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0 pointsprepend3y ago0 comments

> Should I have a leg up over everyone because I am good at what it tested?

Yes, that’s a feature not a bug. The SAT doesn’t test randomly. It is designed to test for specific subjects and knowledge in those subjects.

I’ve SAT is not fun but I think it’s purpose is to fairly test all takers and rank them to assist with allocating educational resources.

It’s such an odd question to ask “should I get a leg up because I got an A in chemistry and someone else got a C?” There are many reasons that make trades hard to get. But the idea is to compensate for them as best as possible and not dwell on the fact that any merit system will not be completely fair.

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Brian_K_White3y ago

I think the point might have been, you can be excellent at chemistryy, a real value to society with your ingenuity and rigor, and be no good at all at writing about chemistry.

A test like that would be fair if it were testing for journalists.

Maybe every job needs at least a little bit of rounded basic skills like that, and so it's fair for the test to include some the same way. In that case I see no problem there either.

But I don't know how out of balance the commenter is talking about. Was the test they are thinking of totally wrong or did it just include the appropriate portion of basic rounded literacy/competency, and if they sucked at it, then that was exactly the job the test is there to do is to guage those weaknesses?

StanislavPetrov3y ago

I think we can all agree there is no such thing as a perfect test, but at the end of the day we need some sort of objective metrics if we want a merit-based educational system.

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