<p>Do not take a real test just to get score feedback. One should be well prepared before taking the test. To evaluate one’s current standing, just do practice tests. Those “baseline score” from the real test concept is so outdated. This may actual hurt the chance for certain schools.</p>
<p>I guess it depends on the high school’s model for advanced classes. Our high school’s dual enrollment is intended for upperclassmen, who also need minimum 520 SAT subscores or equivalent on various other tests. Underclassmen wishing to dual enroll also have to interview and get approval, and I’ve not heard of anyone actually doing this. Also, I’ve never heard of anyone being allowed to accelerate course sequences in English, history, or science, which mostly leaves math. We have more AP classes than dual and AP seems to be preferred by top students, although students planning to attend the in-state schools may be better off with dual. Some top students enroll in AP as freshmen or sophomores, but that’s based on their school record and ability to convince guidance they can handle it, and has nothing to do with standardized testing. My daughter was allowed to enroll in calculus and stats because she had successfully completed the prerequisite classes–SAT doesn’t even assess precalculus mastery. </p>
<p>I don’t think calculus is really much advantage for the PSAT. There is more need for review. Calculus students are used to thinking about different sorts of problems that aren’t tested on the PSAT or SAT. My daughter sometimes comes home from math club chagrined that a freshman or sophomore outperformed her on a problem. Usually it’s geometry, something they just had a year or two ago, but it’s been many years for her.</p>
<p>I am with bill on this one. You might try asking about this on another thread.</p>
<p>Years of prep for the PSAT? Taking the SAT/ACT starting in middle school? National talent searches? Summer academic programs? Dual enrolment before senior year?
None of these things exist where I’m from, and I had never heard of this type of thing before reading it on CC after starting college. Nor, if they were known to me, would my family have been able to afford such things.
This seems to me to reach almost the level of absurdity that this is what we now feel we have to put kids through in order for them to be successful, or that these things are required of some system or another. Also, the idea of “college ready” seventh graders just seems absurd.</p>
<p>I am honesty curious:
Why does this happen to some students and not others? Is is based on region of the country? The school district? Entirely parentally initiated?</p>
<p>billcsho certainly has a point concerning the SAT being taken too many times. Most colleges these days take either the ACT or the SAT. You can delete old ACT scores; SAT scores are permanent.</p>
<p>For me personally, a practice test doesn’t have the same adrenaline effect that an actual test does. But for students planning on attending an SAT school, taking the test too many times could be a problem. Who knows?</p>
<p>I think I may have left the impression that I urge the kids to do test prep every day. I don’t. It’s just more of an awareness that it’s out there. My original question was whether a student in a low cutoff state could improve his achievement percentile from say 93 to 97. I think it can be done, but not with prep that starts six months before the test. I just think it’s a matter of setting a long-term goal and then trying to achieve that goal. And if a student feels he isn’t making progress he can always acknowledge that it is an unreasonable goal and do other things.</p>
<p>mathyone is right about the calculus not being on the PSAT. It isn’t on the SAT either. I think students with experience doing complex math have an advantage, but only if they do a careful review of basic algebra and geometry. The ACT does have seven percent trig questions. Also, I agree that AP is generally better than dual enrollment. My son’s school puts AP on a five-point scale and dual on a 4.5 scale, so there is incentive to take the AP.</p>
<p>nanotechnology, I can assure you that these talent searches do exist in the Boston area. I think your region is in the Johns Hopkins search area. Duke does it in the South and Northwestern does it for the Mid-west. Students whose IQ scores or achievement test scores are in the 95th percentile are invited to participate. The invitation is usually sent home by the child’s gifted teacher or students can enroll online if they are in the top five percent. The cost to participate in these programs is fairly low and waivers are available, but the summer camp is really expensive. Also, every child in my children’s eighth-grade geometry class was urged by their school to take the PSAT as a practice. A few freshmen and lots of sophomores take it. So I think it’s a combination of school and parents urging the kids to do well.</p>
<p>A student who is lucky enough to make the NMF cut is likely to be able to get a five-year scholarship from Alabama or Oklahoma, and I suspect other schools will join the five year bandwagon. Over the course of four years I would guess my kids will take 14 college courses, plus maybe six AP courses. So they could easily start college with 60 hours completed. With a five-year scholarship they can go to grad school at no cost, should they wish. I might add that in many states (not mine) dual enrollment is tuition-free. In my state it’s half price, which is cheaper than what it will be after graduation.</p>
<p>American students are far behind their European counterparts. Bright Europeans simply work harder at academics. I don’t see trying to make my children as smart as a European as putting them “through” anything. Also, the ACT test has college readiness benchmarks, 18 in English, 22 in math and reading, and 23 in science. Essentially if a student makes say a 24 or higher on the ACT that student is academically ready for college, whether he makes the score as a senior, 7th grader, or kindergartener.</p>
<p>I’ve enjoyed reading all the comments. No sin for people to disagree. Thanks!</p>
<p>SAT scores from 8th grade and below are removed from student record unless student requests they be kept permanently.</p>
<p>[Test-Takers</a> in 8th Grade and Below](<a href=“http://professionals.collegeboard.com/testing/sat-reasoning/register/special/8th-grade]Test-Takers”>The SAT – SAT Suite | College Board)</p>
<p>My 8th grader is involved in many great middle-school activities that I think are simply more valuable than SAT test prep. It’s true that other countries may outperform us, but talk of 7th graders taking SATs conjures up images like some of the asian countries where the kids are spending so many hours on test prep coaching and levels of stress about these tests are making some near-suicidal. Not worth it, in my opinion.</p>
<p>Prepping to gain a few percentile points certainly seems a lot more do-able in a low cut-off state than in a high one. And certainly there are some fantastic deals out there for NMF students. You should look into how grad school may fit in, and also how credits are treated though. Also, many schools wouldn’t give credit for a precalculus class, no matter the “dual” label. I just think you have to keep in mind that this could stress a kid.</p>
<p>But I really have to disagree about those college-readiness claims. There is only so much you can test in a few hours of standardized testing. I’m not convinced they do that great a job of testing the reading and math skills they purport to test and there are an awful lot of skills that really aren’t tested at all. </p>
<p>A kid may be good at math, but do they have the reading level to plow through a college-level text full of jargon? At some point beyond the level of math being tested on the SAT, those kids are going to get to math that is much harder. Will they have the problem-solving skills? A kid may be good at answering multiple choice questions about passages they read, and have a large vocabulary, but are they a skilled writer, and are they mature enough to thoughtfully write about college-level reading material, social issues, etc.? Are they mature enough to accept criticism of their writing or ideas constructively? At a young age, do they have the organizational skills to take proper notes, remember to turn in assignments, pace working on a long-term project or studying for a big test? Judging by the number of pencils I buy for my kids to lend out (I know it’s lent because they use mechanicals but don’t like those to walk off so they keep a stock of the regular ones to lend), even remembering to bring a pencil to class every day is a challenge for many middle school kids. Yes, some kids may be ready for college-level classes, but there’s a lot more to it than a standardized test score.</p>
<p>They still can’t remember their pencils in high school, some of them.</p>
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<p>In some parts of the country, there are talent identification programs run by Duke U and Johns Hopkins and others. Through the school districts, middle school kids in the top 10% are offered an opportunity to take the SAT to identify gifted students. Those who make certain scores on the SAT are invited to attend summer enrichment programs.</p>
<p>I think these programs work on the assumption (based on some studies) that gifted kids develop superior intellectual skills at an early age (before age 6). The other side of this assumption is that if kids have not developed superior skills by age 13, it is too late for them to improve / catch up. So, these programs try to identify kids who do well by 13 and offer them enrichment programs to make them stronger.</p>
<p>mathyone, I agree with you that maturity is an important factor.</p>
<p>I think you and others are overestimating the abilities of students currently in college and underestimating the abilities of really bright seventh- through ninth-graders. I know of college graduates who simply cannot read. They can read the words but get zero comprehension. They got through college by having their girlfriends read their assignments to them. And they cheated a little bit. And I’m not talking about poor people here; I’m talking about affluent, connected people.</p>
<p>A family friend worked for my Dad one summer, which involved spending a couple of months with my brother in another state. My brother talked him into reading “Riley’s Luck” by Louis L’Amour. He loved it, but told us it was the first book he had ever read. He was about to enter his sophomore year in college.</p>
<p>If you walk into any intermediate school you will find a few third and fourth graders reading books like Harry Potter, Percy Jackson, Twilight, and so forth. These are books that are simply above the ability level of many state college students. So my question is, why in the world is a student who can barely read more prepared for college than a seventh-grader who reads several books a week?</p>
<p>I’m not saying these children should just skip high school and start college. But I think a college course or two each semester could be quite beneficial. My son’s first college course is Classical Mythology. This may sound like a “sop,” but trust me, it’s a fairly rigorous course. I dropped it years ago because it was too much work. It involves reading about 50 pages per week of the smallest type I have ever seen.</p>
<p>He is doing fine. One of the things my son tells me often is how smart many of his ninth-grade classmates are. He admires them, whether they are a notch above him or below him. There are just a bunch of these kids able to do college or other challenging work. They don’t need to be babied, and society loses by not encouraging them to challenge themselves.</p>
<p>This is all terribly off thread, but I think it is a great discussion to have.</p>
<p>You do need to cultivate a reading habit. My 2 girls love reading and we used to go to library at least once a week to pickup two shopping bags of books each time even when they were 1st grade or even younger. They would finish reading them all within a week. That lasts until they are in 7th grade due to school work. But they still read a lot over the summer.
I still go to the library once or twice a week to pick up books these days but mostly about college application or AP test preps, and only 2-3 books at a time.
By the way, my younger D did read the whole Harry Potter series when she was at 3rd or 4th grade. :)</p>
<p>I think the students at our local colleges are doing a little better than not being able to read. (We do have good vocational options and support for the kids who aren’t academically-inclined.) A college with students like that really can’t offer a very rigorous program, and I think many of their classes are more like high school level. What kind of writing assignments is your son getting? As long as he enjoys it and it is stimulating to him, it doesn’t really matter, but I suspect that it isn’t the equivalent of what he’d get in a decent college. Even the AP classes, which are generally the hardest classes in most high schools, really aren’t the equivalent of a decent college class. One of my pet peeves is that neither the English nor the History AP classes in our school require any significant writing. You don’t get through a good college humanities class writing 5 paragraph essays and just a few 2-3 page papers.</p>
<p>My D prepped for the PSAT and made NMF. We’re in an ACT state. The school only offered the PSAT because I brought it to their attention when D was finishing 9th grade. They gave it the next fall to 30 kids, 25 juniors and 5 promising sophomores, D included. It was given on an alternate test date, because fall break coincided with the test. The following year, they gave the Saturday PSAT during fall break. About 10 kids forgot to show up. That was the last of the PSAT. Now anyone lucky enough to be informed has to make arrangements with another school in the spring of their sophomore year to take the test.</p>
<p>My D scored a 188 on a practice exam before I agitated for the PSAT. She would need a 25 point increase for NMSF. That seemed doable in 18 months. She did a couple practice PSATs and looked through Direct Hits before her sophomore PSAT. She scored a 208. After that she worked on the vocabulary until summer before junior year when she worked halfheartedly through the SAT Blue Book. </p>
<p>She took the SAT the week before the PSAT to get a feel for the timing and a real test experience. That was part of the prep. She came home from that test exhausted and fearful about her math. She did the last 4 PSAT tests that I had nagged her to do earlier. She really focused on understanding the math. She scored a 2100 on the SAT, with 670 math; she got a 228 on the PSAT, with a 73 on math a week later. </p>
<p>She never took the SAT again. She used her ACT score for college applications. If you want to make NMSF, you don’t have to spend your whole life studying from 7th grade on, but you can learn the patterns of the questions. Start with expanding vocabulary. Sign up for the Question of the Day. Go through the Blue Book, and find as many old PSATs as you can. Understand why an answer is right or wrong. </p>
<p>Think about taking the October SAT. My D said she wasn’t as nervous taking the PSAT - even though for her it was more important. Having very recent experience reduced her anxiety immensely. She knew what to expect, knew there was no essay, could pace herself better, tuned out the other student distractions, and knew it was much shorter. When she was finished the PSAT she knew she would be an NMSF and called to tell me so. She was that confident. Quite the change from the week before.</p>
<p>^^ That was the last of the PSAT. Now anyone lucky enough to be informed has to make arrangements with another school in the spring of their sophomore year to take the test.</p>
<p>Its just sad to read stuff like this. There is literally over $100,000 on the line for kids who can make NMF, and they are being denied the opportunity to go to college for free.</p>
<p>Congratulations to your daughter for her PSAT success.</p>
<p>OP, to answer your question, my son had a sub 1200 score in 7th grade. He had no prep. At the time he also had not taken any algebra or geometry. Therefore, his math score was very low. However, his reading score was in the 500s. In sophomore year he scored 173 on the PSAT. Again no practice. His math and reading scores were now in the 60s (SAT 600s). So, without any prep he was in 600s in Math and Reading by the beginning of sophomore year.</p>
<p>as a rising junior, during the summer he used the Blue Book to prep for the SAT. He scored a 2000 in Oct. Then, a week of prep for the NMSQT/ PSAT and scored a 219 and made nmsf. Then, took another SAT and confirmed with a score above 219.</p>
<p>He had no formal prep. After sophomore year’s PSAT the district had him take a diagnostic test, to identify kids who could benefit from formal PSAT prep. He took the diagnostic without prep and scored a 185 or 190. Again this was without prep. The district then invited him to enroll in a formal prep course. After attending the first day, he decided he did not like the formal course. So, he dropped it. He prefers to read and get his info rather than listen to people talk.</p>
<p>So, I think working the SAT Blue Book on his own over the summer as a rising junior and a week of review before the NMSQT is really all the prep he needed for both the PSAT & SAT.</p>
<p>The story Yankee Belle has related is beyond sad. If the average schools gets one NMSF every four years that’s still something to be glad about, as they tend to be clustered in highly competitive schools. For the school to stop offering the test because some kids didn’t show up is educational malpractice.</p>
<p>I did want to add something to my comments about kids not being able to read in college. The students I was referring to are perfectly able to read, but they simply have no reading comprehension whatsoever. I think it really is a learning disability. So they find themselves a girlfriend willing to read to them.</p>
<p>I said this once before, but when I refer to “prep,” I really don’t mean four years of taking practice tests. Instead I see a program where kids learn if they have a chance and then set goals. They might take a summer math course. And from time to time they will test themselves to see where they stand.</p>
<p>I designed an SAT shower curtain for my son, but our new house has sliding doors for the shower and so never had it printed. So I’m printing a 20x30 poster with about 60 hard vocabulary words plus SAT tips. I plan to place this on the side of the refrigerator. A kid can’t help but stop and look at the poster over the course of a couple of years, just like reading cereal boxes. I’m probably going to print up a few extra to give to some of my friends whose kids who might have a shot. But hanging this poster on the wall does not require any “work” on the part of the student. It’s just there; education by osmosis.</p>
<p>“I designed an SAT shower curtain for my son”
Wow, EarlVanDorn, you are a hard-working parent!</p>
<p>My DS PSAT:
9th grade: 204 (without studying)
10th grade: 196 (without studying and yes, it went down)
11th grade: 230 (studied with one of those $30 books)</p>
<p>So, some preparation is necessary to improve PSAT scores.</p>
<p>My D’s PSAT score also went up 35 points from 10th grade to 11th grade after working on SAT practice tests over the summer in between.</p>
<p>To me, an SAT prep shower curtain seems awfully heavy-handed. (My kids would probably disown me). If you want to help your kids improve their vocabulary, why not have them read books with a good vocab level, or enjoy some family read-alouds? You’d be surprised how many kids can read well to themselves but not out loud, and it also provides an opportunity to discuss any obscure words in the reading. Also, reading different types of material is helpful–a good newspaper has words which my middle school kid never encountered in teen fantasy novels. You can also make a point of discussing hard words as they occur in your lives.</p>