Critics say early SAT session for gifted kids is unfair (reserved for those who take $4,495 course)

[Liberal_in_LA]

Critics say early SAT session for gifted kids is unfair

The College Board, which offers its SAT college entrance exam seven times during the school year, is under pressure to cancel a plan that allows a group of gifted students to take the test later this summer.

The problem? The Aug. 3 test date will be available only to students whose families can afford a three-week college-prep program, which is being advertised as costing as much as $4,495. And the summer prep program includes several days of coaching by a for-profit test-prep company, a practice that the College Board discourages.

"Granting the opportunity to take the exam outside the regular academic year and after intense SAT coaching only to an economically elite segment of the college-going population is blatantly unfair," says a letter, delivered Monday to the College Board. It was signed by the non-profit National Center for Fair & Open Testing, or FairTest, a longstanding critic of standardized tests, and by Elizabeth Stone, an educational consultant in San Mateo, Calif., who raised questions with the College Board in a letter last month.

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On its website, the College Board says it does "not endorse the use of expensive test-prep courses." It also cites a 2009 study by the non-profit National Association for College Admission Counseling showing that test-prep courses have "minimal impact" on scores.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/story/2012-06-04/summer-SAT-students/55385706/1?csp=24&kjnd=4l1VCR0cqzAEKHDadTHPBmBMSzPdcOXTvxzprhKo%2BXJv%2B2N%2BJrc91tMA%2FBE9zmjY-afe15bd7-29e8-4740-9407-6b74fba92dc7_8i2E7B67aomLcFTEQNpKkN4FCrVAxPNe7%2Fmn%2B7rlR%2F3olWadYUmSnUmLrFamAlI%2B

[JI7]

1. if they are gifted shouldn't they do better than other students without all this ?

the whole "gifted" thing even makes it seem like you must buy into that or else you aren't "gifted". i always hated the term "gifted" when referring to students also.

[sudopod]

2. Flattery gets you everywhere!

What parent would respond to an ad offering to help their unmotivated, unintelligent children for $5,000?

[surrealAmerican]

12. Apparently, these students are ...

... financially gifted, not academically gifted.

[Baitball Blogger]

14. Bingo!

Just more effort being put into gaming the system. Creating more social inequities in this country.

[TheKentuckian]

17. Gifted $4,500

[JDPriestly]

3. The SAT used to mean something.

In the 1950s, we just walked in the room and took the test. Our scores reflected who we were and what we knew and could figure out.

Now, the scores mostly reflect the financial status of the parents.

The test scores have become meaningless. The process needs to be changed. No professional prep-classes should be allowed. No tutoring to the SATs should be allowed. I don't know how you would enforce that, but if a ban cannot be enforced, then maybe the SATs should simply be abolished and not considered by universities. Maybe the state exams that are now given would be a better measure of a student's ability and performance.

I feel sorry for kids who are bright and study hard and have to compete on this very uneven playing field for the SATs.

My kids did well, but it never occurred to us to pay for classes or tutors. I can only imagine what kinds of prep courses the very wealthiest kids get. Once again the 1% grabs all the cookies for itself and leaves the crumbs to the rest of us.

[blue neen]

5. Remember how we had to use actual slide rules?

Girls were required to wear dresses, and the guys wore dress slacks and shirts. We took the test at a neighboring school that was very large and intimidating to us country bumpkins. Everybody was a nervous wreck because we knew we were taking these SAT's one time only.

There was no practice, no prep, no tutors...and somehow we still managed to do well and make it into college!

What a farce the whole process has become! It's really kind of a shame.

[Liberal_in_LA]

11. i must have taken the test a few years after you. At most we had a small publication with a few

sample questions. Big fancy SAT courses didn't exist at the time. The test truly reflected the accumulated education of a person.

[Igel]

15. In the '70s we had the PSAT.

It was billed, at my school, as a practice SAT.

You take it, you see how you do. Of course, the real reason for taking it was that you saw the kinds of questions asked and when you looked at the review booklet you'd recognize the kind you had trouble with.

That's if you even looked at the review booklet.

The crash courses don't help high-achieving students. They can help students who haven't figured out how to take tests and, consequently, tend to be low-achieving. This is a good thing. You should be evaluated based on what you know, not primarily on whether you understand the testing methodology.

[JDPriestly]

19. The PSAT was used to give Merit Scholarships as I recall. I could be wrong.

[immoderate]

6. I believe them when they say it affects scores very little.

A crash course won't do it.

--imm

[gkhouston]

22. Actually, I bought a book of practice tests for the GRE and it did help a lot.

I'd already taken the GRE once, but wanted to up my score. I went through the book of tests by myself, and learned what sort of problems I tended to miss and why. My first set of scores was 600-650 per test when the highest possible score was 800; the second time I got two 800's and a 750. So reviewing might help your test-taking skills and result in a significantly better score, but I can't imagine paying $$ for a class.

[exboyfil]

7. You are right no way to enforce it

but for $14.95 you can get five previously given ACT tests (plus the one in the registration booklet). The same applies to the SAT. One solution would be to cap consideration of ACT to a 30 test score (anything higher than a 30 does not get counted towards anything - it could be the minimum threshold for elite colleges and state scholarships). The problem with GPA alone would be control on grade inflation. You need some independent verification of capability/past performance.

I bet you can pick up 3 points on the ACT with coaching. My daughter is going into the June ACT naked (with no coaching - I hope she can complete 2-3 tests this week). We are going to put in the big push in for Feb. when she will have six weeks off from her college classes (as a Junior she will be about 1/2 time college).

It is garbage to have a special SAT session - I agree with the article on that. It is intensifying an already unfair system.

I am fortunate to live in a state where admission to the state universities is not so hard. Places like Virginia and California are simply shocking where 4.0 students are turned away. One thing we don't have is much merit aid. My daughter's goal is to finish her Freshman year of college while in High School. She will save a bunch of money by doing this (and not hurt her chances for merit scholarships).

[Igel]

13. The tutorials won't help these kids much.

For all the blather about "jumping your math SAT Scores" or "word origins for SAT success" on the website--two class choices out of a full day's schedule--what they really teach are formats and answer strategies.

You don't learn the thousands of words you'd need to know, or the several years of high school math, in a few hours. Not gonna happen. That's just confidence boosting and fun review. But in a few hours you *can* be taught the kinds of questions that are on the test, how to go about eliminating goofy wrong answers, and what the different kinds of questions are asking.

In fact, most of the school districts around here, come fall, have several Saturday SAT or ACT-prep sessions. One district charges something like $15 per student per day. Another has free sessions and offers pizza. Another is means-tested, depending on your SES status in the district's records.

The really expensive test-prep sessions--and the program in the OP isn't primarily that, whatever the anti-testing crowd tries to bill it as--don't give you much more than the cheap $15 sessions. (The organization has maybe a dozen programs scattered about the country, some with two different summer sessions, all well attended and all costing about the same; just one session at one site included the SAT test, and that's apparently the one that defines all the other sessions and the kids attending all the other sessions.)

[gkhouston]

23. ^^ This. I self-reviewed and one of the most important things I learned is that I

was needlessly rushing through the reading passages part of the verbal tests. Doing practice tests showed me that I could do the quick-answer questions (synonym/antonym) first and then go to the reading comprehension questions and read/reread the passages at my normal speed. Cut my error rate way down.

[elleng]

4. Endorse or not, expensive test prep courses are the way of the world.

HOWEVER, Granting the opportunity to take the exam outside the regular academic year and after intense SAT coaching only to an economically elite segment of the college-going population is INDEED blatantly unfair.

[Fawke Em]

16. Hold on, now.

You KNOW my kiddo can out-test these things and we're not rich.

Now... how do we bottle my family? LOL

Thanks for the kudos to my kiddo, elleng.

[elleng]

18. OH Fawke, PLEASE DO bottle him!!!

How we all need y'all!

[quaker bill]

8. I did it the low budget way for the GRE

I read old books and articles for a comparative literature class, not Shakespear, but Emerson, Whittier, historic Quakers, stuff maybe 100 to 150 years old. It improved my verbal score more than 100 points, because suddenly I knew the arcane words they test for, apparently, all of them.

My advisor asked if I would be taking a prep course, I told him that I thought college was the prep course - - or do you think I have been wasting my time here?

[NotThisTime]

9. Gifted kids don't need to take a 4500.00 test prep, sorry...

[jmowreader]

10. Gifted with what? Silver spoons?

I'd like to see a follow-up to this program, to see how many of the kids who took advantage of it later got gentleman's C after gentleman's C once they got to school.

As has been said several times in this thread, the truly gifted shouldn't need $4500 worth of test prep. The problem is, the truly gifted who are also truly filthy rich will all sign up for it, which puts the working-class truly gifted and the poor truly gifted at a true disadvantage.

[coalition_unwilling]

20. The SAT itself is a bunch of bullshit, does not measure what it

purports to measure, is used to reinforce existing class privilege and allows college admissions folks to think even less about their shitty admissions policies and practices than they currently do (which ain't much).

Read David Owen's None of the Above. Owen (a former staff writer for The New Yorker) will destroy any illusions you might have about the methodology and premises behind the SAT.

[vmy2]

21. blog response. d. keltner class

I don’t necessarily agree with this at all. First of all, no one should have to pay $4,500 just to get a little bit of coaching for the SAT’s. That is way too much money to be paying for a stupid test. There are other options than having to pay $4,500 to get a little bit of prep. There are after school sessions that students are able to attend to see what the test looks like and what types of questions the SAT is going to ask. If you have questions, they let you ask after you’ve practiced and take you step-by-step of what you did wrong and how you can improve. There is even a PSAT that student can take FOR FREE. The PSAT is a practice SAT test in which you get timed and they send you your results. The school gives you the PSAT to let you see where exactly you stand right now and what you need to work on. But I mean really? It’s the SAT’s. It’s not hard. It’s everything that you have learned from the previous 12 years of school. If you weren’t paying attention enough to learn what you were supposed to then that’s your fault. Second of all, I don’t like that they used the term “gifted” simply to identify the students that have money. There are a lot of truly talented students that actually want to graduate and get into a good school that can’t afford to throw away $4,500 on a stupid class that does the exact same thing as the after school sessions. Getting people to “coach” students for that insane amount of money is a just another way to rip us off.

[Liberal_in_LA]

24. welcome to DU, vmy2!

thanks for your input on this topic.