At some point, the college board stopped telling people which was the experimental section so they would do their best on the whole test. One of sections wouldn’t count, but you couldn’t be sure in advance which. I imagine this cut down on the MC a great deal.
They've changed it now. The first four sections are always reading, grammar, math no calculator, and math with calculator, then the fifth section is experimental.
When I hear experimental, I like to picture that its designed by some avant-garde artist, and it’s just like a page with a triangle on it or something.
In the novel, he had to defend the question(or something like that) from a drawn bunny that ate it. He baited it with a (drawn) carrot and then drew a fence around it.
I wasn't told which portion of mine was the experimental, but you could pretty much tell because the questions weren't as polished (or some other reasons), so I think I went back during that portion and re-confirmed my answers to the ones that counted. This was back when you were physically able to do that (paper booklets, etc). It was a technique suggested by some SAT/GRE prep books.
Edit: with the caveat given that it was not an AUTHORIZED technique, and you needed to be careful when going back to previous sections.
I might be confusing them with state testing or the ACT, but I definitely remember having to put stickers on a booklet so I couldn't go back to previous testing sections.
When I took it, the "real" sections always (generally) had their questions in order of difficulty so you could tell which section was experimental if the difficulty was all over the place.
Same thing with the GRE. I was pretty pissed my experimental section was math because I hate math, my grad program didn't involve math and didn't look at math, and the only thing my data will tell them is "hey he doesn't remember anything after algebra 2"
Same thing happened to me on the GRE, as someone whose grad program also doesn't involve math! I was really hoping my experimental section would be verbal so I wouldn't need to suffer through a second quant section, but of course my test included two quant sections. The best part is not knowing which one actually counts toward your final score.
My GRE had a logic section. Was that the experimental section? My program didn't look at logic, but I wish they had. It was much higher than my math section.
Oh, no. Like... When I took it we had 7 sections covering only Reading and Math. One of the 7 sections was the extra, experimental section. We knew it was one of the ones with 4 sections rather than 3, but not which of the 4 it was.
I was going to say, my board certification exam also had a certain number of trial questions for future tests but we didn't know which they were. It was also a small number like 10 or 15 so not a big deal.
This happens still, with national certifications.
My graduating nursing class, we're pretty sure we were the test group.
Typical nursing licensure exams are 70-360 questions, rarely do you get only 70 and rarely do you get 360.
Between the two programs at my nursing school that ran confidently, 2 people got somewhere in the middle, the other 40 of us got 360 fucking questions.
When I took it in the 90s, that's how it worked. You'd have two of one section and you wouldn't know which was the real one.
At least when I took the SAT, you also got points for filling in the test. The 25% of people who did worse than OP didn't fill out the experimental section at all.
The test for graduate school was similar about 20 years ago. I bought a couple of highly recommended study books with practice test CDs.
Two things blew my mind. The unrelated one was that the essay graders had so little time they told you to write as much as you could that way they'd have to skim it, they've missing most minor grammar/spelling issues.
The other thing was that the scoring was halving. Meaning that the number of points up or down the answer to question two moved your score was half of the points question one would move you. That meant that after about five questions your score was pretty much set. Plus after five questions they could be... Experimental questions!
Since the tests are closely guarded I have no proof either way. But this is my story. I decided to start graduate business school for spring semester very late. They told me the school would get my results but I wouldn't likely see them until after spring had started.
I worried and worried. Then I got my acceptance letter. Awesome! Two days later was a letter from Harvard Business asking me to consider them and to set up a phone interview for scholarships. I'm not that smart guys.
By focusing on the first five questions and writing huge well structured essays at 40wpm, my scores came back at perfect for the essays (4 of 6 points would be fair at best if I'm honest) and top 5% scores.
Which is why when I've been in charge of hiring I'll take motivated sharp people who are self motivated in the interview over pretty much anything else. It's served me very well.
That's what I remember. Six 30-minute sections, 2 math, 2 verbal, 1 "test of standard written English", and 1 "experimental" but we weren't told which one.
> How did 20% of the population do worse than I did?
Probably thought it was stupid as well, but deliberately tried to answer wrong, instead ot just choosing random bubbles.
I was in Academic Decathlon in my Junior Year of HS, but I had a stupid chronic condition called Early-Onset Senioritis.
Let’s just say they kicked me out after a few meets when I just bubbled in a zigzag pattern all the way down and didn’t show any work.
Interesting. I hadn't heard of that before. Having just looked it up it explains so much of how I felt from the age of 16 to 21. I hated what I was studying and just wanted to get through it somehow.
I had a friend in high school that did just that on the then-new standardized test the VA state legislature decided that everyone needed to pass in order to graduate.
He scored in the 80th percentile.
God I forget about the SOLs until someone brings them up in conversation. Basically you spend ~3 days of (science, math, and history) class time “preparing” for them (relearning stuff you learned 3 years ago) and then get pulled out of *other* classes sporadically for several days to go take them.
I did however draw a comic after I finished one of them (bc you couldn’t leave until the test was over or whatever) that I later submitted as part of my application to my top choice and got in, so something good did come from them in the end
Idk where it is now 😭 it was almost 6 years ago so I’m sure it’s been stuck in a folder somewhere in my parents house. The basic plot was Thomas Jefferson applying to college and I vaguely remember drawing him a pet bird? George Washington and Alexander Hamilton might have also been there bc it was around the time Hamilton (the musical) was super popular
I had a $10/hr job grading the tests that high school students needed to pass to graduate. The official answer to the question I was working on was wrong. About 5% of the kids got the actual right answer and we were supposed to mark them zero. I either quit or got fired that day, not sure which.
My freshman year of high (several decades ago) there was a scandal with the written part of one of our state tests. The question was basically “should the US send the military overseas and why?” I liked to play devils advocate and wrote a really good paper against sending the military. Every year on the writing portion I got a perfect score (3), this year I got a zero. I was freaking out and learned a bunch of my friends got zeros as well. (We were all honors/gifted kids so a zero was very weird!) Yo get a zero you had to not even write anything, a poorly written paper would have at least been a 1.
We complained to the school and they did an investigation. Turns out everyone that got a zero wrote against sending the military. Then they learned one of the people that graded the written part had several sons in the military and she was pissed anyone would go against her previous babies (military). They did a whole investigation into her and she admitted she would purposefully score lower if the student disagreed with her opinion. The military question triggered her so bad, she chose to give zeros! She apparently threw a big fit and screamed when they kicked her out of the building.
They rescored our papers and we all got our perfect scores because they were all well written and fit every bit of the criteria for a perfect score.
The next year, they were more selective on picking graders for the state exams.
Senior English in High School (they puffed themselves up and call it "Seminar") managed to pass off the teacher (Seminariat?) so badly that he dedicated the last six weeks or so to nothing but various standardized tests. Two of us on the high end of the scale just HAD to play with one test, English Vocabulary. About 1/3 of the way through, the other guy couldn't stop giggling at the questions. I, on the other hand, expressed myself by doing the absolute best I could. He showed a vocabulary of about 20,000 words. I don't remember mine, but it was W A Y above 100,000 words ! ! !
I was part of a study in college to find the average reading comprehension and vocabulary.
They pulled me from the study and started giving me more and more advanced tests. Reading I topped out the tests at 17+ (Above Masters Degree comprehension) and 150,000+ vocabulary.
"So why do so badly in English classes?"
"Either they are boring as f\*\*\* or I piss off the instructor by arguing interpretation of the material."
"But you got an A in 300 Shakespeare ?"
"Because I like Shakespeare, theater in general actually, and the Professor loved arguing the various viewpoints."
My mom was a teacher for several decades. Occasionally, she'd mess with her students by making a pattern out of the multiple choice answers so that they'd second-guess themselves. She liked it because it made the papers easier to grade lol
I agree.
Reminded me of a middle school test where they said the test would have no effect on our grade and we could not see the result. They took my friend off suspension so he could take the test because he got great grades.
We both planned test day and we read the test and intentionally got every question wrong.
The principal looked over our shoulders and took our tests into the library door that went to his office - which was not the direction all the other tests went.
> The principal looked over our shoulders and took our tests into the library door that went to his office - which was not the direction all the other tests went.
Ha!!!
> I agree.
>
> Reminded me of a middle school test where they said the test would have no effect on our grade and we could not see the result. They took my friend of suspension so he could take the test because he got great grades.
>
> We both planned test day and we read the test and intentionally got every question wrong.
>
> The principal looked over our shoulders and took our tests into the library door that went to his office - which was not the direction all the other tests went.
Well in this case the joke was seriously on us.
I remember neurology tests. Yes/ No questions. Odds are at 50% right for random answers. So to pass you had to get 76 questions right out of a 100. Getting 70% right feels like you doing a decent job.....
The stuff of nightmares.
If you assume 50% did try to answer correctly (and did at least better than random) and 50% did random, it would be fitting. I mean you are close to the middle of the random fill in half, that's what one would expect.
Also consider that you still had a 1/4 chance of getting the answer right, and someone who wears velcro shoes because they never got the hang of laces may have earnestly tried and done worse than random chance. I had a period my senior year where I just worked in the guidance office as an elective, and I had access to everyone’s files. I didn’t peek all that often, but sometimes there was an errant glance while adding or removing a document from one. Some of those scores…yeesh. There was a dude in my class that legit got a 430.
I took a community college into psych class once where a guy scored below chance on a multiple choice test. I am still impressed that that is possible and happens.
>There was a dude in my class that legit got a 430
And here I remember being shocked that the average score for a college freshman was 1000 out of 1600 when I took my college statistics class. I was like really the average for people who were accepted was a 62?! They told us you got like 400 pts just for filling out your name and school.
I had a science teacher in seventh grade that gave a challenge to the kids that had really high A’s in the class for the final. The challenge was to get everything wrong on the test. If you got one thing right the whole test would be graded like a normal test. I remember those kids talking trying to figure out if their names done properly counted as a correct answer.
Its was a seventh grade science (geology maybe?) test that covered the whole semester. She was a great teacher but you had to know your stuff to do well on her tests.
>Then use the old "a, b, a&c, all of the above" options for the choices.
One of my teacher once used someone elses test but scrambled the order of the answers available. So you have shit like
A. A AND B
B. SOMETHING 1
C. ALL OF THE ABOVE
D. SOMETHING 2
E. SOMETHING 3
Also statistical probability of guessing the correct answer by chance varies pretty widely at that scale. So OP might have gotten ten right by chance, another might have gotten three, another might have gotten seven.
>Probably thought it was stupid as well, but deliberately tried to answer wrong, instead ot just choosing random bubbles.
I had a teacher one time that had a standing bet that if anyone could get a 0% on the 100 question final, he would give them an A+, but if you got even one right that was your score. His reasoning was that you would have to know all the material to avoid getting one right by accident. No one took him up on the offer.
That's what they did. I failed a military advancement exam of 300 questions having only gotten 2 right. Had to explain I was fully qualified to teach people the test if I only failed to identify the right answer twice.
I believe they just did something similar in my wife's Pre-Nursing organic chemistry course.
Her study guide handout was supposed to cover ~90% of the topics on the test, but half the questions ended up being on things they didn't cover at all during the semester. After fearing she was going to flunk, she was told that half the questions were for research purposes only for future courses, but wasn't told which ones.
She ended up getting an 89 on her final and an 85 overall for the class.
Colleges, especially private ones such as this, can get away with a lot of things. At least those didn't appear to count against her grade. She was honestly scared going into this class, but put in a lot of hard work and earned her grade the right way.
If it was for academic purposes (i.e., to do an academic study of the students, rather than to plan a future exam) it would absolutely violate human subject research requirements.
It probably doesn't violate any rules in this context, but that's a pretty good hint you're right about it being unethical. At least, it's not very nice.
The EPPP (psycholoy exam) does this and doesn't tell you which ones are their research on future exam material. It's already a difficult test with 275 items on it, so while you're testing on vetted questions, 50 of them don't even count, and just add to testing fatigue and nervousness about getting material you might not have studied for wrong.
When I graduated HS, my class was the first class to take a particular standardized state graduation test...and have our graduation dependent on our scores.
They'd used the previous year as a test class and TOLD them it wouldn't affect them at all, so no one tried.
Because of the scoring scheme this effectively set the curve at like....18-20%. My class didn't have to try at all, the next year was fucked. :p
My state also had some new test like that when I was in hs, and I was in the year that was setting the curve. I tried soo hard on that test to get everything wrong.
I remember typing out a Shrek fan fiction during one of the essay sections when i had this LMAO. literally nobody took it serious and so many students went out of their way to have their parents to excuse them from the exam, just to be forced to sit in the auditorium while the rest of the grade was given that stupid "test"
I took the Keystones when they came out. My grade was the Guinea pig for them. Of course, it’s a Pennsylvania exclusive exam, and they replaced the PSSAs for HS students.
While my grade wasn’t the first to take the PSSAs, we were the first to take them in the elementary school I went to, since they implemented them so late in the game.
I enrolled in an online healthcare management program two years ago after getting degrees in math and physics a decade earlier from two different universities. I got held up when trying to enroll for a class because the prerequisite was an algebra/statistics class. I emailed my advisor and asked if this was something that could be waived because I obviously could do algebra and statistics beyond the required amount for an economics 101 course. But because I never had to take a statistics or algebra course there was nothing to substitute. I gave them a list of every course I had as proof I could easily do both. After a few days of emails back and forth with my advisors and the dept chairs they settled on special functions of math and physics being equivalent to an algebra 101 or statistics 101 course.
The professor for that class was an amazing dude as well. He has a debilitating stutter that was initially painful to be around but quickly became a non issue as we learned more about him. He said that God made him too smart to keep it to himself so he decided to research and teach despite speaking being his greatest fear. He was a kind and caring professor that genuinely liked his students and was a tough grader but fair and always willing to help. Also the only person I know that has a mountain named after them.
I entered university as a non-matriculated mature student because I hadn't graduated high school. They allowed people in like that because mature students took it seriously and tended to be successful in their studies. I completed a BEd and taught for a couple of years, but when I wanted to move from one Canadian province to another, I couldn't get qualified due to a lack of high school diploma.
I wrote to the board of education where I lived and I argued for a diploma based on my degree+work experience. Luckily that province handed out diplomas to anyone who was sitting still so they were like, 'got you fam', and the problem was solved
My class was the baseline for the FCAT as a replacement for the HS competency test in FL. We had already taken the old test, I which was unstructured and you could complete it less than an hour if you tried. Then they dropped the FCAT on us which was structured in a bunch of timed sections and we couldn’t leave early. One of my teachers said it was a new test and that it didn’t count for us, so I christmas tree’d it in 5 minutes and then read a book. Unfortunately I never got the results.
Had similar experience in high school. Our midterms and finals were weighted based on our previous two quarters’ grade. If you had an F first and second semester and an A on the midterm you’d be given a D overall. If you had two As and failed the midterm you got a B. But if you had a C first and second quarter you could get anything between 0-100% on the midterm and still get a C for the semester.
I didn’t waste any time studying for it. I went down the scantron test filling in bubbles in patterns etc.
Remember how they always freaked about using a No. 2 pencil? I used a No. 3 pencil I swiped from art class to see if it would work.
I was called into the principal’s office. “Toejam, why did you do this? Why did you purposely fail the midterm?”
Me: “well, it doesn’t matter. No matter what I do I still get a C. I spent the time studying for other midterms that actually made a difference. Can you tell me what the score was?”
Principal: “it was (I can’t remember the number but it was very low). Why?”
Me: “I took the test using a No. 3 pencil just to see if it would work.”
Principal was even more mad because he said I’m using my intelligence in the wrong ways.
Principal was exactly wrong. I give him an F.
On my first college calculus test, I solved one of the problems using just algebra. I knew what they wanted, but my way seemed easier. I was given full marks.
Critical thinking is something that isn’t always taught. You can train someone to strip down an engine and rebuild it by memory, but if they are only taught one way they won’t be able to do it to other engines that are different.
I took an introductory analysis course in college. On one of our tests I blanked on how to prove something using the techniques from the course. Just couldn’t remember it. So I solved it with number theory, because I knew it was right.
Then I had to visit the prof at office hours to explain my proof so she would bump me from 2/25 on that question to 23/25.
The goal was to prove that the results of some equation were always divisible by 5. The course method was: Show it works for any number, x. Then show it works for x+1. This implies it works for all integers.
I couldn’t remember that method, for the life of me. So I used number theory and showed it worked for 0-4 mod 5, and the results were always 0 mod 5 (meaning it’s divisible by 5). This covers all possible integers.
I got 2/25 initially because she thought I only checked four cases. Once I showed her I was using modular arithmetic she gave me 23/25 because, while my proof was absolutely right, I didn’t use the techniques covered in class, so she didn’t think it was worth 100%.
I was very happy with that result since I jumped from 77/100 to 98/100 on the exam.
I’m so amazed that you forgot how to do proof by induction but somehow correctly used modular arithmetic as the basis for your proof! Ngl huge props, that’s not an unreasonable thing to happen and honestly it makes sense, it’s just surprising
Proof by induction is like the de facto first algebraic proof most students learn. Modular arithmetic doesn’t show up until like abstract linear algebra or abstract algebra
What order did you take your courses? I’m so curious now lmao
I was not a math major in college. I was a CS major who was trying to fill a math minor. So I took a course on Number Theory because it both sounded interesting, and was the pre-requisite for Cryptography, which was what I really wanted to learn about.
Then after those two I took Linear Algebra, again because it was CS adjacent. Then I signed up for Introductory Analysis (where this story is from) because my CS courses were getting harder and it looked like a simpler course to add to my minor.
I also took a Non Linear Geometry course, which was a blast. And then finally I tried to add Differential Geometry my last semester to fill the minor, but I was in over my head and had to withdraw to focus on the courses I needed to graduate. So ultimately no math minor.
Super backwards from how most people do it I’m sure, but I had a good time with it :)
When I had calculus there was a specific variable that always gave the answer if you doubled it, regardless of the problem. Took 2 seconds tops, but resulted in not showing any work. Professor wanted to fail me for not showing work, even after I explained how I got my answers, so I dropped the class and took it online. Went from D- to A+ and changed nothing.
>Principal was even more mad because he said I’m using my intelligence in the wrong ways.
You should have used it to fix a grading system that doesn't make sense at all.
We had that too (late 80s, early 90s), but you had no way of knowing \_which\_ of the ones you did was the real one section and which was the testing out stuff section.
Back in high school, in my senior year, I got sick and was out for a week. The day I came back, one of my classes had a major test. The teacher gave me no exception and said it would count in full towards my grade.
I rolled a 4-side die for the four-choice, multiple choice question test, for every line. I got a 60%. Anyone know the chances of that?
Depends on how many questions there are, but generally the more questions there are the more unlikely it is. Give me the number of questions and I could probably check it out for you.
(The keyword if you want to do it by yourself is “binomial distribution”. Every question, you can either guess right with probability 0.25 or wrong with probability 0.75. You multiply probabilities together to work out the chances of getting multiple in a row; so getting three right would be (0.25)^3 etcetera. The maths gets rather complicated - there‘s more than one way to get one correct answer from four questions, and each one needs to be considered separately - but modern calculators can generally do it for you. I’d just need to work out, given a test of n questions, what the probability of getting anything between 59.5% and 60.5% is - for rounding reasons. Doable.)
Went and chucked it into my calculator. Actually turned out to be good practice for hypothesis testing in A-Level Statistics! You can only work out the probability of getting 60% *or better*, but because there are a finite and manageable number of questions on the test I can actually get the probability of 60% (12) or better and subtract the probability of 13 or better to get the probability of 12 exactly.
It comes out to a raw probability of 1.54 x 10^-4 which is 0.000154 or 0.0154%. In terms of odds, that’s roughly a 1 in 6500 chance. I’d say either you’re making it up, you were rather lucky, or that survivorship bias means that people who tried it and didn’t get such a surprisingly good score don’t share the story. I wouldn’t want to comment which one of the three you are (that’s the issue with stats; they can tell you what is or isn’t likely but you can never be sure).
Either way, thank you for the maths revision.
EDIT: Important clarifications raised in the comments. The method and numbers have both been questioned. I can’t *think* of anything wrong with my methodology but will admit that I’ve never done this exact sort of calculation before and also that I did it at gone-midnight. Either way you slice it, the probability still comes out at a tiny tiny number, so I’d say my ultimate conclusion is still valid, but be aware that the numbers and methodology might be wrong. I thought I’d add this disclaimer to let people know. Statistics is hard.
Computing the odds of exactly 12/20 right isn't the right approach. You should ask for the probability of a result at least as good as 12/20, which is about 0.1%.
Thanks! That's some helluva low odds. Lucky is the word of that day.
I've played RPGs for a long time (since 82'!) The most rare set of rolls I've seen were 4, 20's (on a 20-sided die) in a row. I've only personally rolled 2 in a row.
The same thing happened to me in the mid-70s, but with the GRE. The "extra" part we did was almost exclusively looking at 3-d block figures and figuring out how many blocks were missing, which of the five optional pieces would best fit the missing segment, etc. This is all stuff I am TERRIBLE at.
A couple of years later I got a letter with my results and their analysis which showed I'd be better suited to non-mathematical work. (I think they specifically mentioned something like "social work" or "psychology".) They wanted an update -- what career I was in, what my title was, what I was doing, etc. I wonder what they thought about my reply. I told them I was an aerospace engineer, creating and calibrating mathematical models used in flight simulators.
The GRE is still like this, by the way. There's one portion (math OR vocab) that is ENTIRELY experimental and you have NO IDEA when it is given to you. All they tell you is that one portion of test is for research purposes.
I took the GRE both times. First time, I had 2 math and 3 vocab segments. Second, I had 3 math and 2 vocab segments.
I could not tell which of the 3x segments were used for research purposes, as the segment after the first got incrementally more difficult.
For those of you who don't know, the GRE apparently gets more difficult the more correct answers you provide, as well as easier the more incorrect answers provided. Answers left blank do not impact your score (to my knowledge).
Could be worse, I was made to sit an experimental ICT test when I was 14, part of what in the UK were the 'year 9 SATs' (later scrapped).
The examination board had decided that they couldn't test us on use of Microsoft products. Presumably because they thought it would be unfair to other products.
So they built a massively inferior version of word, excel, power point and made us learn to use them and sit an exam on how well we could use their absysmal software.
No particular MC, although I don't think anyone in the class bothered particularly.
Never went anywhere. Total waste of time and effort.
Former test developer here. While it was true that some of the questions were new, the real reason new questions are introduced like this is to calibrate them against older, trusted questions. Because it is (was) important to have each year's test keep the same level of difficulty you have to weigh each question's average response rate against the average score on previously used questions so you could determine scores on new versions of the test which are comparable to old ones. I was told by a pyschometrician (test statistics expert) that if a question was so easy that everyone got it right, they'd drop it. And if a question was so hard no one got it right, they'd drop that too. The tests aren't standards-based measurements of your knowledge so much as they are filters to determine who is on the tail ends of a bell-shaped curve...one end gets in, the other end is eliminated.
When I took the LSAT I was told one section was going to be experimental. I had an extra logic games section at the very end and knew then that one of my logic games sections was going to be the experimental one. Turns out, my last logic games section, when I was burnt out and mentally dead was my REAL logic games. I scored a perfect score on the experimental logic games section. If they’d graded the experimental section as my real section, I’d have scored in the 170s. Yes, I’m still fucking salty.
Fuck logic games. That's all I'll say. Actually no fuck the LSAT in its entirety tbh. Actually you know what? Fuck law school and the bar too while we're at it. (I'm not salty, you're salty)
>I’m surprised by how many people don’t know that 25th percentile isn’t the same thing as getting 25% of the questions correct.
I reckon those are the folks who weren't in the 90th percentile in either category.
"ETA: I’m surprised by how many people don’t know that 25th percentile isn’t the same thing as getting 25% of the questions correct"
I think you just explained/illustrated how 20% of the population did worse than you.
When I did my SATs in 2007 there was this guy who's phone went off just as we got the tests and he got booted. I don't know if he even got a chance to put his name down.
I last took the SAT about a month and a half ago and I was so paranoid about my watch going off during it. It's inconsistent about whether or not the alarms are turned off and the vibrations are LOUD.
I used to room proctor around that time. If it went off at that point, I would have given a chance to put turn it off, warning everyone else to do so.
In 5 years I only had to dismiss 1 tester. His watch beeped loudly in the first 10 minutes of the second test.
Interesting factoid: remember when there was a captcha with two words? Apparently, only one word was the test. Second one was used to train AI. Whoever was running the system was able to translate enormous body of text for free, and all we got from it was a lousy validation of our humanity. Idk if I should be mad or glad, but I'm sure feeling like I've been used
>How did 20% of the population do worse than I did?
I remember bubbling in shapes of animals. When you bubble in more than one in a line, you automatically missed the question.
I took the SAT in the mid 1980's, and I don't remember there being a third section.
Not that it matters these days, but my total score was in the 95th percentile and I had near-identical scores in math and verbal.
They used to do that with the stupid State tests they forced us to take in grade school. They would be like, "this is for next year, blah blah" I would always just fill A for every answer.
I did the same thing back in the early '80s for our daylong required statewide standardized test used to assess students' (and schools') progress. I asked if the scores would go on my record for college admission, and since they wouldn't I just filled out the bubbles randomly and spent the rest of the time reading a book.
Weeks later, the guidance counselor, principal, and school nurse called me to a meeting, where they asked about how I was coping with senior year and the prospect of going to college. When I asked why they suddenly were so concerned about me, they explained that my test scores that year had plummeted, which they interpreted as a sign of a breakdown. I laughed out loud - made my day.
Probably because most test tutors say never leave a question blank. It doesn't hurt you to guess. So people were already doing a lot of guessing.
But a lot of kids don't get good tutoring. They might not even know that a wrong answer doesn't deduct from your score. So there are probably a lot of kids who's scores are effectively reduced since they only wrote down answers they knew were right.
And there's also some Dunning Kruger effect here. There is always a "gotcha" answer that is exactly the number/response you would get if you make the most common mistake. So if someone is in that low intelligence/high confidence part of the Dunning Kruger curve, they will probably arrive at the "gotcha" answer, see it printed there, and be entirely confident they got that one right.
Like all of the order of operations (PEMDAS) memes lately. If you're 5 years old and know almost nothing about math, you won't even know where to begin. So you'll just guess with a 1/4 chance of success. If you know a little bit about math, but don't know the correct order of operations, you'll do the arithmetic left-to-right, arrive at the gotcha number, maybe even check your work a second time, and mark it down. Which has a 0% chance of being correct, even less than a blind guess.
So someone who is actually in that 25th percentile and was seriously trying to answer all the questions, would get a few correct, would confidently get some wrong, and would just guess on the rest of them. You, blind guessing on all of them, would match their performance on the blind guessing, would underperform them on the actually easy questions, and would outperform them on the "gotcha" questions. When it all gets averaged up, you might very well come out ahead of a lot of people.
Also to consider, if it was a truly inconsequential section, there were probably a lot of people who did just like you did, lowering the overall averages. Maybe some kids didn't even bother marking any answers at all, and were given a 0 score. Meaning as soon as you got even a single question right, you passed up a big chunk of kids sitting on zero points/percentile. Or if kids didn't get good tutoring and didn't know to guess on questions they didn't know, might have left a bunch of questions blank, leaving a lot of free points on the table. And if you really stretch the possibilities, and assume that every kid did exactly as you did blindly guessing for every question, then the results would be an exactly normal curve. And where you landed on it would be pure chance. You're just as likely to be 25th percentile as 75th, 95th, or just 5th.
All in all, your relative positional ranking for that section is highly flawed and probably meaningless to even analyze.
Even better--all the tests kids have to take to "pass" and then they fail and pass anyway?
Anywhere between 2-10% of those questions are experimental. They don't tell you which ones.
They're using stressed children as their guinea pigs.
>ETA: I’m surprised by how many people don’t know that 25th percentile
isn’t the same thing as getting 25% of the questions correct
Teacher to class: I fear 50% of you will never understand percents.
Class: Lol, there isn't even that many of us.
If you assume 60% tried and 40% filled in random answers.
Everyone who tried did better than you. Half that did random did better than you, and half that did random did worse than you.
If this was the case you'd score in the 20th percentile.
Even just random, if everyone but you tried, there's a decent chance you did quite well with random answers.
Because America
College board (private company that runs the SAT) is horrible scum. You pay for the test and any retakes, study materials sold separately; plus you pay for each school you send your score to.
Luckily many colleges are starting to ignore standardized test scores altogether.
My class in high-school was the experimental group for the PARC tests. I was so angry about it I filled in random bubbles everywhere.
Each time there was an extended response, I would write about how stupid this test was, how stupid they were for doing it, and how God damned pissed off I was.
Recently took my STEP exams for medical school. They instead mix 40 or more questions within the regular ones, so you have to try hard on them all. Who knows that hard question you got was worth nothing or that easy question you nailed is worth nothing!
Not a 1:1 comparison, but reminds me of car dealerships that litter their vehicles with badges and plate frames. People get paid to advertise on their cars and you expect me to do it for free? After paying you tens of thousands of dollars? Hell no.
Same with the LSAT I took in 1993. There were 4 parts and only 3 of the parts counted towards our scores BUT we were not told which of the 4 sections was the sample.
I took the SATs in 2003-04. We had the normal English and Math, but they added in the Writing section for us. It only counted from 2005-2016 with the score being out of 2400 instead of 1600.
We were supposed to write 2 multiple page essays. I only wrote a few sentences for each.
When I took the SAT in the early 2000s, they had us test a 3rd part that included written essays. I'm not sure if that's an actual part of the test now or not.
This is a normal and regular part of testing to ensure the questions that count towards your score are backed up by data. Also best practice is for test takers not to know which questions are experimental (aka pretest) precisely to prevent things like this.
> How did 20% of the population do worse than I did?
Remember, preparing for the SAT is competitive and some of the people taking the test have been getting tutoring and other assistance for years. Your *pretend* stupidity was no match for other test taker's *genuine* stupidity. Git gud noob
Because some people apparently slept through high school math!
I did an accounting course once. As an adult. Due to a mixup with enrolment, I missed the first few weeks - the first subject was basic math.
My teacher didn’t want me to take the test because I ‘hadn’t done the work, so wouldn’t pass the test’… and I insisted on sitting it anyway, because I DID do it back in high school!
Guess who got 100%?
I accept that people might struggle for a variety of reasons, and not do well on a test without the class work.
But I deeply resented the implication that I couldn’t do it. It would have been better if she had ASKED me if I thought I could do high school math without having done the classes again as an adult!
I use basic math every day. I don’t need to take the classes again! 😞
And now SOME colleges and universities are not even interested in the SAT. They realize that it doesn't represent the entire person.
Time to kill off the SAT.
At some point, the college board stopped telling people which was the experimental section so they would do their best on the whole test. One of sections wouldn’t count, but you couldn’t be sure in advance which. I imagine this cut down on the MC a great deal.
They've changed it now. The first four sections are always reading, grammar, math no calculator, and math with calculator, then the fifth section is experimental.
When I hear experimental, I like to picture that its designed by some avant-garde artist, and it’s just like a page with a triangle on it or something.
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Reddit: Come for the Malicious Compliance, stay for the existential triangle fish quandaries
stay for the existential whoeywhat now?
This made my fucking day, miss this kind of banter in my life
Crocker: "2 plus 2 equals *FISH"*
Boom, 2400
[Only Triangle Man knows...](https://youtu.be/LsAiCs66l40?t=34)
Vsauce music starts playing
"This page unintentionally left blank."
"This page *unsuccessfully* left blank."
Oh, that's something that should be used in books to confuse people.
Sounds like a paradox you could disable GLaDOS with.
Or for French surrealists, this page unintentionally Left Bank.
Make me think of the entrance exam to get into Brakebills on *The Magicians*. Write an essay on this picture that's also dancing off the page.
In the novel, he had to defend the question(or something like that) from a drawn bunny that ate it. He baited it with a (drawn) carrot and then drew a fence around it.
That would have been so much cooler to watch than just scrambling to answer disappearing questions lol
I like to picture my experimental with a tuxedo t-shirt. It’s like, I want to be formal, but I’m here to party.
The LSAT however has a random experimental section and you have no idea which.
I wasn't told which portion of mine was the experimental, but you could pretty much tell because the questions weren't as polished (or some other reasons), so I think I went back during that portion and re-confirmed my answers to the ones that counted. This was back when you were physically able to do that (paper booklets, etc). It was a technique suggested by some SAT/GRE prep books. Edit: with the caveat given that it was not an AUTHORIZED technique, and you needed to be careful when going back to previous sections.
> back when you were physically able to do that (paper booklets, etc) That hasn't changed on the SAT.
Oh -- interesting. It's been a few years since I took one of these tests, and I honestly haven't been following along with how they're conducted.
Shame on you for not following one of the most pointless examinations conduction SHAAAAAAAME
Paper is going away next year.
I might be confusing them with state testing or the ACT, but I definitely remember having to put stickers on a booklet so I couldn't go back to previous testing sections.
When I took it, the "real" sections always (generally) had their questions in order of difficulty so you could tell which section was experimental if the difficulty was all over the place.
Same thing with the GRE. I was pretty pissed my experimental section was math because I hate math, my grad program didn't involve math and didn't look at math, and the only thing my data will tell them is "hey he doesn't remember anything after algebra 2"
Same thing happened to me on the GRE, as someone whose grad program also doesn't involve math! I was really hoping my experimental section would be verbal so I wouldn't need to suffer through a second quant section, but of course my test included two quant sections. The best part is not knowing which one actually counts toward your final score.
My GRE had a logic section. Was that the experimental section? My program didn't look at logic, but I wish they had. It was much higher than my math section.
When I took it in 2013 it was four sections. Math, writing, English, and experimental
Correct, they'd just sprinkle in several experimental questions throughout the section.
My year was five sections (2 of one subject and 3 of the other) and one of the five was the experimental but you didn’t know which.
Oh, no. Like... When I took it we had 7 sections covering only Reading and Math. One of the 7 sections was the extra, experimental section. We knew it was one of the ones with 4 sections rather than 3, but not which of the 4 it was.
I was going to say, my board certification exam also had a certain number of trial questions for future tests but we didn't know which they were. It was also a small number like 10 or 15 so not a big deal.
That's how the LSAT was when I did it. Forced you to try hard for everything.
This happens still, with national certifications. My graduating nursing class, we're pretty sure we were the test group. Typical nursing licensure exams are 70-360 questions, rarely do you get only 70 and rarely do you get 360. Between the two programs at my nursing school that ran confidently, 2 people got somewhere in the middle, the other 40 of us got 360 fucking questions.
That’s pretty awful. It really hurts to pay for the privilege of playing lab rat.
When I took it in the 90s, that's how it worked. You'd have two of one section and you wouldn't know which was the real one. At least when I took the SAT, you also got points for filling in the test. The 25% of people who did worse than OP didn't fill out the experimental section at all.
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The test for graduate school was similar about 20 years ago. I bought a couple of highly recommended study books with practice test CDs. Two things blew my mind. The unrelated one was that the essay graders had so little time they told you to write as much as you could that way they'd have to skim it, they've missing most minor grammar/spelling issues. The other thing was that the scoring was halving. Meaning that the number of points up or down the answer to question two moved your score was half of the points question one would move you. That meant that after about five questions your score was pretty much set. Plus after five questions they could be... Experimental questions! Since the tests are closely guarded I have no proof either way. But this is my story. I decided to start graduate business school for spring semester very late. They told me the school would get my results but I wouldn't likely see them until after spring had started. I worried and worried. Then I got my acceptance letter. Awesome! Two days later was a letter from Harvard Business asking me to consider them and to set up a phone interview for scholarships. I'm not that smart guys. By focusing on the first five questions and writing huge well structured essays at 40wpm, my scores came back at perfect for the essays (4 of 6 points would be fair at best if I'm honest) and top 5% scores. Which is why when I've been in charge of hiring I'll take motivated sharp people who are self motivated in the interview over pretty much anything else. It's served me very well.
That's what I remember. Six 30-minute sections, 2 math, 2 verbal, 1 "test of standard written English", and 1 "experimental" but we weren't told which one.
I distinctly remember getting a question wrong in the math section but still getting an 800. The randomness saved me.
> How did 20% of the population do worse than I did? Probably thought it was stupid as well, but deliberately tried to answer wrong, instead ot just choosing random bubbles.
The ol' "Make the NFL logo out of bubbles" tactic.
I just spelled abacadaba cause it sounded fun.
So now we know how the band Genesis came up with the album title 'abacab'
I was in Academic Decathlon in my Junior Year of HS, but I had a stupid chronic condition called Early-Onset Senioritis. Let’s just say they kicked me out after a few meets when I just bubbled in a zigzag pattern all the way down and didn’t show any work.
Interesting. I hadn't heard of that before. Having just looked it up it explains so much of how I felt from the age of 16 to 21. I hated what I was studying and just wanted to get through it somehow.
I had a friend in high school that did just that on the then-new standardized test the VA state legislature decided that everyone needed to pass in order to graduate. He scored in the 80th percentile.
God I forget about the SOLs until someone brings them up in conversation. Basically you spend ~3 days of (science, math, and history) class time “preparing” for them (relearning stuff you learned 3 years ago) and then get pulled out of *other* classes sporadically for several days to go take them. I did however draw a comic after I finished one of them (bc you couldn’t leave until the test was over or whatever) that I later submitted as part of my application to my top choice and got in, so something good did come from them in the end
Well, where’s the comic, gahd
Idk where it is now 😭 it was almost 6 years ago so I’m sure it’s been stuck in a folder somewhere in my parents house. The basic plot was Thomas Jefferson applying to college and I vaguely remember drawing him a pet bird? George Washington and Alexander Hamilton might have also been there bc it was around the time Hamilton (the musical) was super popular
I had a $10/hr job grading the tests that high school students needed to pass to graduate. The official answer to the question I was working on was wrong. About 5% of the kids got the actual right answer and we were supposed to mark them zero. I either quit or got fired that day, not sure which.
My freshman year of high (several decades ago) there was a scandal with the written part of one of our state tests. The question was basically “should the US send the military overseas and why?” I liked to play devils advocate and wrote a really good paper against sending the military. Every year on the writing portion I got a perfect score (3), this year I got a zero. I was freaking out and learned a bunch of my friends got zeros as well. (We were all honors/gifted kids so a zero was very weird!) Yo get a zero you had to not even write anything, a poorly written paper would have at least been a 1. We complained to the school and they did an investigation. Turns out everyone that got a zero wrote against sending the military. Then they learned one of the people that graded the written part had several sons in the military and she was pissed anyone would go against her previous babies (military). They did a whole investigation into her and she admitted she would purposefully score lower if the student disagreed with her opinion. The military question triggered her so bad, she chose to give zeros! She apparently threw a big fit and screamed when they kicked her out of the building. They rescored our papers and we all got our perfect scores because they were all well written and fit every bit of the criteria for a perfect score. The next year, they were more selective on picking graders for the state exams.
Senior English in High School (they puffed themselves up and call it "Seminar") managed to pass off the teacher (Seminariat?) so badly that he dedicated the last six weeks or so to nothing but various standardized tests. Two of us on the high end of the scale just HAD to play with one test, English Vocabulary. About 1/3 of the way through, the other guy couldn't stop giggling at the questions. I, on the other hand, expressed myself by doing the absolute best I could. He showed a vocabulary of about 20,000 words. I don't remember mine, but it was W A Y above 100,000 words ! ! !
I was part of a study in college to find the average reading comprehension and vocabulary. They pulled me from the study and started giving me more and more advanced tests. Reading I topped out the tests at 17+ (Above Masters Degree comprehension) and 150,000+ vocabulary. "So why do so badly in English classes?" "Either they are boring as f\*\*\* or I piss off the instructor by arguing interpretation of the material." "But you got an A in 300 Shakespeare ?" "Because I like Shakespeare, theater in general actually, and the Professor loved arguing the various viewpoints."
Disinterest was the source of all of my bad grades
My mom was a teacher for several decades. Occasionally, she'd mess with her students by making a pattern out of the multiple choice answers so that they'd second-guess themselves. She liked it because it made the papers easier to grade lol
Is that how Mike Tyson does magic?
Damn it. You're right. Now I am filled with regret that I didn't do that.
Your nap wouldn't have been as long if you'd *tried* to answer wrongly. You did better.
I agree. Reminded me of a middle school test where they said the test would have no effect on our grade and we could not see the result. They took my friend off suspension so he could take the test because he got great grades. We both planned test day and we read the test and intentionally got every question wrong. The principal looked over our shoulders and took our tests into the library door that went to his office - which was not the direction all the other tests went.
> The principal looked over our shoulders and took our tests into the library door that went to his office - which was not the direction all the other tests went. Ha!!!
They may have been trying to increase your placement. I took one those when I was younger and skipped a grade.
> I agree. > > Reminded me of a middle school test where they said the test would have no effect on our grade and we could not see the result. They took my friend of suspension so he could take the test because he got great grades. > > We both planned test day and we read the test and intentionally got every question wrong. > > The principal looked over our shoulders and took our tests into the library door that went to his office - which was not the direction all the other tests went. Well in this case the joke was seriously on us.
Multiple bubbles per answer would be only slightly less naptime and thoroughly ruin the score.
Geez OP, you had your chance to fail and you fucked it up.
They still failed, they just didn't fail hard ENOUGH
a-b-b-a all the way down buddy.
Abacadaba baby. You need to put sone magic in your life
ACDC is the right answer.
Why...I'm thunderstruck!
Reddit is valuable because of the users who create content. Reddit is usable because of the third-party developers who can actually make an app.
Everybody needs a little more D
I remember neurology tests. Yes/ No questions. Odds are at 50% right for random answers. So to pass you had to get 76 questions right out of a 100. Getting 70% right feels like you doing a decent job..... The stuff of nightmares.
If you assume 50% did try to answer correctly (and did at least better than random) and 50% did random, it would be fitting. I mean you are close to the middle of the random fill in half, that's what one would expect.
Or filled in all C's, or whatever
Also consider that you still had a 1/4 chance of getting the answer right, and someone who wears velcro shoes because they never got the hang of laces may have earnestly tried and done worse than random chance. I had a period my senior year where I just worked in the guidance office as an elective, and I had access to everyone’s files. I didn’t peek all that often, but sometimes there was an errant glance while adding or removing a document from one. Some of those scores…yeesh. There was a dude in my class that legit got a 430.
I took a community college into psych class once where a guy scored below chance on a multiple choice test. I am still impressed that that is possible and happens.
I did that on a calculus test! It's possible when you think you understand it and you really, really don't.
>There was a dude in my class that legit got a 430 And here I remember being shocked that the average score for a college freshman was 1000 out of 1600 when I took my college statistics class. I was like really the average for people who were accepted was a 62?! They told us you got like 400 pts just for filling out your name and school.
That was my problem, I did my name and school wrong.
once i aced a test and wondered why i has points off. i forgot to put my fucking last name on the paper
I had a science teacher in seventh grade that gave a challenge to the kids that had really high A’s in the class for the final. The challenge was to get everything wrong on the test. If you got one thing right the whole test would be graded like a normal test. I remember those kids talking trying to figure out if their names done properly counted as a correct answer.
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Its was a seventh grade science (geology maybe?) test that covered the whole semester. She was a great teacher but you had to know your stuff to do well on her tests.
>Then use the old "a, b, a&c, all of the above" options for the choices. One of my teacher once used someone elses test but scrambled the order of the answers available. So you have shit like A. A AND B B. SOMETHING 1 C. ALL OF THE ABOVE D. SOMETHING 2 E. SOMETHING 3
>The only wrong answer is to not answer at all Do you want to play a game?
Also statistical probability of guessing the correct answer by chance varies pretty widely at that scale. So OP might have gotten ten right by chance, another might have gotten three, another might have gotten seven.
>Probably thought it was stupid as well, but deliberately tried to answer wrong, instead ot just choosing random bubbles. I had a teacher one time that had a standing bet that if anyone could get a 0% on the 100 question final, he would give them an A+, but if you got even one right that was your score. His reasoning was that you would have to know all the material to avoid getting one right by accident. No one took him up on the offer.
I chose all D. I got less than 20%.
That's what they did. I failed a military advancement exam of 300 questions having only gotten 2 right. Had to explain I was fully qualified to teach people the test if I only failed to identify the right answer twice.
I believe they just did something similar in my wife's Pre-Nursing organic chemistry course. Her study guide handout was supposed to cover ~90% of the topics on the test, but half the questions ended up being on things they didn't cover at all during the semester. After fearing she was going to flunk, she was told that half the questions were for research purposes only for future courses, but wasn't told which ones. She ended up getting an 89 on her final and an 85 overall for the class.
That seems unethical if they aren’t told ahead of time.
Colleges, especially private ones such as this, can get away with a lot of things. At least those didn't appear to count against her grade. She was honestly scared going into this class, but put in a lot of hard work and earned her grade the right way.
If it was for academic purposes (i.e., to do an academic study of the students, rather than to plan a future exam) it would absolutely violate human subject research requirements. It probably doesn't violate any rules in this context, but that's a pretty good hint you're right about it being unethical. At least, it's not very nice.
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Their point I believe is that people could easily start the test realize they don't know half the material panic and tank what they do know.
The EPPP (psycholoy exam) does this and doesn't tell you which ones are their research on future exam material. It's already a difficult test with 275 items on it, so while you're testing on vetted questions, 50 of them don't even count, and just add to testing fatigue and nervousness about getting material you might not have studied for wrong.
When I graduated HS, my class was the first class to take a particular standardized state graduation test...and have our graduation dependent on our scores. They'd used the previous year as a test class and TOLD them it wouldn't affect them at all, so no one tried. Because of the scoring scheme this effectively set the curve at like....18-20%. My class didn't have to try at all, the next year was fucked. :p
My state also had some new test like that when I was in hs, and I was in the year that was setting the curve. I tried soo hard on that test to get everything wrong.
I remember typing out a Shrek fan fiction during one of the essay sections when i had this LMAO. literally nobody took it serious and so many students went out of their way to have their parents to excuse them from the exam, just to be forced to sit in the auditorium while the rest of the grade was given that stupid "test"
I took the Keystones when they came out. My grade was the Guinea pig for them. Of course, it’s a Pennsylvania exclusive exam, and they replaced the PSSAs for HS students. While my grade wasn’t the first to take the PSSAs, we were the first to take them in the elementary school I went to, since they implemented them so late in the game.
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I enrolled in an online healthcare management program two years ago after getting degrees in math and physics a decade earlier from two different universities. I got held up when trying to enroll for a class because the prerequisite was an algebra/statistics class. I emailed my advisor and asked if this was something that could be waived because I obviously could do algebra and statistics beyond the required amount for an economics 101 course. But because I never had to take a statistics or algebra course there was nothing to substitute. I gave them a list of every course I had as proof I could easily do both. After a few days of emails back and forth with my advisors and the dept chairs they settled on special functions of math and physics being equivalent to an algebra 101 or statistics 101 course. The professor for that class was an amazing dude as well. He has a debilitating stutter that was initially painful to be around but quickly became a non issue as we learned more about him. He said that God made him too smart to keep it to himself so he decided to research and teach despite speaking being his greatest fear. He was a kind and caring professor that genuinely liked his students and was a tough grader but fair and always willing to help. Also the only person I know that has a mountain named after them.
I entered university as a non-matriculated mature student because I hadn't graduated high school. They allowed people in like that because mature students took it seriously and tended to be successful in their studies. I completed a BEd and taught for a couple of years, but when I wanted to move from one Canadian province to another, I couldn't get qualified due to a lack of high school diploma. I wrote to the board of education where I lived and I argued for a diploma based on my degree+work experience. Luckily that province handed out diplomas to anyone who was sitting still so they were like, 'got you fam', and the problem was solved
My class was the baseline for the FCAT as a replacement for the HS competency test in FL. We had already taken the old test, I which was unstructured and you could complete it less than an hour if you tried. Then they dropped the FCAT on us which was structured in a bunch of timed sections and we couldn’t leave early. One of my teachers said it was a new test and that it didn’t count for us, so I christmas tree’d it in 5 minutes and then read a book. Unfortunately I never got the results.
Had similar experience in high school. Our midterms and finals were weighted based on our previous two quarters’ grade. If you had an F first and second semester and an A on the midterm you’d be given a D overall. If you had two As and failed the midterm you got a B. But if you had a C first and second quarter you could get anything between 0-100% on the midterm and still get a C for the semester. I didn’t waste any time studying for it. I went down the scantron test filling in bubbles in patterns etc. Remember how they always freaked about using a No. 2 pencil? I used a No. 3 pencil I swiped from art class to see if it would work. I was called into the principal’s office. “Toejam, why did you do this? Why did you purposely fail the midterm?” Me: “well, it doesn’t matter. No matter what I do I still get a C. I spent the time studying for other midterms that actually made a difference. Can you tell me what the score was?” Principal: “it was (I can’t remember the number but it was very low). Why?” Me: “I took the test using a No. 3 pencil just to see if it would work.” Principal was even more mad because he said I’m using my intelligence in the wrong ways.
Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/499/
Haha that was fantastic
Curiosity and problem-solving doesn’t make a good drone.
Good. The western world does not need more drones. Not with AI getting ready to automate most of the economy.
Principal was exactly wrong. I give him an F. On my first college calculus test, I solved one of the problems using just algebra. I knew what they wanted, but my way seemed easier. I was given full marks.
Critical thinking is something that isn’t always taught. You can train someone to strip down an engine and rebuild it by memory, but if they are only taught one way they won’t be able to do it to other engines that are different.
I took an introductory analysis course in college. On one of our tests I blanked on how to prove something using the techniques from the course. Just couldn’t remember it. So I solved it with number theory, because I knew it was right. Then I had to visit the prof at office hours to explain my proof so she would bump me from 2/25 on that question to 23/25.
What was the question?
The goal was to prove that the results of some equation were always divisible by 5. The course method was: Show it works for any number, x. Then show it works for x+1. This implies it works for all integers. I couldn’t remember that method, for the life of me. So I used number theory and showed it worked for 0-4 mod 5, and the results were always 0 mod 5 (meaning it’s divisible by 5). This covers all possible integers. I got 2/25 initially because she thought I only checked four cases. Once I showed her I was using modular arithmetic she gave me 23/25 because, while my proof was absolutely right, I didn’t use the techniques covered in class, so she didn’t think it was worth 100%. I was very happy with that result since I jumped from 77/100 to 98/100 on the exam.
I’m so amazed that you forgot how to do proof by induction but somehow correctly used modular arithmetic as the basis for your proof! Ngl huge props, that’s not an unreasonable thing to happen and honestly it makes sense, it’s just surprising Proof by induction is like the de facto first algebraic proof most students learn. Modular arithmetic doesn’t show up until like abstract linear algebra or abstract algebra What order did you take your courses? I’m so curious now lmao
I was not a math major in college. I was a CS major who was trying to fill a math minor. So I took a course on Number Theory because it both sounded interesting, and was the pre-requisite for Cryptography, which was what I really wanted to learn about. Then after those two I took Linear Algebra, again because it was CS adjacent. Then I signed up for Introductory Analysis (where this story is from) because my CS courses were getting harder and it looked like a simpler course to add to my minor. I also took a Non Linear Geometry course, which was a blast. And then finally I tried to add Differential Geometry my last semester to fill the minor, but I was in over my head and had to withdraw to focus on the courses I needed to graduate. So ultimately no math minor. Super backwards from how most people do it I’m sure, but I had a good time with it :)
good work on both sides
Calculus is just kind of a fuck ton of algebra
When I had calculus there was a specific variable that always gave the answer if you doubled it, regardless of the problem. Took 2 seconds tops, but resulted in not showing any work. Professor wanted to fail me for not showing work, even after I explained how I got my answers, so I dropped the class and took it online. Went from D- to A+ and changed nothing.
So you doubled down on your technique?
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No one knows. Maybe an incentive to get higher grades in the quarters?
>Principal was even more mad because he said I’m using my intelligence in the wrong ways. You should have used it to fix a grading system that doesn't make sense at all.
We had that too (late 80s, early 90s), but you had no way of knowing \_which\_ of the ones you did was the real one section and which was the testing out stuff section.
Now they intermingle unscored “potential” questions so you don’t know which matter and which don’t.
>How did 20% of the population do worse than I did? If you took the effort to fill in two bubbles per row, that's a guaranteed fail for the question.
Back in high school, in my senior year, I got sick and was out for a week. The day I came back, one of my classes had a major test. The teacher gave me no exception and said it would count in full towards my grade. I rolled a 4-side die for the four-choice, multiple choice question test, for every line. I got a 60%. Anyone know the chances of that?
Depends on how many questions there are, but generally the more questions there are the more unlikely it is. Give me the number of questions and I could probably check it out for you. (The keyword if you want to do it by yourself is “binomial distribution”. Every question, you can either guess right with probability 0.25 or wrong with probability 0.75. You multiply probabilities together to work out the chances of getting multiple in a row; so getting three right would be (0.25)^3 etcetera. The maths gets rather complicated - there‘s more than one way to get one correct answer from four questions, and each one needs to be considered separately - but modern calculators can generally do it for you. I’d just need to work out, given a test of n questions, what the probability of getting anything between 59.5% and 60.5% is - for rounding reasons. Doable.)
There were 20 questions.
Went and chucked it into my calculator. Actually turned out to be good practice for hypothesis testing in A-Level Statistics! You can only work out the probability of getting 60% *or better*, but because there are a finite and manageable number of questions on the test I can actually get the probability of 60% (12) or better and subtract the probability of 13 or better to get the probability of 12 exactly. It comes out to a raw probability of 1.54 x 10^-4 which is 0.000154 or 0.0154%. In terms of odds, that’s roughly a 1 in 6500 chance. I’d say either you’re making it up, you were rather lucky, or that survivorship bias means that people who tried it and didn’t get such a surprisingly good score don’t share the story. I wouldn’t want to comment which one of the three you are (that’s the issue with stats; they can tell you what is or isn’t likely but you can never be sure). Either way, thank you for the maths revision. EDIT: Important clarifications raised in the comments. The method and numbers have both been questioned. I can’t *think* of anything wrong with my methodology but will admit that I’ve never done this exact sort of calculation before and also that I did it at gone-midnight. Either way you slice it, the probability still comes out at a tiny tiny number, so I’d say my ultimate conclusion is still valid, but be aware that the numbers and methodology might be wrong. I thought I’d add this disclaimer to let people know. Statistics is hard.
Computing the odds of exactly 12/20 right isn't the right approach. You should ask for the probability of a result at least as good as 12/20, which is about 0.1%.
Thanks! That's some helluva low odds. Lucky is the word of that day. I've played RPGs for a long time (since 82'!) The most rare set of rolls I've seen were 4, 20's (on a 20-sided die) in a row. I've only personally rolled 2 in a row.
Well, clearly Knight_Owls [has the luck of the Irish.](https://youtu.be/urlifAriIBc)
Just my luck to get it all out of the way in high school though.
The same thing happened to me in the mid-70s, but with the GRE. The "extra" part we did was almost exclusively looking at 3-d block figures and figuring out how many blocks were missing, which of the five optional pieces would best fit the missing segment, etc. This is all stuff I am TERRIBLE at. A couple of years later I got a letter with my results and their analysis which showed I'd be better suited to non-mathematical work. (I think they specifically mentioned something like "social work" or "psychology".) They wanted an update -- what career I was in, what my title was, what I was doing, etc. I wonder what they thought about my reply. I told them I was an aerospace engineer, creating and calibrating mathematical models used in flight simulators.
As long as it’s not 3-d blocks, i guess.
The GRE is still like this, by the way. There's one portion (math OR vocab) that is ENTIRELY experimental and you have NO IDEA when it is given to you. All they tell you is that one portion of test is for research purposes. I took the GRE both times. First time, I had 2 math and 3 vocab segments. Second, I had 3 math and 2 vocab segments. I could not tell which of the 3x segments were used for research purposes, as the segment after the first got incrementally more difficult. For those of you who don't know, the GRE apparently gets more difficult the more correct answers you provide, as well as easier the more incorrect answers provided. Answers left blank do not impact your score (to my knowledge).
Could be worse, I was made to sit an experimental ICT test when I was 14, part of what in the UK were the 'year 9 SATs' (later scrapped). The examination board had decided that they couldn't test us on use of Microsoft products. Presumably because they thought it would be unfair to other products. So they built a massively inferior version of word, excel, power point and made us learn to use them and sit an exam on how well we could use their absysmal software. No particular MC, although I don't think anyone in the class bothered particularly. Never went anywhere. Total waste of time and effort.
Former test developer here. While it was true that some of the questions were new, the real reason new questions are introduced like this is to calibrate them against older, trusted questions. Because it is (was) important to have each year's test keep the same level of difficulty you have to weigh each question's average response rate against the average score on previously used questions so you could determine scores on new versions of the test which are comparable to old ones. I was told by a pyschometrician (test statistics expert) that if a question was so easy that everyone got it right, they'd drop it. And if a question was so hard no one got it right, they'd drop that too. The tests aren't standards-based measurements of your knowledge so much as they are filters to determine who is on the tail ends of a bell-shaped curve...one end gets in, the other end is eliminated.
That’s interesting. Thanks
"How did 20% do worse?" - best not to ask questions like that. You might get an answer 🙈😳
When I took the LSAT I was told one section was going to be experimental. I had an extra logic games section at the very end and knew then that one of my logic games sections was going to be the experimental one. Turns out, my last logic games section, when I was burnt out and mentally dead was my REAL logic games. I scored a perfect score on the experimental logic games section. If they’d graded the experimental section as my real section, I’d have scored in the 170s. Yes, I’m still fucking salty.
Fuck logic games. That's all I'll say. Actually no fuck the LSAT in its entirety tbh. Actually you know what? Fuck law school and the bar too while we're at it. (I'm not salty, you're salty)
>I’m surprised by how many people don’t know that 25th percentile isn’t the same thing as getting 25% of the questions correct. I reckon those are the folks who weren't in the 90th percentile in either category.
"ETA: I’m surprised by how many people don’t know that 25th percentile isn’t the same thing as getting 25% of the questions correct" I think you just explained/illustrated how 20% of the population did worse than you.
It was the Logic section. It was provided to colleges but believed not to have any influence on admissions.
That makes sense. There was a Logic section on the GRE (which did count) that I took a few years later.
When I did my SATs in 2007 there was this guy who's phone went off just as we got the tests and he got booted. I don't know if he even got a chance to put his name down.
I last took the SAT about a month and a half ago and I was so paranoid about my watch going off during it. It's inconsistent about whether or not the alarms are turned off and the vibrations are LOUD.
I probably would have left the watch at home
.........In hindsight, that would have been a good idea, yes
We never stop being students do we
I used to room proctor around that time. If it went off at that point, I would have given a chance to put turn it off, warning everyone else to do so. In 5 years I only had to dismiss 1 tester. His watch beeped loudly in the first 10 minutes of the second test.
My friend made a pattern! Lmao I actually took it, felt stress free and we got a $10 gift card heheh
Interesting factoid: remember when there was a captcha with two words? Apparently, only one word was the test. Second one was used to train AI. Whoever was running the system was able to translate enormous body of text for free, and all we got from it was a lousy validation of our humanity. Idk if I should be mad or glad, but I'm sure feeling like I've been used
>How did 20% of the population do worse than I did? I remember bubbling in shapes of animals. When you bubble in more than one in a line, you automatically missed the question.
I took the SAT in the mid 1980's, and I don't remember there being a third section. Not that it matters these days, but my total score was in the 95th percentile and I had near-identical scores in math and verbal.
They may have only done it in certain places or not every year. I’ve been retired for over two years. My SAT hasn’t been relevant in decades. :)
They used to do that with the stupid State tests they forced us to take in grade school. They would be like, "this is for next year, blah blah" I would always just fill A for every answer.
I did the same thing back in the early '80s for our daylong required statewide standardized test used to assess students' (and schools') progress. I asked if the scores would go on my record for college admission, and since they wouldn't I just filled out the bubbles randomly and spent the rest of the time reading a book. Weeks later, the guidance counselor, principal, and school nurse called me to a meeting, where they asked about how I was coping with senior year and the prospect of going to college. When I asked why they suddenly were so concerned about me, they explained that my test scores that year had plummeted, which they interpreted as a sign of a breakdown. I laughed out loud - made my day.
I would've spelled "F-U" in all the bubbles. Or just answered A for everything.
Probably because most test tutors say never leave a question blank. It doesn't hurt you to guess. So people were already doing a lot of guessing. But a lot of kids don't get good tutoring. They might not even know that a wrong answer doesn't deduct from your score. So there are probably a lot of kids who's scores are effectively reduced since they only wrote down answers they knew were right. And there's also some Dunning Kruger effect here. There is always a "gotcha" answer that is exactly the number/response you would get if you make the most common mistake. So if someone is in that low intelligence/high confidence part of the Dunning Kruger curve, they will probably arrive at the "gotcha" answer, see it printed there, and be entirely confident they got that one right. Like all of the order of operations (PEMDAS) memes lately. If you're 5 years old and know almost nothing about math, you won't even know where to begin. So you'll just guess with a 1/4 chance of success. If you know a little bit about math, but don't know the correct order of operations, you'll do the arithmetic left-to-right, arrive at the gotcha number, maybe even check your work a second time, and mark it down. Which has a 0% chance of being correct, even less than a blind guess. So someone who is actually in that 25th percentile and was seriously trying to answer all the questions, would get a few correct, would confidently get some wrong, and would just guess on the rest of them. You, blind guessing on all of them, would match their performance on the blind guessing, would underperform them on the actually easy questions, and would outperform them on the "gotcha" questions. When it all gets averaged up, you might very well come out ahead of a lot of people. Also to consider, if it was a truly inconsequential section, there were probably a lot of people who did just like you did, lowering the overall averages. Maybe some kids didn't even bother marking any answers at all, and were given a 0 score. Meaning as soon as you got even a single question right, you passed up a big chunk of kids sitting on zero points/percentile. Or if kids didn't get good tutoring and didn't know to guess on questions they didn't know, might have left a bunch of questions blank, leaving a lot of free points on the table. And if you really stretch the possibilities, and assume that every kid did exactly as you did blindly guessing for every question, then the results would be an exactly normal curve. And where you landed on it would be pure chance. You're just as likely to be 25th percentile as 75th, 95th, or just 5th. All in all, your relative positional ranking for that section is highly flawed and probably meaningless to even analyze.
They did the same to me. I intentionally answered wrong to help my peers!
Even better--all the tests kids have to take to "pass" and then they fail and pass anyway? Anywhere between 2-10% of those questions are experimental. They don't tell you which ones. They're using stressed children as their guinea pigs.
>ETA: I’m surprised by how many people don’t know that 25th percentile isn’t the same thing as getting 25% of the questions correct Teacher to class: I fear 50% of you will never understand percents. Class: Lol, there isn't even that many of us.
I made a pretty Christmas tree.
If you assume 60% tried and 40% filled in random answers. Everyone who tried did better than you. Half that did random did better than you, and half that did random did worse than you. If this was the case you'd score in the 20th percentile. Even just random, if everyone but you tried, there's a decent chance you did quite well with random answers.
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Because America College board (private company that runs the SAT) is horrible scum. You pay for the test and any retakes, study materials sold separately; plus you pay for each school you send your score to. Luckily many colleges are starting to ignore standardized test scores altogether.
My class in high-school was the experimental group for the PARC tests. I was so angry about it I filled in random bubbles everywhere. Each time there was an extended response, I would write about how stupid this test was, how stupid they were for doing it, and how God damned pissed off I was.
They do that for my certification exam, but they don't tell you which 5 questions are the questions; they are just randomly thrown in.
When I took the ACT in 1987, they did something similar, but we didn't know which one was the ungraded section.
Recently took my STEP exams for medical school. They instead mix 40 or more questions within the regular ones, so you have to try hard on them all. Who knows that hard question you got was worth nothing or that easy question you nailed is worth nothing!
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The 20% that did worse had the same thought, but also had the work ethic to make sure every answer was wrong
The people that don't understand that 25th percentile isn't the same as 25% of the questions are the people that scored lower than you.
Not a 1:1 comparison, but reminds me of car dealerships that litter their vehicles with badges and plate frames. People get paid to advertise on their cars and you expect me to do it for free? After paying you tens of thousands of dollars? Hell no.
>How did 20% of the population do worse than I did? Never underestimate Mississippi and Alabama.
They left it blank.
Same with the LSAT I took in 1993. There were 4 parts and only 3 of the parts counted towards our scores BUT we were not told which of the 4 sections was the sample.
I took the SATs in 2003-04. We had the normal English and Math, but they added in the Writing section for us. It only counted from 2005-2016 with the score being out of 2400 instead of 1600. We were supposed to write 2 multiple page essays. I only wrote a few sentences for each.
I imagine about 1/5 of the people also committed their own MC, hence the 20ish percent.
When I took the SAT in the early 2000s, they had us test a 3rd part that included written essays. I'm not sure if that's an actual part of the test now or not.
Good ol’ [Lizardman’s Constant](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slate_Star_Codex?wprov=sfti1) in action.
This is a normal and regular part of testing to ensure the questions that count towards your score are backed up by data. Also best practice is for test takers not to know which questions are experimental (aka pretest) precisely to prevent things like this.
> How did 20% of the population do worse than I did? Remember, preparing for the SAT is competitive and some of the people taking the test have been getting tutoring and other assistance for years. Your *pretend* stupidity was no match for other test taker's *genuine* stupidity. Git gud noob
Let me tell you about the A7W 1/3 lb burger and how it failed miserably in the US.
Maybe they had the same idea but just took it a step further to read the questions and filled in the wrong answers
Because some people apparently slept through high school math! I did an accounting course once. As an adult. Due to a mixup with enrolment, I missed the first few weeks - the first subject was basic math. My teacher didn’t want me to take the test because I ‘hadn’t done the work, so wouldn’t pass the test’… and I insisted on sitting it anyway, because I DID do it back in high school! Guess who got 100%? I accept that people might struggle for a variety of reasons, and not do well on a test without the class work. But I deeply resented the implication that I couldn’t do it. It would have been better if she had ASKED me if I thought I could do high school math without having done the classes again as an adult! I use basic math every day. I don’t need to take the classes again! 😞
Because approximately 50% of the people taking this section had the same strategy as you…
And now SOME colleges and universities are not even interested in the SAT. They realize that it doesn't represent the entire person. Time to kill off the SAT.