Part of this video is sponsored by Datacamp.
Today i'd like to take a look at one American exam, the SAT.
It's used for college admission in the S.S and it's been around in some form
for nearly 100 years. In 2020 there were over 2.2 million students who sat the exam,
you don't need to be in America to take it. It comes with its controversies and criticism and
anything that's sat by that many students is bound to have a cultural impact but the sat
isn't like the extremely hard entrance exams that we've seen from other countries
like India and China, you don't even need to know calculus to be able to ace the math section.
It comes with a different motive, instead of trying to rank what a student has already learned
the SAT is supposed to be designed to assess a student's readiness for college and it forms
only part of a college application alongside personal essays, references,
school grades and extracurricular activities.
So just out of interest let's have a look at it.
I've got here a practice test. It takes three hours excluding an optional essay.
There's a reading and writing section and a math section. With maths there's mostly multiple choice
and for some questions you can't use a calculator and some you can.
So here's the math questions and they do start off pretty easy
we have finding the value of an unknown in a simple equation. So we've got algebra, some
algebra again here with more of a word problem and working out a linear relationship from this
table. You'll want to be confident with reading graphs and your algebra skills and simplification
but all of the questions are possible to figure out in just a few lines of working.
This question uses trigonometry, you just need to find the cosine of an
angle and know that a similar triangle will have similar angles. There's questions about parabolas,
circles and simultaneous equations.
This is the section where you're allowed to use a calculator but to be honest you don't need
it for most of them. For a few of them though it might help you work out the answers sooner
but for a lot of them I feel like it would actually slow you down.
This question shows two lists of numbers and asks if the means are the same or different
and if the standard deviations are the same or different. I kind of like this question because
it reminds me of this part on Mario Party where you can unlock special dice but you
have to choose whether or not you actually want to use them. I tried the questions
myself under the time pressure and I did get two wrong because of silly mistakes.
35 was one of the ones I got wrong, you've got a times x plus b is equal to 4x
plus 10. It says in the equation above a and b are constants. If the equation has
infinitely many solutions for x what is the value of b.
I left my answer as just 10 over a and didn't realize that I could solve for a as well.
The other one that I got wrong was question 14. The square root of 4x is equal to x minus 3.
What are all values of x that satisfy the given equation?
Is it one or is it nine or is it both or neither?
I originally wrote down the right answer for this which was B but then I crossed it out and
wrote C because I got bamboozled over whether or not they were talking about the principal root.
I can claim that the questions were kind of easy for me but i'm really not the target audience for
this i'm older than what you would be trying to sit this which I think would be around 17.
The reading and writing questions were I found a bit harder because there are
some questions in here that I thought were pretty subjective
and there's definitely no room to argue your point when you've just got a multiple choice answer.
For reading we have to read this passage here and then answer questions about it. In the passage
there's a part where a teacher is telling her students about a trip that she went on
and this is described from the point of view of one of her students. Question 10 asks
which sentence is the best evidence that the students are baffled by the teacher's story.
"And can you guess what we saw from the train" Miss Spivy asked.
We could not. "Camels!" she said. "We saw a whole caravan of camels."
She looked around the room waiting for us to be amazed and delighted at the thought.
I thought that last sentence was the answer
but I got it wrong it's actually the sentence that comes next.
We all hung there for a minute thinking hard until Mavis Davis spoke up.
So that's the reading section let's have a look at the writing one.
You've also got a passage to read but then it's marked with little numbers for each question
where it will ask you if there's a better way to say what is underlined.
With the math section at least it doesn't seem impossible that if you kept trying you
might be able to get close to a perfect score and that's the interesting thing its that you
can actually take this test I believe as many times as you want so you can keep taking it
until you get a score that you're happy with. It's offered seven times throughout the year
but the thing with that is that it costs money to take, it costs around fifty dollars
which does certainly sound unfair to people who can't afford to just keep taking it and
then there's the cost of things like tutors and other preparation to try and do better.
So the SAT might seem kinda easy and it's probably not good at distinguishing between the top
students because there are no extremely difficult problems. The makers of the test claim that the
SAT does assess the literacy and numeracy skills that a student would need to succeed in college
and they also claim that the SAT combined with high school grades is a better indicator
of success in college than high school grades alone but more and more colleges
are making the SAT optional on your application and it all points towards a more holistic approach
to college applications. The top schools are still very competitive but you need
to find other ways to stand out rather than just performing well on a standardized test.
This section of the video is sponsored by Datacamp.
If you're looking for a way to further stretch your mind and learn some useful applications
of your skills then check out Datacamp. It is an online learning platform that makes it easy
to build the skills for analyzing data. You can learn at your own pace with interactive
courses and hands-on exercises. There are over 300 courses that range from beginner to advanced
for example the python data science toolbox has some super useful ideas for scientists or
anyone working with data and you can do all of the activities from within your browser.
I also love the project where you learn to draw flowers using mathematics and the language R.
In fact I think i'd like to use some of these plots in a future video.
The first chapter of every course is free and subscription start at $25 a month. There's no
credit card required to sign up so use my link down in the description to have a look yourself.
Thanks Datacamp and thanks to my Patreon supporters for helping me to make videos.
A special shout out to the Patreon cats of the day Kilgorian and Juliet.