I’m an upcoming Junior, and I got 1430 on my last practice test (I’m looking to improve it). What you guys think of Khan Academy for SAT prep. Good? Bad?
The price is right:-)
My boys have found it helpful.
@3scoutsmom Thanks! I thought it was free?
Yes. Khan Academy SAT prep is very good. Best of luck.
@Pawrrrrrr what could be a better price than free???
It’s so-so. Lots of errors and some question types (in R, at least) that do not appear on the CB’s actual exams. The math portions have lots of bad English usage; the W sections have some entire passages written with UK conventions (including single quotation marks, ugh). That said, there’s not much out there that’s better at this point.
Agree with Marvin (not unusual here). It’s pretty bad, but it’s still better than anything else available at this time.
In my opinion, Khan Academy is much, much worse than was the old Official SAT Online Course.
The Online Course had questions written and edited by the same people who wrote the real test. It had 10 full practice tests in addition to the practice tests available in the Official SAT Guide. The quantity of practice tests and the similarity of the questions to real questions are the most important factors in the quality of prep material.
It has been very difficult to obtain clear answers from College Board about who is writing the Khan Academy material. My best guess is that even if some of the questions are written by people who write questions for the real test, the Khan material is not subject to the same selection and editing process as are real test questions, which are reviewed many times. The result is that Khan Academy questions often do not look and feel like real SAT questions, and also have errors and ambiguities one would not generally find in real SAT questions.
In addition, it was possible to download every practice quiz and test from the Online Course. Khan Academy does not allow downloading of most practice questions. Only the complete tests also available from the College Board site can be downloaded. The real test is on paper. Practice should be on paper too. The delivery format of the test and practice questions makes a difference.
I used to recommend the Online Course (for $60) to every student I had. I only recommend Khan Academy to students who need to work on basic skills and want a budget option. I agree it can be helpful to some people, but students deserve better. CB is promoting as a major improvement what is actually a significant lowering in the quality of its preparation offering to students.
CB says that Khan Academy SAT Prep is “official”.
QUESTIONS THAT ARE NOT WRITTEN, SELECTED AND EDITED BY THE SAME PEOPLE WHO WRITE, SELECT AND EDIT THE REAL TEST QUESTIONS ARE NOT “OFFICIAL”.
So in my view, the only publicly available official prep materials are the 6 official SAT practice tests, 2 official PSAT Practice tests, and the two actually administered October 2015 PSAT tests.
After this, the next best thing is old ACT’s, especially for Writing. At least that material has been edited, and if you get good enough at the ACT, you can also sit the real test.
Here is an example of a Khan Academy reading question I find flawed. (I have discussed math questions on another thread.)
I am mostly concerned about question 9, but question 8 is the basis for question 9, so I copied both below.
You can find the relevant passage selection linked below. I took a screenshot instead of copying the passage to demonstrate a problem with the line numbering.
http://im*****gur.com/gallery/hIJkE
Question 8
It can reasonably be inferred from Passage 2 that the hotspot theory
A) can be supported by comparing the volcanic rocks of two different islands.
B) has yet to be proved in part due to a lack of evidence from multiple locations.
C) has recently been altered after a thorough study of Hawaiian volcano sites.
D) won’t be able to be confirmed with certainty until volcanoes get older and erode.
Question 9
Which choice provides the best evidence for the answer to the previous question?
A) lines 39-41 (“Wilson…time”)
B) lines 41-44 (“This … volcanism”)
C) lines 54-65 (“According … hotspot”)
D) lines 59-64 (“By…formed”)
Discussion
Question 8
The last paragraph says that the hotspot theory predicts that volcanoes further from the hotspot should be older and more eroded. Then it says that volcanoes in Kaui, far from the hotspot, are very old and eroded, while volcanoes on the Big Island right over the hotspot are much younger.
This clearly shows that choice A (hotspot theory can be supported by comparing the volcanic rocks of two different islands) is correct.
From a stylistic point of view, I am not happy with the language of choice D (“hotspot theory won’t be able to be confirmed with certainty until volcanoes get older and erode”).
“won’t be able to be confirmed” is an informal, wordy expression for “cannot be confirmed”
“get older and erode” is so informal it is almost slang. How about “further erode as they age”?
Maybe I am old-fashioned and nitpicky, but I have never seen any language like the choice D language on an SAT: I cringed slightly when I read it.
In any case, the bad style does not affect the substance of the question.
Now let’s come to the real issue: question 8.
The less serious issue is that the line numbers in choices C (54-56) and D (59-63) do not match the line numbers of the quoted sentences in the passage.
In the passage, line 54 is “crust do not erupt onto the seafloor, forming an active seamount.” The sentence in the passage that corresponds to (“According…hotspot”) has line numbers 55-57, not line numbers 54-56.
Similarly, the sentence in the passage the corresponds to choice D (“By…formed”) has line numbers 60-64, not line numbers 59-63.
I take this mistake to be serious. If it occurred on a real test, I think the question would have to be thrown out.
The more serious issues concern the content of the answer choices. As discussed above, the last paragraph says that the hotspot theory predicts that volcanoes further from the hotspot should be older and more eroded. Then it says that volcanoes in Kaui, far from the hotspot, are very old and eroded, while volcanoes on the Big Island right over the hotspot are much younger. This shows that evidence from two islands supports the theory.
Thus the correct line numbers justifying answer choice A are lines 55-64. These lines contain the prediction of the theory and then the evidence from two different islands consistent with the prediction.
Unfortunately, these lines are not among the answer choices. We have choice C, containing lines 54-56 that should be lines 55-57 and choice D, containing lines 59-63 that should be lines 60-64.
According to Khan Academy, the correct answer choice is D, which in the text reads:
“By comparison, on the Big Island of Hawaii…the oldest rocks are less the 0.7 million years old and new volcanic rock is continually being exposed.”
and the reason given in Khan answer explanation is that:
“These lines describe the conditions of the second site Wilson studied that support the hotspot theory.”
Unfortunately, contrary to Kahn, you cannot show that a comparison of two islands supports a theory by presenting evidence from only one island.
What if the rocks on the first island (the one further away from the hotspot) showed little erosion? What if there were no evidence from another island at all?
In addition, you cannot know that the evidence from either island supports the theory unless you know the relation of the evidence to the theory. The sentence quoted in choice D presents facts about the second island, no facts about the first island, and also no explanation of the relation between these observed facts and the theory.
Therefore taken in isolation from the rest of the paragraph, the sentence quoted in D does not give any evidence that the theory can be supported by a comparison of the two islands.
Well done, @Plotinus – it appears the most egregious errors are in the M section (well, aside from obsolete question types in R). In W I’ve also seen KA passages with British conventions (single quotation marks, for example).
@Plotinus Hooray for your diatribe. Cheers are coming from this corner of the site as well.
I groaned when I first heard of the CB/Khan partnership, and I have seen nothing to change my opinion.
KA is free, and you get what you pay for in life.
I will concede that KA is an option for students in poor or rural areas with no access to quality test prep. However, like in any academic subject, you’re going to learn far more from a human in the room with you (or even on Skype) than you’re ever going to learn from TV!
KA fashions itself as the be-all, end-all source for academic knowledge. If that’s the case, we’re a pretty sad world academically.
Just to finish up the discussion of the Khan reading question above:
Although choice D) is listed by Khan as correct, choice C) is better.
The line in the passage from Choice C) reads:
“According to Wilson’s hotspot theory, the volcanoes of the Hawaiian chain should get progressively older and become more eroded the farther they travel from the hotspot.”
Since the theory predicts that the further from the hotspot, the older and more eroded the volcano, a comparison of the volcanoes from two islands (one near and one far from the volcano) can support (or refute) the theory.
However, the Khan answer explanation says choice C) is incorrect because:
“The lines describe one aspect of the theory, but do not provide evidence that either supports or refutes this theory.”
The Khan answer explanation is completely wrong. The answer to question 8 was:
“It can be reasonably inferred from Passage 2 that the hotspot theory can be supported by comparing the volcanic rocks of two different islands.”
We do not need any actual evidence to infer that a certain kind of evidence CAN support a theory. It follows from the theory itself that a certain kind of evidence CAN support (or undermine) it.
We need actual evidence to show that there is evidence that DOES support the theory. But the answer to 8 is that evidence CAN support the theory, not that evidence DOES support the theory. The theory in itself shows what kind of evidence can support it.
D in logic for the people writing the Khan answer explanations.
To be fair, CB explanations for R and W have traditionally been pretty crappy (and woefully inconsistent).
Agreed, but these explanations are not just crappy – they have clear logical errors in them. They justify the wrong answer and reject the right answer. I never saw anything like that in the SAT Online Course.
KA SAT prep is funded by Bill Gates. Bill Gates is pocketing mega-taxpayer dollars from his investments in the statewide Common Core testing industry and the Common Core computerization of schools. So in the end, KA is not free but funded by your tax dollars.
The Official SAT Online Course cost $60. This is a case in which you got much more than you paid for.
Totally. Just taking the chance to jab at the old crappy explanations.
All true. And what’s more, this sort of elective funding (as opposed to actual progressive taxation) gives the very rich undue influence over policy–in this case, education policy.
I think the real problem with the Khan SAT prep is that it intentially doesn’t give students score boosting strategies, such as skipping difficult questions. Because college board is affiliated with it, they won’t use strategies that would help the students but discredit College Board and the test.
The problem from my point of view is that Sal Khan is not a math teacher. He goes on and on explaining something that I would explain in a few words. (For example, he’ll spend 2 paragraphs describing how to multiply 2 binomials. I’ll say “FOIL” and my kids will understand.) His explanations tend to get pretty convoluted.