scores than other groups with more even ability; it’s pretty unproven though afaik).

That's a good point about the math section being easier, because it definitely is (at least for the super high levels). But isn't the verbal section skewed towards native speakers with native-speaker parents? how the heck is someone who immigrated as a teenager, with non-English speaking parents, ever supposed to do well on the verbal section no matter how smart he is? It's not like they offer a Chinese language version of the SAT. (there is the AP Chinese test, which is something I guess)

Why is the verbal section so much more heavily g-loaded? Does it contain logic puzzles or something? I have never taken an sat (and took the act decades ago)

It's just that they chose easier math problems.

Some of the verbal sections are relatively difficult interpretive questions, with subtle reasons why one of the answers was right, and the other wrong.

I did about equally well between math and verbal on both the SAT and PSAT, but verbal always felt like it had several questions that I was not certain between two of the choices and going with the answer that felt slightly more likely than the other, whereas the math I always knew what I was doing, had no problems working anything out and just occasionally made stupid mistakes.

The SAT has significant clipping, particularly for math (though math scores and verbal scores are correlated; scaling the verbal score would give you a meaningful signal of math capabilities >800). You could add harder questions and get a more meaningful metric, and these questions aren't particularly difficult to construct, even ignoring exposure to advanced math topics in school. The issue is that elite universities don't want a bunch of exceptional shape rotators: they want to provide a reproduction ground for the elite, who need to be smart but not potential Von Neumanns.

There is no problem with the SATs, institutionally: they give universities what they want.

A lot of this feels like the idea that the left holds all the institutional power. They recreated the SAT to make it hard for math people to stand out but verbal to be the big separator. It also seems like the new test favors females versus boys. The changes overall seem to be better for blue tribe versus red tribe. It may only be a small shift but it’s another advantage they have built into the system.

I understand that its not straightforward to write difficult math questions that do not require any advanced knowledge but with how easy the SAT/ACT math sections are it feels like they're not even trying. The AMC/AIME contain multiple questions each year that require no special knowledge and are harder than the hardest question on the SAT. Here's one nice example https://artofproblemsolving.com/wiki/index.php/1985_AIME_Problems/Problem_6 solving it requires no knowledge beyond area of a triangle = 1/2 base * height and basic equation solving but I bet many 800 math scorers would still struggle, especially with time pressure.

Questions with combinatorics and counting are highly g loaded because you need to know the 'trick' or shortcut , which involves certain symmetries or patterns, instead of brute forcing it , but at the same time the actual math is not conceptually advanced.

The problem lies in inherent issues with spatial IQ as measured by math questions. The SAT math section can’t have math that every high schooler doesn’t know for reasons of fairness.

For what it's worth, I always chalked the far higher variance in the verbal section to the fact that math questions (almost always) have exactly one correct answer, while the verbal section plays a lot more into social expectations of how you interpret texts and questions, and doesn't quantify well.

I scored pretty well, but not 800, on verbal (and like many, higher on math) and felt that many of the multiple-choice questions had ambiguous answers in which at least two could be, arguably -- and I probably could have written a few paragraphs of justification -- interpreted as correct. I'm not going to claim that I deserved a higher score, but at some level it felt like the meta-game was determining which answer a College Board test writer would interpret as correct.

at some level it felt like the meta-game was determining which answer a College Board test writer would interpret as correct.

Absolutely; this was the bane of my existance when I was in my standardised testing years. With the quant sections I knew how well I had done pretty much as soon as I had checked over my answers during the test itself, with the verbal section there was always a lot more inherent variance based on which option was the supposedly "correct" one.

That just means you’re not as good at verbal though. I very consistently do extremely well on verbal sections and there are people who can consistently hit 800 on the SAT’s variant. They’re not inconsistent and there is pretty much always an obvious best answer. And I never studied examiner dictionaries or grading guidelines, it’s not scrabble or a spelling bee.

I think it's trickier than that, though. I've got this fairly strong memory of a multiple choice verbal question along the lines of

'How does Alcohol impact driving skills

A) Strongly negatively B) Negatively C) Significantly Negatively D) Positively '

Where I'm sure they wanted the exact wording of the pamphlet in hindsight, but it's also somewhat absurd to mark any of A-C as incorrect.

Fair enough, I definitely agree I'm less good at verbal compared to quant. The other thing that always ground my gears was the fact that we got more time per question on the quant section compared to the verbal section, they were giving 1:15 or so per quant question and like 0:50 per verbal question, even though the quant sections were stuff you could spit out answers to in 0:30 while the verbal stuff often required reading a passage, which used up the 0:50 you had per question.

Where does that theory come from anyway? Jews are clearly way overrepresented in high quant ability too. Are they all that skewed toward being wordcels?

Jews are extremely overrepresented in both, but there’s some evidence of relatively higher representation in verbal fields, eg. Jews are overrepresented by 700% among math professors but 1300% among law professors. As with any Kierkegaard theory it’s highly questionable and shouldn’t be taken as fact.

Some have argued, separately, that physics is really more of a hybrid or perhaps even primarily verbal field than a quant field.

Couldn't that have to do with network effects counting for more in Verbal pursuits, since it's less objective who the 'best' law professor is whilst mathematics can be tangibly measured far more easily?

Some have argued, separately, that physics is really more of a hybrid or perhaps even primarily verbal field than a quant field.

But physics is applied math. Theoretical physics is not uncommonly on forefront of math or indistinguishable from pure maths.

You might say that some pure maths is also a verbal field, I've taken semester long courses in pure mathematics where there was not a single number at any point (other than 0 or 1, but even then they didn't represent the numbers 0 and 1 as commonly used).

No indexed sequences, even? Was it all category theory?

Always has been.

Ah, there were indexed sequences, you are right about that. It was a highly complex Abstract Algebra course, but there were sequences of Ideals.

Maybe I should change my claim to "did not use numbers for any purpose beyond kindergarten counting".

Still sounds suspect. No explicit examples worked out all semester?

I was a math major, and I don't find this suspect at all. Beyond 100-level courses, college math is primarily about logic, often applied to numbers, but also often applied to non-numbers. It would be entirely reasonable for a full semester of a class not to involve any engagement with numbers beyond the kind of basic everyday stuff, and explicit examples would be irrelevant, because those examples wouldn't involve numbers anyway. A majority of college-level math is writing essays.

However, on that note, I would say that I disagree with the notion that this would make math, or certain types of math, a verbal field. The fact that it's primarily about writing essays doesn't make it verbal, because the essays are based around rigorous rules of logic, which is what makes it a quant field, rather than a verbal field where such rules just don't matter.

Probably the class that stood out to me the most as having basically zero concrete examples that cash out on the level of actual numerals was differentiable manifolds. Who the hell wants to actually describe any concrete examples of those objects all the way down to the level of numerals?! That just sounds painful. I mean, maybe there was like one simple example of a problem on a torus way back in the introduction part of the course, just to give a nod to the idea that one could go get at real problems, but I actually don't remember anything other than like, "Oh, here is an example of how the state space of a dynamical system could be represented as a torus or a cylinder, or..." but stopping short of actually solving any particular problem on them.

I believe him. For tertiary math education the actual numbers are mostly irrelevant. Consequently the undergrads/profs don't bother and just use "some constant C" or in the rare occasions numbers mostly < 10 or 100.

There were, but I don't remember numbers being used, Just stuff like Z to represent the integers with x,y elements of z, never explicitly saying x = 12, z = 25 or whatever.

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I think part of the issue is that a verbal/spatial split is not the same as a verbal/quantitative split. Something like theoretical math or physics might actually be more verbal than it is spatial even though it falls on the quant side of the verbal/quant split.

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