A recommended schedule for taking the SAT, ACT, and AP tests

The Princeton Review published a High School Testing Timeline, with recommendations for when to take what tests.  Keep in mind that PR is in the business of selling test prep.

Here are key parts of the Princeton Review Timeline, with brief explanations of our local high school’s approach* to testing posted in blue text:

THE FRESHMAN YEAR

The Princeton Review philosophy is to not take tests during the first year in high school. We don’t even think it’s a good idea to take a PSAT as a 9th grader, because the scores seem to create more, not less, stress for the freshmen and their families. The one consistent exception to this is if a freshman is doing very well in her (or his) 9^th grade Biology class, and is planning to take AP Biology before the end of the Junior year. If these two factors are in place, then we think it is a good idea for that student to take the Biology Subject Test (formerly known as the SAT II) in Ecology.

Our Local School —
Similar to above, except that many accelerated science students take AP Environmental Science in eighth or ninth grade as an alternative to biology.

THE SOPHOMORE YEAR

October: Take the PSAT or the PLAN
These tests during the sophomore year are opportunities for risk free practice that should not be missed. We do not recommend intensive preparation …

May: If you are in an AP class, then you will have the chance to take the AP in May. Some students take an AP class, but then do not take the AP exam. You do not want to be one of these students. College admissions people tend to frown upon students from AP classes who duck out on taking the AP exam.

June: Take any appropriate Subject Test
Traditionally, if a Sophomore is going to take a Subject Test in the 10th grade, it will be in either World History or Chemistry….

Our Local School —
Similar to above, with the opportunity to take the PLAN only recently becoming an option.  I’m glad they now offer the PLAN because it sets the stage for taking the ACT, which is a better choice than the SAT for some students.  Students taking AP classes are required to take the AP exam.

SUMMER BETWEEN THE 10TH AND 11TH GRADE YEAR

If you have the time, the inclination and the resources, this is the time frame best suited for test preparation. The students have learned the vast majority of the material that will appear on the SAT (and if they’ve completed Algebra II, they’ve learned all of it), and it’s a considerably less stressful time to be doing this work….

Our Local School —
Most students are advised to defer any test prep until after they’ve taken the SAT in their junior year.  According to guidance counselors, at that point a student will be in a better position to decide if he wants or needs tutoring.

JUNIOR YEAR

While many different scheduling strategies can satisfy individual student’s needs, the majority of students fall into two distinct categories: “Aggressive” and “Regulars”.

AGGRESSIVE
(Includes high academic achievers, kids with proactive parents, students who had a lot of time to prepare during the previous summer but who anticipate being extremely busy in the spring, students who want to try to achieve some flavor of National Merit status, very weak testers who may need extended preparation to achieve acceptable scores, and students who will apply as Early Decision candidates).
October – SAT followed by PSAT (may not be appropriate for weaker testers)
November – Language listening subject tests for native speakers
Winter – Refresher preparation
Mar – The second crack at the SAT, if necessary
April – Try the ACT
May – AP’s/Subject Tests
June – Subject Tests

REGULARS
Sep/Oct – Light prep (PSAT Clinic)
October – PSAT
Fall/Winter – Intensive prep (can do extended prep starting in November or begin in January, both in preparation for the March/April test in either the SAT or the ACT)
May/June – Subject Tests (if needed) or a second attempt at the SAT

Our Local School —
Similar to above recommendations on Subject and AP tests, but less aggressive on other testing matters.  Our high school generally recommends waiting until the spring of junior year to first take the SAT, followed by the ACT if the SAT score was lower than desired.  On the subject of test prep, our school appears slightly schizophrenic in their outlook.  Guidance counselors do not recommend extensive test prep for the vast majority of students, but the school administration sends the message that the highest test scores are the result of test tutoring.  My guesstimate is that at least half the students pay for some type of test prep.

SENIOR YEAR

The Senior year can become complicated because it is so late in the cycle, and the permutations are very dependent upon the individual student. From the broadest perspective, if you’re “Aggressive”, then October should be your last ACT/SAT/Subject Test attempt. The “Regular” students may take these exams up to, and including, December of their senior year and still make it in time for most colleges’ admission deadlines (including the UC schools).

Our Local School —
Similar to above, with a general recommendation to complete testing sooner rather than later.

* This is based on my experience and observations, so I make no claim that this is a comprehensive representation of their official policy.

Related:  College application timeline

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I’m reposting this from PWN the SAT because this SAT guide comes highly recommended and because I want a chance for a free copy!  You should post or link it, too.
…

The whole reason I started PWN the SAT is that I think good, solid test prep advice should be available to everyone, not just people who have access to top-notch tutors or prep courses. That’s why the content on my sites will always be free, and although I am selling a book now (I need to pay my rent, you know) I want to give you a chance to get your hands on it for free, too.

Here’s the deal:

1. You reblog this post. (Or copy/paste THE WHOLE POST onto your non-Tumblr blog, or put a link to this contest on your favorite social network.)
2. You fill out this form.
3. For every 10 books that sell, I choose 1 random person from the list, email them to make sure they still want a book and confirm their shipping address, and send them a free copy.

What?

If you have no idea what the PWN the SAT Math Guide is or why you’d want it, the book’s Amazon page allows you to browse through and see what it’s about.

Why?

Well, it’d be nice to get the word out, but I don’t exactly have a marketing budget. This is a promotion that pays for itself, so I know I’ll always be able to afford to ship out the prizes.

And I’ve heard from a bunch of people that they want my book but can’t afford it.

I feel like this one stone, if it catches on, can kill both birds. You help me get the word out, and I give you free stuff.

Restrictions:

• This is only available to USA residents, because I don’t really know how to ship internationally. Sorry.
• Only one entry per person.
• I’ll check to make sure your post is still up before I contact you to tell you you’ve won, so you can’t just make a post and then delete it.
• This is important: PLEASE don’t spam. That means don’t put this where you don’t have permission to put it. Don’t put it on message boards that forbid advertising. Don’t put it ANYWHERE it won’t be welcome. If you have any doubt about whether you should be posting this, don’t.
• This promotion will run through the entire month of February, but I might extend it further if it seems to be working well.

http://qa.pwnthesat.com/post/16873853535/want-a-free-copy-of-the-pwn-the-sat-math-guide

More SAT cheating arrests – ‘This stuff has been going on for a very long time’

NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) – At least 13 students are expected to face authorities this morning in connection with Nassau County’s expanding SAT scandal.

Some could be charged with felonies for impersonating test takers and accepting huge sums of money in exchange.

It all comes two months after police arrested Sam Eshaghoff and several students from at Great Neck North High School in September.

The students expected to turn themselves in today come from Great Neck South, Great Neck North, Rosyln High School, the North Shore Hebrew Academy and St. Mary’s High School Manhasset.

There is concern that this type of cheating is widespread.

Lavalle says every district attorney in the state ought to follow the lead in Nassau and investigate their own high schools.

It makes me wonder if it is significantly affecting the SAT score percentiles, especially on the upper end.

Some students are not entirely surprised by today’s pending arrests.

“This stuff has been going on for a very long time,” said one student. “Everybody wants to succeed and go to the best college.”…

Law enforcement negotiated Tuesday’s surrender date with the lawyers for the students, keeping it close to their Thanksgiving breaks from colleges.

It’s doubtful these students will be enjoying their Thanksgiving breaks very much.  I’m thankful these cheaters have been caught.

Related:  New York SAT cheating scandal is expected to lead to more arrests

New York SAT cheating scandal is expected to lead to more arrests

A former FBI chief is coming in to help clean up the SAT cheating mess.

Gaston Caperton, president of the College Board and a former governor of West Virginia, said that in addition to bringing in the former F.B.I. chief, Louis J. Freeh, as a consultant, the College Board was also considering additional safeguards over the next year, including bolstering identification requirements for students taking the SAT and taking digital photographs to ensure they are who they say they are.

Some educators think this action is long overdue and are calling for harsher penalties.

“The procedures E.T.S. uses to give the test are grossly inadequate in terms of security,” Bernard Kaplan, principal of Great Neck North, testified at the hearing. “Furthermore, E.T.S.’s response when the inevitable cheating occurs is grossly inadequate. Very simply, E.T.S. has made it very easy to cheat, very difficult to get caught.”

While the new security measures represent a change of tone for College Board and Educational Testing Service officials who previously insisted their system was adequate, some superintendents and principals said they did not go far enough. These officials have called for fingerprinting students, increasing stipends for proctors and imposing real consequences on those who cheat. Currently, if the testing service suspects cheating, the students’ scores are canceled and they are permitted to retake the test — with no notification to either their high school or colleges where they apply.

Educational Testing Service is already spending about 10% of its budget on security for College Board testing, but whatever they’re doing may not be adequate.  Bernard Kaplan, principal of the high school where the cheating occurred, says this about the problem.

“It is ridiculously easy to take the test for someone else” 

Many young people have fake IDs, which are commonly  ”being bought in bulk from vendors in China” and “nearly undetectable by bar employees”.  I imagine SAT test proctors also find it hard to spot them.

Related:  Student cheating – the SAT, the Internet, and Ted Kennedy

(Cross-posted at Kitchen Table Math)

 

‘self-control is a better predictor of students’ college grades than IQ or SAT scores’

The importance of willpower

Should one need a more practical sales pitch for the importance of willpower, Messrs. Baumeister and Tierney point to empirical work showing its over-riding importance for academic, personal, career and financial success. (Remarkably, for example, self-control is a better predictor of students’ college grades than IQ or SAT scores.) So crucial is self-discipline to individual flourishing, the authors suggest, that “research into willpower and self-control is psychology’s best hope for contributing to human welfare.”

In “Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength,”, authors Roy F. Baumeister and  John Tierney report that willpower can be viewed as a  ”moral muscle”, with similarities to a physical muscle.

• It can be overused and temporarily depleted.
• It is fueled by glucose, so hunger can weaken our willpower.
• It can be strengthened by training.

But  ”mind over matter” also plays a role in willpower.

Recent research suggests that “Willpower” may exacerbate the very problem it is trying to reduce by promoting the idea of self-control as a limited resource. Stanford University psychologist Carol Dweck and her colleagues have found, both in the laboratory and in the real world, that one’s willpower is depleted through exertion only if one thinks it will be. Losses of self-control may sometimes “result not from a true lack of resources after an exhausting task,” Ms. Dweck and her colleagues wrote last year, “but from people’s beliefs about their resources.”

Student cheating – the SAT, the Internet, and Ted Kennedy

How widespread is SAT cheating?

The arrest this week of six Long Island high school students accused of cheating on the SAT is only the beginning of a wider investigation into similar behavior on the island, The New York Times reports.

A reporter for The Times, Jenny Anderson, writes that two other schools are being investigated by Kathleen M. Rice, the district attorney for Nassau County, who says she believes that the cheating problem is widespread. School officials and tutors have suggested that the Educational Testing Service, which administers the exam, should require students to take it in their own schools or notify districts when outside students are going there for the test.

Here are some numbers.

More than half of teenagers say they have cheated on a test during the last year — and 34 percent have done it more than twice — according to a survey of 40,000 U.S. high school students released in February by the nonprofit Josephson Institute of Ethics. The survey also found that one in three students admitted they used the Internet to plagiarize an assignment.

The statistics don’t get any better once students reach college. In surveys of 14,000 undergraduates conducted over the past four years by Donald McCabe, PhD, a business professor at Rutgers University and co-founder of Clemson University’s International Center for Academic Integrity, about two-thirds of students admit to cheating on tests, homework and assignments. And in a 2009 study in Ethics & Behavior (Vol. 19, No. 1), researchers found that nearly 82 percent of a sample of college alumni admitted to engaging in some form of cheating as undergraduates.

While it appears that student cheating is becoming more prevalent, this story about Ted Kennedy reminds us that this type of deceit has always been around.

… Kennedy was forced to withdraw from Harvard for two years after cheating on a Spanish final. According to “The Education of Edward Kennedy,” by Burton Hersh, the future U.S. Senator and presidential candidate had the roommate of one of his football teammates take the exam for him.

Hirsch explains cause of decline in SAT scores is content-light instruction

Average SAT scores fell this year, with critical reading results declining to the lowest on record.  E.D. Hirsch writes that the main cause is a move away from content-rich instruction in the elementary grades.

The decline has led some commentators to embrace demographic determinism — the idea that the verbal scores of disadvantaged students will not significantly rise until we overcome poverty. But that explanation does not account for the huge drop in verbal scores across socioeconomic groups in the 1970s.

The most credible analyses have shown that the chief causes were not demographics or TV watching, but vast curricular changes, especially in the critical early grades. In the decades before the Great Verbal Decline, a content-rich elementary school experience evolved into a content-light, skills-based, test-centered approach.

Daniel Willingham on this subject:

More:

How Knowledge Helps – It Speeds and Strengthens Reading Comprehension, Learning—and Thinking

(Cross-posted at Kitchen Table Math)

Students who don’t submit SAT scores do worse in college

Howard Wainer’s new book, Uneducated Guesses: Using Evidence to Uncover Misguided Education Policies, takes on the test optional movement.

Wainer is critical of the movement to make the SAT optional in college admissions, and argues that students who don’t submit SAT scores perform worse in college than do those who submit the scores.

Wainer looked at data from five colleges.

In the case of Bowdoin College, which does not require testing, but for which most applicants have taken the SAT, he compares the academic performance in college of those who did and did not submit scores. For four other colleges, he looks at the performance of the minority of students who submitted ACT scores instead of SAT scores.

As expected, Bowdoin students who submitted their SAT scores outperformed those who did not – 1323 vs. 12o1.

But then he tracked the academic performance of both groups of students in their first year (the first year being key, since the College Board says that the SAT predicts first-year academic success). He found that those who did not submit scores received grades in the first year that were 0.2 points lower than those of students who submitted scores. This suggests, he writes, that the SAT does predict academic performance in a meaningful way.

Then Wainer examined four colleges that let students submit SAT or ACT scores, and for which first-year grades were also available: Barnard and Colby Colleges, Carnegie Mellon University and the Georgia Institute of Technology. At all of these institutions, the students who submitted SAT scores had slightly better first-year grades than those who didn’t.

Wainer argues that these and other data suggest that colleges that seek to enroll those who will perform best in their first year are acting against the evidence when they make the SAT optional. “Making the SAT optional seems to guarantee that it will be the lower-scoring students who perform more poorly, on average, in their first-year college courses, even though the admissions office has found other evidence on which to offer them a spot,” he writes.

Robert Schaeffer, public education director of the National Center for Fair and Open Testing, which has encouraged colleges to drop SAT requirements, said that these findings don’t challenge the reality that scores of colleges have done in-depth studies in recent years and found that dropping the test requirement has no impact on retention or graduation rates. He noted that Wainer’s career “has been spent inside the testing industry” and said that he “ignores evidence” from many other colleges.

While some studies have found that SAT scores do not predict college performance, other research that has taken selection bias into account or pulled out  SAT scores as an independent variable has concluded just the opposite.

‘Uneducated Guesses’ – Inside Higher Ed

Student names are worth 33 cents each to colleges

The College Board sells names to more than 1,000 colleges, using biographical information students provide when they register for the preliminary SAT and SAT exams. Students can opt out of having their names in the company’s search service. The company and its competitor, Iowa City, Iowa-based ACT Inc., both nonprofit, sell names for 33 cents apiece.

SAT scores matter, even for test-optional colleges

Do SAT scores matter in college applications?  Although students often hear that admissions officers place a relatively low priority on test scores and that the trend is toward “test-optional” admissions, it’s clear that performance on standardized tests remains important.   Inside Higher Ed had this recent report.

Many of the same colleges that have ended SAT requirements, noting that wealthy students tend to do well on the exam and that many black and Latino students succeed in college while not doing well on it, may trust the SAT in other ways. These colleges buy the names of high-scoring students from the College Board (and from the ACT) and use those names to recruit prospective students, Bloomberg reported. Leon Botstein, president of Bard College (which neither requires the SAT nor buys names), criticized the practice. “They take a stance that looks principled but is strategic,” Botstein told Bloomberg. “They say ‘I’m going to show myself to be open,’ but in reality they’re completely buying into the definition of a good student that is guided by the test.”

From Bloomberg:

Students are being duped by some schools into thinking that test scores don’t matter, when they matter a great deal for marketing outreach and prestige…. Test-optional colleges that buy names of high-scoring students are hypocritical….

Another benefit to test-optional colleges of recruiting students with high test results is that it can help raise their average entrance-exam scores, a metric used in determining some national rankings and a measure of prestige. Since students who don’t test well may refrain from submitting scores, that leaves high performers, or those who can afford prep courses and pay fees to retake the test several times, to bolster a school’s average scores….

In 2004, Pitzer President Laura Trombley wrote that the SAT “doesn’t really make any sense anymore.” The school, one of seven institutions comprising the Claremont Colleges inCalifornia, ranked 70th in the 2002 U.S. News & World Report list of liberal arts colleges. That year, the school’s average SAT score for verbal and math combined was 1,234, according to Pitzer data. In 2004, after it went test optional, its ranking climbed to 59, while the average score rose to 1,246. By 2010, it ranked 46th, while the score reached 1,293.

“It helped certainly to improve our rankings,” Trombley said. “That’s going to have a positive effect if our SAT scores improved.”

The College of the Holy Cross, which went test-optional in 2006, does not buy names of high-scoring students.

“If we were buying the names of students who scored very high on the SATs, to buy those names would be somewhat contrary to the message we would send about the importance of standardized testing,” McDermott said.

Many merit scholarships require SAT test scores, even at test-optional schools like Wake Forest.  The criteria for several of their merit awards, including the Nancy Susan Reynolds Scholarship, are described on their website.

Successful applicants have pursued the most challenging curriculum available to them and have achieved grade point averages and SAT scores that place them in the top few percentage points in comparison to their peers (often in the top 1 percent of their class, with SAT-1 scores above 1500).

Some test optional colleges that buy student names from testing companies:
American University  –  Bowdoin College  –  Denison University  –  Dickinson College  –  Mount Holyoke College  –  Pitzer College  –  Sewanee: University of the South  –  Smith College  –  Union College  –  University of Arizona  –  Wake Forest University

A response by Laura Skandera Trombley, president of Pitzer College.