By Steve Sailer
09/09/2023
An anonymous reader writes in reply to my endorsing Florida endorsing the Classical Learning Test as a peer of the SAT and ACT in order to promote competition in the stagnant college admission testing cartel:
Florida has been considering adding the CLT for quite a while, so it’s been in the news from time to time. At first, I thought it would be some sort of nutty thing like a trivium rhetorical test, reading Latin and Greek, and religion. But there’s an example exam on the website that you can do yourself, and I did a bit of it and it’s really pretty well done. The reading samples are quite good, some of them are taken from classical 19th century, literature, the non-florid branch of 19th century literature, and the questions require a lot of eduction and inference of stuff not explicitly mentioned in the text sample. There was nothing at all nutty about the test.
In the sample exam, the selections are from Kipling’s Jungle Book, a popular science article entitled “How to Save a Country from Snakebite,” an excerpt from Plato’s Republic, essays from Cicero and Jefferson, Thomas a Kempis, George Eliot, a scientific article “Adya Misra’s “The Changing Face of Cardiovascular Medicine: Insights from the European Society of Cardiology Annual Congress,” first published in 2019 in PLOS,” and President Eisenhower’s 1953 “Atoms for Peace” speech.
I’m impressed.
The big challenge for these guys is to learn how to deal with cheating and prepping once the test goes high stakes. SAT and ACT have a lot of experience here. On the other hand the standard IQ tests for preschoolers are not that robust in this respect, and once they started being used as qualifying exams for New York gifted grade schools, “consultants“ with access to the tests made bank.
Right, the admission process to fashionable Manhattan and Brooklyn kindergartens (the term “fashionable Manhattan and Brooklyn kindergartens” is inherently comic) included taking the Wechsler IQ test. The Wechsler is a fine IQ test, but it was devised as a diagnostic tool, not as as a high-stakes. It doesn’t have all that many questions because it assumes that everybody who uses it is playing fair to figure out what the kid’s cognitive abilities really are. So ambitious New Yorkers hire consultants who have gotten a copy to drill their four year olds on every single question on the Wechsler test.
A number of years ago the fashionable kindergarten association announced they weren’t going to use the Wechsler test, they were going to come up with a different test, but I never heard what they did. Does anybody know whatever happened?
My vague impression is that the way to beat test preppers is to have an immense bank of test questions. For example, for college admissions testing, rather than specify ahead of time a couple of thousand words that might be on the SAT vocabulary quiz, thus encouraging Tiger Mothers to fund intensive test prep, instead go with interactive testing on a computer in which all the words in the English language are in the vocabulary question bank.
I vaguely recall about 10 or 15 years ago during the Blogging Era an online vocabulary test which claimed to have a huge 45,000 words in its test bank and would estimate how many you knew, with “you know” being allowed to be handwavingly vague. Perhaps the questions were phrased in the manner of “A closer synonym for X is Y or Z?” If you got that right, it would give you a tougher word. If you got that wrong, it would give you an easier word.
I have the kind of brain that knows a lot of stuff, but only in a vague, gesturing, pointing way, unlike the really impressive intellectuals like Pinker, Murray, Cochran, or Alexander who know a lot of stuff quite precisely. So this kind of test which rewarded my kind of hand-waving cognitive powers was ideal for my ego.
It was a fad among my blogging peers to take the test. My recollection is the best bloggers of the era tended to score around 38,000 words known out of 45,000. I was quite proud to have scored 40,000.
I can’t imagine scoring that well at my present decrepit stage. It’s less that I’m not smart enough anymore (although that’s a big part of it) to figure out some obscure word used by Addison in 1711 as that I don’t care enough anymore.
I used to think, well, over the last four or so decades of my life, I may well need to use this word, so I’d better invest the effort in figuring out what it means.
But now, it seems more likely I’ll be dead before I need to know what “prerogatory” means, so who cares?
Anyway, I’m all in favor of inflicting 45,000 English words on Tiger Children. If they manage to figure out what 40,000 of them roughly mean, well, God bless them.
The SAT and ACT have the financial resources to create huge test banks of questions, but nobody has been pressuring them to improve their product in response to the Tiger Mother Onslaught. Instead, all that anybody is allowed to be concerned about is that blacks do worse on any and all tests, which, obviously, can only be the fault of the test.
So nobody is trying to improve tests. The only move that is allowed is to cancel tests.
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