nunya

"It's been a gripe of mine for a while that we spend plenty of money bringing the exceptionally challenged students along but we don't spend much money to develop the exceptionally talented to the academic levels they are capable of achieving. It would do our country well to give strong support to both groups. "

You need to look no further than the school budget to see that there's oodles more money spent on low performers.

leafblade1354

The only use many CA high schools have for high-achieving kids is to keep them in school for as long as possible (regardless if they really shouldn't be there) to collect the attendance-based $38 a day from the state.

missy411

one poster said that students are not 'college material' if they make below 1550. Sorry but that comment sounded pretty ridiculous. Plain and simple one three hour test should not determine your destiny in life. And SAT scores on CC are really skewed: isn't 1550 the national average or close to that? Correct me if I'm wrong

thinker88

1500 is the average (I think that College Board resets the test every now and then so that 500 will be the average per section). It is also the mark of someone who, while they might not be intellectually incapable (far from it), they are not at college level. If that means that the average American isn't ready for college, so be it. College shouldn't be an "everybody" institution anyway. It should be for our more gifted students (and I'm using that term loosely since 500 is a low score indicating an average ability to comprehend high school, not college, material). And while it may be dehumanizing that a 3 hour test (actually longer than that if I recall correctly) can accurately predict your abilities (within 100 points), the fact is that it's the truth. Also, if this cutoff was made, it would mean that our society would be forced to recognize that a college degree is not needed for a lot of jobs. Only the intellectually harder jobs (the ones that students scoring above a 1500 are already working at) would require a degree.

missy411

thinker88 I agree that anything below 1500 is low. But you can't paint every student with the same brush. There are loads of colleges that accept students with SAT scores below 500 (shock!). I scored a 450 on the math section which i am definitely not proud of but still got accepted to schools whose SAT math score averages were a good 50-100 points higher than mine (UGA, Emory-Oxford campus, Agnes Scott College). Colleges do not look at SAT scores and automatically think that one student is going to succeed and the other isn't. And by the way the SAT is NOT a good indicator of college success (there is a thread that refers to this somewhere?)

BCEagle91

Graduation rates are around 25% so wouldn't a 75th percentile be a better measure of the ability to graduate?

thinker88

I addressed the fact that the SAT is not a perfect indicator of college success on page three with post #43.

chaosakita

On the remedial course issue (which this thread was started about!), I think that they're not such a bad thing. Schools have yet to come up with a homogeneous standard for all students, even the incredibly gifted ones (causing a need for remedial courses even at Harvard). But there definitely are things one should have learned in high school if one wants to go to college.

On the need for college preparation issue, I think that definitely not everyone needs or even wants a college-based career. However, I was reading a magazine on a Chinese airplane, where there was an interview with the flight attendant of the month of that company and while I don't know how honest he was, he actually said in the interview that flight attendants should have a college degree.