Don't be a sucker and administer the PSAT if you are an administrator or not cancel your PSAT if you're a student. This was my daughter's situation. National Merit competition is usually via a PSAT, but you can submit a SAT score (via Alternate Entry). Just cancel your PSAT. Image
The overwhelming majority of National Merit Semi-Finalists in CA entered via SAT scores even when their schools did give a PSAT test. They just had the score canceled. There are those who didn't know this trick that did better on the PSAT & SAT, but didn't cancel their PSAT score
Sociologically speaking, it's interesting how tricks to game the system seem to be reserved for those who can afford the expensive testing companies. There is an article waiting to be written on how the ballyhooed National Merit Competition has and will increasingly be gamed.
Looking back at it, I feel bad that I didn't tell my daughter to drop her PSAT which was more harshly graded. She missed one verbal question on it that dropped her score 20 points (740/760); on her SAT one wrong answer cost only 10 points (790/800). Who'd use a PSAT? A sucker.
She dropped 3 math questions on the PSAT that cost her 60 points (700/760); on the SAT she also missed 3 math questions but her score was 770/800. Only suckers use the PSAT.
I am putting this out there in hopes that families not using the expensive test prep companies can understand the tricks to game the National Merit competition.
Her National Merit Selection Index had she used her SAT would have been a perfect 228, but she was not allowed to compete with that number because she made the mistake of not canceling her PSAT by falsely claiming to have been sick while taking it.
It's even crazier. Once you cancel your PSAT, you can take the SAT multiple times & submit your highest score. How is this a fair competition with those who take the PSAT? Ridiculous! Even the one SAT score my daughter has would've been enough had she been allowed to submit it
You could use a SAT in which you scored in the 96.5th percentile to beat out a person who scored in the 99th percentile on the PSAT. The National Merit council knows this, but just pretends it's not a loophole that's being exploited. Testing companies sell this "trick".
I was once on an executive committee for the College Board re: new AP's for Interdisciplinary Research. The person who ran the committee from KY argued that the grading could be left to a mentor of the student's choosing, say a fracking CEO for a project on fracking. I quit.
As far as I can tell, College Board/National Merit are run by people who are out-of-their-depth and interested in placating people who have power in local communities, not creating the standardized testing that we probably do need.

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More from @postdiscipline

18 Sep
Look at what National Merit still allows. Does anyone know if the test prep companies recommend that their customers cancel their PSAT scores and submit SAT scores instead? Does anyone know if the school is ever explicitly told that the Selection Index number came from a SAT? Image
I get that the school can infer from the PSAT score list whether a student must have submitted an alternate entry. But I am wondering whether when the school receives the National Merit list, it is explicitly told whether the number came from a PSAT or SAT?
I am burnt about this because I think the January PSAT was graded harshly to make sure there were enough spots left for all the people who would be submitting alternate entry SAT scores which make it *much* easier to get above the threshold. Our daughter's SAT is a perfect 228.
Read 6 tweets
17 Sep
.@shoshanazuboff's story is of Google using data to improve its search engine & then appropriating data surplus to that for the purpose of generating predictions about consumers to sell to advertisers who can then manipulate or nudge us. It has 2 other features:
1. Google went from improving a service its users knew they were using to appropriating raw behavioral data without users' consent or knowledge. This is likened to forcible extraction of raw material from a colonial possession as if Google were a new King Leopold in the Congo.
2. But this isn't the only overwrought aspect of the argument. The dotcom crisis is likened to a Schmittian state of emergency in which the law can be suspended: so Google turns a crisis of profitability into a reason to suspend any ethical constraint on its relation to its users
Read 4 tweets
8 Jun
Critical race theory:
1. not thinking only THROUGH the categories of race but ABOUT them: how did they ARISE; how did their INTENSION change, e.g from marking language to pseudo-biological groups; how did their EXTENSION change--some becoming white, others excluded from Aryan;
how do racial classifications VARY across time & place; how do racial categories become SUBSTANTIALIZED, i.e. groups imagined to stand out of society and can thus be expelled or eliminated from it ("exterminate all the brutes")
2. deconstruction of the biological reality of race while specification of the conditions under which it becomes REAL in its SOCIAL effects.
3. PROCEDURES to show that putatively race-neutral tests test for arbitrary attributes meant to reproduce racial advantage & inequality.
Read 4 tweets
14 Mar 19
Tweeting Shoshana Zuboff lecture at @UCBerkeley Privacy Must Fall: The World According to #SurveillanceCapitalism
Title homage to Wm Morris, a Romantic. Had a yearning nostalgia in face of Industrialism, but focused on beauty in textiles and buildings. Sought self-regulation, made moralistic appeals
But then read Marx's Capital. Was riveted, and became a disciplined thinker. Destruction of beauty not an unfortunate byproduct but a necessary consequence of industrial logic. New situation: "a river of fire", alive and devouring. The river of fire not industrialism
Read 33 tweets
23 Jun 18
When he wasn't tightening the border to try to get immigration reform passed, Obama used it as an alibi, i.e. not as wall but as an excuse to deport those whose unauthorized crossing would not be tolerated.
#toleratedillegality in border crossings is just one of many cases where the balance of forces & the state conspire to have the law serve mostly symbolic purposes. While Obama did the right thing to try to create a path to citizenship for MILLIONS,
even his approach externalized the costs of our own drug war by deporting those caught up in it & refused the costs of the way we fought the Cold War that destabilized societies people try to escape.
Read 4 tweets

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