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The MBTI's validity, the SAT's fairness, and COVID19 - Keith McCormick
Saturday, January 30, 2021, 12:00 PM - 3:00 PM EDT
Category: APTi Chapter Events

This event is hosted by the North Carolina - Research Triangle chapter an is available for free to all APTi members and chapter members.

The MBTI's validity, the SAT's fairness, and COVID19: 

Myer's original SAT studies, the Worcester studies of the 90s, and some reflections on what it all means for the next generation of college applicants in the wake of COVDI19

During the MBTI's development mid-century at ETS, the large scale high school studies were critical to validating the MBTI. That same data also prompts some fascinating questions about what the SAT really measures and the whole phenomenon of "over and underachievers." If the SAT may be optional for more students than ever before. Who should consider taking it, and who should avoid it?

Keith McCormick is a frequent speaker and thought leader in the practical application of machine learning. Earlier in his career, however, he spent more than a decade researching score differences between the 16 types, first as part of a multi-year undergraduate research project, later as a contract researcher for CAPT, and as the founder of a small SAT prep company.

Keith met Mary MacCaulley while still a freshman at WPI in the spring of 1987. That meeting changed the trajectory of the first 15 years of his career. He collaborated with Jerry Macdaid, John Wilkes (WPI), Gordon Lawrence, and Peter Briggs Myers on the largest high school data collection since Isabel Myers' high school studies decades earlier. Fascinated by Binet's observation that the pattern of wrong answers is what is interesting, McCormick analyzed which items on the SAT the various types tended to get wrong. Myers awarded the Myers & Briggs Foundation research award to McCormick and Wilkes at APTi's conference in 2001 in Minneapolis.

This talk will discuss why the early high school studies were so critical to Isabel Myers and the MBTI, and why the replication studies were so important to Peter Briggs Myers. Discussing the wrong answers research can be fun if you treat it like a puzzle, and we will try some sample SAT questions in break-out groups during the talk.

We'll also discuss how the research can be interpreted as evidence of a cognitive bias in the SAT. Finally, we will discuss a bit about the atmosphere of MBTI research in the 90s, how that has changed dramatically, and what it might mean for the MBTI's future. The format will be 3 hours, with opportunities for break-out groups and Q&A each hour. An open-ended Q&A discussion for those that want to stick around after the talk will be offered as well.

To register:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfwHVeC42K1U440CQLW-cFyZnph-HvAYPvVexANGzcF_gtmvg/viewform