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Education

MSCHF Just Turned the SATs Into a Battle Royale With a Big Cash Prize (theverge.com) 42

Posted by msmash from the moving-forward dept.
It'll cost $52 for you to enter, but you could take home thousands -- at least. This is the latest project from art collective MSCHF: a one-off, winner-takes-all, massively multiplayer version of the SATs named the MSAT. From a report: The SAT -- for non-US readers -- is a multiple-choice test taken across the United States for college admissions. Because it's so widely taken, it's something of an object of cultural horror. "I actually took the ACT, but as 95 percent of my friends took the SAT, I remember them being out of their minds stressed and spending almost a full 12 months preparing with private tutors and study classes," MSCHF founder Daniel Greenberg tells The Verge. So, Greenberg and his colleagues made the MSAT. Registration is open for the rest of the week, and the test itself will take place at noon ET on Saturday, March 5th, with all entrants playing live against one another from their computers. The winner will take home all the entrance fees, and here's the kicker: cheating is encouraged.
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MSCHF Just Turned the SATs Into a Battle Royale With a Big Cash Prize More

MSCHF Just Turned the SATs Into a Battle Royale With a Big Cash Prize

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  • and if there is an big multi way tie?

    • On the web page:

      The MSAT is scored out of 1600 points. In the event of ties, the fastest time to complete the test wins.

    • It'll cost $52 for you to enter, but you could take home thousands - at least.
      This is the latest project from art collective MSCHF: a one-off, winner-takes-all, massively multiplayer version of the SATs named the MSAT.
      The winner will take home all the entrance fees, and here's the kicker: cheating is encouraged.

      I.e. Unless you're already in possession of all the answers, a fast internet connection and a script to do all the answering for you - it's only a certain way to lose $52 and about 4 hours of your life.

      Spending the same amount on booze would be a much wiser choice. And would probably cost you less in lost time.
      Well, depending on the booze.

      • Whereas if you ARE in possession of all the answers, a fast internet connection and a script to do all the answering for you, it's still a good bet the cheating-encouraging organizers will cheat you as part of their "art project".

  • Harvard is not an sports school and if you can get on the sports plan then there are other places that give you an better hope of going pro in sports.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by fermion ( 181285 )
      College is never the best way to the pro. It is just that the MCAA has brainwashed the gullible parents to think this is so. Almost no one goes from college to a lucrative sports career. We learn by doing, and for some stuff, academics, music, university can be the best place to do. But look at real sports like soccer where real athletes are playing for a real 90 minutes. They are players. Not cheaters who coordinated with the NCAA to fake a college diploma.

  • Study for the test (Score:3)

    by sinij ( 911942 ) on Monday February 28, 2022 @02:47PM (#62312577)
    SAT is a clear and problematic example of derailing education - it is crazy that students must spend considerable time solely on optimizing their performance on the test instead of developing skills such test suppose to measure.
    • You don't need to do any of that if you actually paid attention in high school. If you can't walk into those exams "cold" and score high enough to get into a college then you shouldn't be there anyhow.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by kunwon1 ( 795332 )
        -a- college, yes.

        If you are aiming for a particular school, then you may need to do much better than 'high enough'

        People who want to get into the best schools need the best scores, so they waste huge amounts of time optimizing for this test, rather than learning things that matter

    • Most community colleges in the USA have open enrollment available to anyone with a high school diploma or GED (and many community colleges also offer GED programs if you didn't graduate high school). Community college may not look as good on a resume, but how much that actually affects your job prospects depends entirely on what sort of field you're going into.

      The big problem with college in the USA is that even at a community college, you can still run up some eye-wateringly high amounts of student loan d

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by jbengt ( 874751 )

        . . . even at a community college, you can still run up some eye-wateringly high amounts of student loan debt.

        I don't know anywhere that would be true, unless you're counting room and board, and community colleges don't typically have student housing, that's why they're "community" colleges.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by fermion ( 181285 )
      I donâ(TM)t know if it the high cost of tuition, or the belief that one has to be accepted to a specific school or be a failure living in a ditch, but the college board has pulled off one of the greatest cons of all time, which is why s many schools are no longer requiring it. In my state, it is only used if a student is otherwise unqualified. It is a test of last resort.

      When I took it, graduating from public school, there were several perfect scores and almost all of us had above the median score. T

      • If your high school had "several" perfect scores on the SAT, it was decidedly not in any way typical. Not the hardest test in the world, mind you, but if you have "several" people making essentially 99.9+ percentile scores, you're already working with an abnormally strong talent pool.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by fermion ( 181285 )
          We were just typical public school inner city kids. Black, white, Hispanic, Asian. If anything made us special, it was that we did not waste our time with athletics or recreational drugs.
          • Unless your "inner city public school" was Bronx Science or Boston Latin, or similar, no, you were not typical. And high schoolers who neither use any recreational drugs (counting alcohol here) nor play a sport are, frankly, a little atypical themselves. Not bad. Just not typical. You're talking about maybe 5-10% of the class, if that.

        • I was about to suggest it wasn’t as rare as you thought, given that I personally knew a few friends who got 1600s back in the day when that was the top score (which is apparently the case again?), but it looks like you’re right: they’re apparently a fraction of a percent according to public statements.

          To be fair, my friends were spread around a few schools, so they weren’t all in the same graduating class from the same school.

          • If you know anyone who got a 1600, it means you move in the kind of circles where people can plausibly make 1600s, so not so weird that you might know a few. But, as I said, that is in no way typical of any single inner-city public high school or its students, unless one uses that term to apply to extremely selective magnet schools. You just happened to have friends who were insanely high-achieving. And, as you note, distributed among several schools.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ncc74656 ( 45571 ) *

      it is crazy that students must spend considerable time solely on optimizing their performance on the test

      I never did any such thing either time I took it. I treated it as a test of what I knew, which I suspect is what they're looking to determine. I first took it in 7th grade as part of some sort of competition. Not having been exposed to most junior-high- and high-school-level topics at that point, I only managed 430 verbal and 430 math...not so hot, though the verbal score was apparently above the ave

    • I took the SATs with 0 studying beyond my high school diploma. No private tutors or expensive courses. I scored in the 85th percentile for language skills, and around the 60-65th in the other sections. If you've got to study an extra year just for the SAT, there was something seriously lacking in your high school education. "Teaching to the test" seems like a symptom of deeper problems, then, rather than the cause. It would probably be OK to get rid of standardized testing but that alone won't improve educa

  • Just don't take the SAT. (Score:3)

    by dmay34 ( 6770232 ) on Monday February 28, 2022 @03:00PM (#62312627)

    Just have your parents donate a few million dollars to whatever University you want to go to. It's not that hard people!

    • Just have your parents donate a few million dollars to whatever University you want to go to. It's not that hard people!

      This is funny and sad at the same time. If you're wealthy and pop out a kid who struggles at school, you absolutely can throw money at the issue until your adult child has a piece of paper from a prestigious school that says they're entitled to a well-paying job.

      If you're broke and struggled at school, well, you're screwed, basically. It's the toilet scrubber for you, bud.

      • If you're broke, well, you're screwed, basically.

        • If you're broke, well, you're screwed, basically.

          Right? Even if you're a prodigy, the loans can ream you without scholarships or grants -- and even those are under heavy competition. It irks me that some students a lot of students rank in the "your parent(s)/you make too much" and "your parent(s)/you make too little" -- this being a Venn diagram and they're at the intersection, which makes them easy prey for predatory lending; thereby, they hope to get a good enough paying job afterwards to cover the loans or never get through paying them off.

          This smells

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by dmay34 ( 6770232 )

        That's really everything. If your parents are rich, they can buy you a place pretty much anywhere they want.

        Elite military academy? No problem.
        High profile position at a research company? When can you start.

  • The SAT -- for non-US readers -- is a multiple-choice test taken across the United States for college admissions.

    Anyone with even a passing knowledge of US culture can already guess that SAT is an acronym for some sort of Test. What non-US readers would be more interested is what the S and A stand for. I would rewrite the story lead as "The SAT, or (Stochastic Asterisk) Test for non-US readers, is a multiple-choice etc". (The multiple-choice part is also pretty obvious since undergraduate mass-based exams are almost always multiple choice, unless you're auditioning for the army.)

  • No, what really happend is MSCHF (Score:3)

    by wakeboarder ( 2695839 ) on Monday February 28, 2022 @04:08PM (#62312941)

    just got free advertising

  • Let's see now...
    Golden laser sword is to vampire's queen as bag of holding is to ____.

  • If you are planning to pay some money and sit there manually taking this test you will be wasting your time.

    Since it's rather straightforward to get a 1600 without the subjectivity of the essay, completing the test fastest will be the way to win.

    To prepare, I'd probably suggest to work on a good set of GPT-3 prompts along with some browser based tool to automate getting the questions and answers into it as fast as possible.

    I'll be rather disappointed if the winner doesn't appear within 10 minutes or so.

  • Can a 50 year old win this?

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