SHSAT Sunset

Tag: prep

  • Failing The Stuyvesant Test

    In bringing its federal complaint against the Specialized High Schools admissions policy, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (to which I am an unpaid advisor) is challenging both the effect of the test in diminishing opportunities for bright black and Latino youth and shining a light on the arbitrary nature of the admissions process. How peculiar, to have the state legislature determine these procedures! Normally, such technical matters are left to educators versed in psychometrics and professional judgment. Here, a 40 year-old law trumps everything we know and otherwise practice about academic merit.

    That SHSAT scores are highly sensitive to test prep is beyond dispute. Rigid rank ordering creates hair’s-breadth distinctions without substance. The test has never been validated to determine its consistency with actual high school performance so the city Department of Education cannot even demonstrate a relationship between admitted students’ test results and those of others who might have been more successful meeting elite high schools’ demands. Discounting the use of middle school grades, portfolios of student work, and (after substantiated widespread cheating at Stuyvesant) character diminishes merit to a narrow gauge of tutored test-taking proficiency on a given day in an adolescent’s life.

    https://www.chalkbeat.org/posts/ny/2013/01/11/failing-the-stuyvesant-test/

  • Does Admissions Exam for Elite High Schools Measure Up? No One Knows

    Many parents and teachers have long contended that the SHSAT is an assessment of students’ test-taking skills, honed by extensive test preparation, more than their potential to succeed at the specialized schools.

    Pian Rockfeld, an English teacher at the High School of American Studies at Lehman College in the Bronx, one of the smaller specialized schools, has proctored the SHSAT. She said she could always tell who had taken prep courses. The students would draw diagrams to decipher confusing questions that left others stumped, or if they were good in math, they would start midway through the test on the math section to take advantage of a quirk in the scoring process that rewards students who score extremely high on one part of the exam rather than those with high but more balanced scores across subjects.

    “The test does not assess at all how hard a student works, or the creative and independent thinking that a student would need to thrive in our high school,” Ms. Rockfeld said. “I’m always wondering what kids we’re missing by using this test.”

    https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/18/nyregion/shsat-new-york-city-schools.html

  • High Stakes, but Low Validity? A Case Study of Standardized Tests and Admissions into New York City Specialized High Schools

    This is a study of the admissions process at a select group of New York City public high schools. It offers the first detailed look at the admissions practices of this highly regarded and competitive group of schools, and also provides a window into the broader national debate about the use of standardized tests in school admissions. According to New York State law, admission to these schools must
    be based solely on an exam. The exam used is called the Specialized High Schools Admissions Test (SHSAT). This study makes use of the individual test results from 2005 and 2006.
    Several key findings emerge:
    1. The SHSAT has an unusual scoring feature that is not widely known,
    and may give an edge to those who have access to expensive test-prep tutors. Other reasonable scoring systems could be constructed that would yield different results for many students, and there is no
    evidence offered to support the validity of the current system.
    2. Thousands of students who are not being accepted have scores that are statistically indisti nguishable from thousands who are granted admission. And these estimates are de
    rived using the less precise, classical-test-theory-based measures of statistical uncertainty, which may understate the problem. The New York City Department of Education (NYCDOE) fails to provide the more accurate, item- response-theory-based estimates of the SHSAT’s standard error of measurement (SEM) near the admi
    ssion cutoff scores, which would offer a clearer picture of how well the test is able to differentiate among students who score close to the admi ssion/rejection line. This omission
    violates generally-accepted testi ng standards and practices.
    3. Students who receive certain versions of the test may be more likely to gain admission than students who receive other versions. No evidence is offered on how accurate the statistical equating of different test versions is. The mean scaled scores vary across versions much more than would be expected given the ch
    ance distribution of ability across large random samples of students, suggesting that the scoring system may not be completely eliminating differences among test versions.
    4. No studies have ever been done to see if the SHSAT is subject to
    prediction bias across gender and ethnic groups (i.e., if SHSAT scores
    predict things for different groups).

  • Best schools shouldn’t be determined by a test

    Kaplan Inc., is probably one of the most famous companies students turn to when they need help taking a test. Their preparation courses for tests like the SAT and ACT are part of an industry worth hundreds of millions of dollars (if not in the billions). In fact, the company offers a prep course starting at just under $1,000, and tutoring for $2,600.

    If the SHSAT is simply about testing someone’s knowledge of information they should have already learned, why are test prep organizations such big business? And how exactly, outside of a few groups that provide prep inexpensively or free, are those with limited financial means supposed to get access to it?

    http://riverdalepress.com/stories/best-schools-shouldnt-be-determined-by-a-test,66322

  • Educators For Excellence: Open Letter to Mayor de Blasio and Chancellor Carranza on Desegregating NYC Schools

    Opponents of school desegregation argued in 1977 that “either we have to lower the standards for everybody so the special nature of the schools would disappear, or we would have to allow these students to be subjected to failure.”

    It is eerie how today’s opponents repeat these same arguments.  This argument assumes that black and Hispanic students are unable to achieve at high levels because they don’t have access to SHSAT test prep. On the contrary, there is no evidence to support the idea that multi-measure admittance will diminish the quality of any of these schools. These arguments are tired dog-whistles to racist assumptions and entirely grounded in efforts to preserve access to these institutions for the few.

    https://e4e.org/blog-news/blog/open-letter-mayor-de-blasio-and-chancellor-carranza-desegregating-nyc-schools

  • Everyone needs help getting into Stuyvesant: What it really takes

    Now that I mention it, I don’t think I was all that good at the test questions at the beginning. But my mother, a math teacher, had a blue shoulder bag of “manipulables”: toys, essentially, that she used to explain concepts in geometry and probability. The blue bag was always in the foyer, as if she might need it at the last minute while escaping a fire or running late for work.

    My father, who taught English, discussed the books I was reading, even (despite his love of realism) the Star Wars spin-offs. When I got stuck on a test-prep problem, they were happy to help and had time to do so.

    https://www.amny.com/opinion/columnists/mark-chiusano/high-school-admissions-test-nyc-shsat-1.18994239

  • Nix this admissions test: A recent Stuyvesant grad makes the case against the SHSAT

    Student argument against the SHSAT

    Defenders of the current system, hailing the test as establishing a level playing field, argue that if more black and Latino students truly wanted to attend specialized high schools, they could just study harder. I have repeatedly heard my classmates champion this mindset, implying that black and Latino students are not as hardworking, and, even more disturbingly, not as smart as their Asian counterparts.

    The SHSAT, however, does not measure work ethic or intelligence, but a student’s ability to answer over 100 tedious multiple choice questions in under three hours. It tests for access to tutors and cram schools that teach students the skills they need to answer the questions without thinking.

    I flunked my first practice tests. After a prep class and some tutoring sessions, however, I knew all the tricks. If I hadn’t had access to that class, I likely would not have gotten into Stuy.

    http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/ny-oped-nix-this-admissions-test-20180607-story.html

  • ‘So there I was, figuring it out myself’: A Brooklyn teen on why the city’s specialized high school prep wasn’t enough

    My family wasn’t well off financially. Often times, we struggled and there was constant worry over whether we had food in the fridge or we had school supplies. I wasn’t expecting to enroll in a Kaplan or a Princeton Review course like my fellow affluent classmates. Nevertheless, I persisted. I sought out a free program that’s funded by the Department of Education called DREAM. Upon hearing the name of the program, I knew this was my chance to really meet my goal.

    https://ny.chalkbeat.org/2018/4/16/21104774/so-there-i-was-figuring-it-out-myself-a-brooklyn-teen-on-why-the-city-s-specialized-high-school-prep

  • Admission Test’s Scoring Quirk Throws Balance Into Question

    Mr. Feinman had stumbled on a little-known facet of the test: because of the complex way it is graded, a student scoring extremely high on one part of the exam has a sharp advantage over a student with high but more balanced scores in each subject.

    “As taxpayers and parents, we should know how the test is graded — not necessarily with an eye to changing it — but certainly as a matter of public knowledge,” said Mr. Feinman, who lives on the Upper East Side. “It shouldn’t be hidden or disclosed only to the select few who have the advantage of test prep.”


    Even some veteran test-prep tutors were surprised.
    Barry Feldman, an owner of GRF Test Preparation, which tutored Mr. Feinman’s daughter, said that in 24 years in the business, he has never focused on the scoring method.


    “I just really never thought about it before,” said Mr. Feldman, a retired junior high school math teacher and a 1964 graduate of Stuyvesant. “What are the reasons? Why do they do it how they do it? I don’t know. I really don’t know, and I never really thought about questioning it.”


    Officials of American Guidance Service, a private company in Minnesota, said the test had been designed to the city’s specifications. Principals of the six specialized schools are not involved in developing or grading the test, much as colleges are not involved in administering the SAT.


    In essence, the scoring system rewards students with more points per question as they get closer to a perfect score on either math or verbal.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/12/nyregion/admission-tests-scoring-quirk-throws-balance-into-question.html

  • Special Classes Help Gifted in Ghettos

    OUTSIDE, there is a burned‐out tenement, a symbol of a devastated inner‐city neighborhood. Inside, a teacher is working on algebra problems with a class of gifted children, preparing them for entrance to specialized high schools.

    Of the 16,800 pupils in District 7, 400 are in special progress classes. The district is about 68 percent Hispanic, 31 percent black and 1 percent “other,” meaning white and Oriental.

    Madeline Golia, the coordinator of the district’s program for gifted and talented pups, said that admission to the special progress classes is based on several “flexible” standards. These include performance on the citywide reading test, mathematical ability, teacher evaluation, emotional adjustment and personal screening.

    Selection Method Changed

    This represents a change from the days when intelligence tests were used to determine eligibility for classes for the gifted, and when pupils who scored only one I.Q. point below the “gifted” score — 130 — were not admitted. I.Q. tests no longer are administered in New York City schools.

    The District 7 standard, Mrs. Golia said, is that the pupil read one year and six months above grade level and be at grade level in math. Over‐all, only 40 percent of pupils in the city’s schools read at or above grade level. There are no citywide math tests.

    This article points out quite a bit.

    1. Specialized High School test prep was given to students IN school. It wasn’t an added outside program like today’s “DREAM” program
    2. We had norm-referenced G&T before SPE which caused the predictable diversity issues. SP changed this to a local-normed admission process. This gives evidence to what I’ve always held. That Bloomberg/Klein knew that switching to a national norm-referenced exam would decimate Black participation in G&T
    3. SP had 400 students in a 16K district
    4. Students back then were performing at similar to lower on criterion-referenced exams ( something we already know, but some challenge )

    https://www.nytimes.com/1978/12/12/archives/special-classes-help-gifted-in-ghettos-the-children-belong-in.html