Learning by Making Rockets & Robots

[Ian Curtis]

Originally Posted by Siri

I feel like this is one of the big misunderstandings with these types of tests (sorry, I don't meant to pick on you). It's not ~95% = A = 5, ~85% = B = 4. Yes, A =~ 5 and B =~ 4, but the percentages are (in the case of APs) based on the grades of students in college comparability studies. Depending on the test, your composite score could be 66% and still get a 5.

This is not to say that the scoring setting is necessarily done correctly in all standardized tests.

Perhaps I am not smart enough to understand the College Board, but it seems like if you only need to get 50% of the test right to be as good as a college student getting an A you are losing a lot of resolution you could be using to separate students.

To expand on this a bit, I always tell my students about how the company I work for hires. We're a fairly large medical device company... but we contrary to popular assumption, we don't hire a lot of biomedical engineers. It's easier to hire a good mechanical, electrical, or computer engineer and teach him/her the biology they need for the job, than it is to teach a biomedical engineer the in-depth knowledge of a particular engineering discipline they need.

Absolutely. It seems to me that in most cases what you learn in school really just lays a broad base anyways. For example the project I spent 3 months working on when I was an intern got covered by the professor for about 2 minutes in my flight mechanics class.