I met this Chinese international student. He was a very nice student. His command of the English language was not the best. It was somewhat difficult to have a conversation with him. He went to Stanford. Anyone who goes to Stanford generally need a extremely high SAT score.
If my daughter took the SAT in Spanish (a language she has studied since elementary school), I guarantee that she would fail the SAT. If you have a segment of the smarter kids in the US take the SAT in their language of choice other than English, I am almost certain that they would not score high enough to get into Stanford.
You see international student post here (Chance Me post) from non-native English speaking countries scoring almost perfect scores on their SAT. How is this even possible?
Have you seen those videos of Korean students taking the SAT without any pre-knowledge of the SAT and acing it? Depending on the country, especially in east Asia, the curriculums can be much more application-based and rigorous, which is why many international students are used to the types of questions on the SAT.
Also, Iām assuming if an international student wants to go to the United States for college and applying to Ivies, they know how hard it is and will prepare to learn a new language as if an American was preparing to dive into a fully Chinese university.
This Chinese student must have also taken the English Proficiency Exam, which means he most likely prepared very well and demonstrated his skills well enough to convince Stanford.
Edit: Also, I have a Spanish friend who moved to the United States six years ago, so he has very thick Spanish accent and stutters a lot through school presentations. Yet, his SAT is somewhere above 1450+. This is because heās a hard worker and actually writes better than most native English speakers I know.
Iāve seen domestic undergrads with 1300ās get into Stanford so Iām not really surprised. Also, his command of language while speaking should not be compared to his command of language while writing or reading. He must have worked very hard on his essays. Also, there might be a chance that this international student was a graduate student, which is generally easier to get in than undergrad. SATās make a small fraction of Stanfordās admissions process. They primarily focus on an applicantās essays and ECās to gauge their extreme passion for a particular subject or activity. Hope this helps.
For undergrad, they train to take the SAT. HARD. At levels that make US ātiger parentā stories look tame. And they have come through a system that emphasizes the ability to memorize large amounts of material.
At the PhD level it is enough of a problem that interviews are done to try and ensure a reasonable level of spoken fluency. A few years ago Harvard undergrads protested b/c so many of their TAs were PhD students whose spoken english was so bad it made them useless as TAs. It is still a problem, but all of the PhD programs that Collegekid2 applied to had a mandatory video interview for international candidates.
I can see them doing well on the Math, but the reading and English sections are pretty esoteric and not very straight forward to even a native speaker.
I do realized that those people are very smart, but almost a perfect on the SAT is hard to imagine.
While home / native / heritage language learners are often āaheadā in speaking / listening compared to reading / writing, this can be the reverse for those who learn a new-to-them language in school.
Also, test prep in some parts of Asia can be much more intense than even tiger parent stereotypes in the US, because standardized tests in some parts of Asia are the only criterion for admission to universities.
While standardized tests are intended to be proxies or measures for categories of learning, they are not perfect proxies, and it is possible to learn what will give a high test score without being nearly as strong in the intended proxied category of learning (e.g. doing much better on the SAT EBRW than oneās general reading and writing skills are supposed to correspond to). Test preparation is often intended to exploit the difference between the proxy measure (the standardized test) and what it is trying to measure (the category of learning).
Remember the SAT essay writing section in the 2004-2015 SAT? When it was first used, it was found by some colleges to be a stronger correlate to college grades than the other parts of the SAT. But apparently some test preparation companies figured out or reverse-engineered the grading rubric and began teaching students with weak English skills how to score highly on essay. Presumably, it became seen by colleges as less valuable after that.
ucbalumnus nailed it. I was able to do well on the ACT and SAT Subject Tests despite my limited English skills because they were in multiple choice format. My English reading comprehension was well ahead of my writing, listening and speaking skills.
I was able to read fiction and textbooks in English in high school. At the same time, I was proud of myself when I understood a native speaker after they repeated themselves the first time. Movies were a lost cause without subtitles. After two years in college I was typically able to express what I wanted, but with enough difficulty that āWhere are you from?ā was a question that came up in virtually every conversation. A decade and some accent work later and Americans most often guess that I am Irish, which I take as a huge compliment!
Of course I needed more exam preparation than if I had been educated in English. For example, I had to learn the relevant vocabulary for each subject I was tested in. I needed to practice my reading speed for the ACT Reading section. I opted for the ACT instead of the SAT because the grammar focus of the ACT English section was easier for me than the vocab-heavy SAT Critical Reading section. Plus, the SAT Essay with its vague prompts was a nightmare that I was all too happy to avoid.
