@BingeWatcher I’m sorry. I know how much effort your D put in. These high stakes tests…sigh…good for you both allowing yourselves to let the tears flow a bit and also focusing on the next steps and positives. It sounds as if your D has another great option.
@BingeWatcher I’m so sorry for your daughter. What a tough situation. Like you said - onward and upward!
@BingeWatcher I’m so sorry to hear about your disappointing morning. My D also went down this year, she went up a tiny bit in math but down 30 points in english. She was nowhere near NMF but she was still bummed out. I am hoping this might be the push she needs to actually start doing some work for her next exams.
Good news bad news PSAT results. Good new went up 40 points in verbal. Bad news went down 60 points in math. Hopefully the SAT she took on Saturday will get those math points back and hold on to the higher verbal scores
My son got the same score as last year. His reading went down and Math went up. He is still happy with his score because he wanted to improve his Math. He claims a passage about a girls journal did were all his wrong answers, he did come out of the test saying that was a really weird one.
The smaller differences in PSAT scores (say 40 points or less) don’t really tell you much. That could mean two/three more questions right or wrong versus last year. Remember that College Board always gives the kids a range as well that they expect the student would get if they took the test again and I believe that range is 20 points above their score and 20 points below.
Also, for those kids who took SAT and PSAT and are trying to read the SAT tea leaves by looking at PSAT, I don’t know if that makes much sense. S19 did much better on SAT. Looks like @BingeWatcher 's D did as well. The tests are a bit different and each sitting of each SAT and PSAT is different!
For example, my D19 scored 1120 on PSAT 2x, and then took SAT and scored 1350.
@eb23282 did she study much between her most recent PSAT and her SAT?
I agree with Homerdog. My D21 also took the PSAT last year and she scored 130 pts higher on the SAT. Now that may be due to her completing Algebra 2 prior to SAT. We will see how the PSAT pans out for her. She gets her results tomorrow here in Calif.
Wow, @eb23282, that gives me hope!
How are the PSAT and SAT different? I just assumed the SAT would be a little harder, with a few more advanced questions.
@homerdog The only thing she did between PSAT and SAT was a weekend SAT crash course the week before the test. She did no other studying, prep or practices, and didn’t open a SAT book (didn’t even own one). Our thought process was take the two PSATs (10/11th grade) to get familiar/comfortable with the test, and then learn the “tips and tricks” the weekend before the SAT. It worked for her.
We tried the same basic thing with S21. He took the PSAT and scored 1350. We gave him three 1-hr lessons the last three weeks, again focusing on “tips and tricks”, and he took the SAT Saturday. And like his sister, he did absolutely no prep, practices or studying. Just the 3 hours of tips/tricks. We’ll find out soon enough how it went. He said his only goal is to beat his sister’s score - lol.
@eb23282 Our guidance counselors insist that kids just get better each year at the PSAT/SAT even with no prep. They get older and they learn more as each year goes by. Maybe there is some truth to that. I think it’s certainly true up to maybe the 90th percentile scores. Above that, I think prep matters because we’re talking about making hardly any mistakes and being almost perfect on a test is rough without practice.
This all bodes well for D21 because she won’t be in that tippy top and if she were to increase 100 points from her PSAT, that would probably be good enough. Of course, getting a higher score would be great but she’s not aiming for super elite universities that expect really high scores. I think she’d love a place like Vanderbilt and her grades and classes are commiserate with the kids from our school who get in. But she’d have to get to a 34 or a 1500 or so to have any shot at that and then she’s probably have to go ED and I don’t think we can stomach that. It makes more sense for her to ED to a school that’s just a more likely admit. Of course, I haven’t talked to my H about ED yet so we will have to see how things work out with her score and our visits. If most schools on her list will be full pay for us then I don’t see why she shouldn’t use ED. S19 didn’t use it and had offers from great schools with merit and we didn’t make him go to those schools so I can’t see us telling D she has to take only offers that offer merit.
@homerdog yeah, completely different story if we were targeting elite schools, which we’re not. D19 was a solid B student (3.4), so 1350 was more than enough for her.
S21 is a much stronger student (3.9), but he’s not targeting elite schools either so a 1350 would work for him too.
It’s certainly easier and less stressful for those like us who are just as happy considering schools that many on here view as a worst case safety (as I’ve seen referenced). In that regard, we don’t have to put the time, effort, or MONEY into all the prep that so may others do.
We were able to get Ds score breakdowns on our phones today even though I can’t access it on my computer until Wednesday.
Although we were disappointed in the total score, the good news is that all of her gains were in math, where she needed them. Her good ER stayed the same. I hope she can bring up both, of course, but she’d be OK if it continued to stay the same as long as math continues to come up, up, up! In fact, she got a perfect 38 on reading! I think improving some nuts and bolts of grammar/writing are doable with some good Erica Meltzer practice so I’m cautiously optimistic.
Can’t wait for SAT scores to come out December 20th, since she did put in a month of pretty good prep. If scores come up even a tiny bit I’m sure she will be more motivated to continue the prep all winter after seeing it pay off. Keeping fingers crossed for all of us.
When I see that her scores (in math anyway) are typically commenserate with those of a B student (she makes all As in the honors track) I just do’t know what to think. Is it that our school system is THAT much easier than others? I know it’s not a highly competitive school, but many of her classroom peers are scoring a good bit higher in math than she is. I don’t think she has a testing disability, and she’s never had a hard time finishing tests. She’s not intuitively “mathy” but she does all of her homework, understand things and tests well at school once it’s thoroughly explained to her (often it’s dad doing the explaining). I’m thinking it may be just that she doesn’t particularly enjoy math, so once a unit is finished it’s “out of sight and out of mind.” Hoping lots of prep to reinforce the skills she learned previously will make a huge difference. College Board estimated that the highest projected score she could likely make is a 1380. I’d be satisfied with that. Wonder how likely that would be !?
@inthegarden Not sure if you’ve looked at the SAT math questions but they look nothing like a math question kids get in a class at school. The wording is confusing and some of the questions seem more theoretical until you try to just guess and check the options for answers. ACT math questions look much more like questions kids would get at school. That’s probably why there’s a little disconnect. Most kids need to practice SAT type math questions over and over until they start recognizing familiar type questions.
That makes a lot of sense, @homerdog, thanks! Especially as her math achievement is more based on work ethic than innate theoretical understanding (that ability shows up for her in verbal areas). So, either the ACT will prove to be “her” test, or she will have to work hard to start recogmizing those SAT patterns. It will be a bit of a bear to get her switch gears and do an ACT practice test though. She’s already so tired of testing and just wants to hunker down for a little holiday rest 
@inthegarden that’s exactly D’s issue with math. She was accelerated two grades ahead for middle school so finished geometry honors as an eighth grader so she has some innate ability but, as math has gotten harder, she just grinds it out and I’m not sure how deeply she understands. I see a difference between her and S19 even though they were on the same math track. He understood how and why the math worked where D is kind of just memorizing how to do the problems if that makes sense. She understands a little more deeply than that but not like s19. So, even within our honors math classes, there are a range of ability. Where S could take an SAT problem and “figure it out”, D looks at that same problem and says “I don’t recognize what they want me to do!”
^^^Exactly, @homerdog! She wants it all laid out for her!
I was the opposite in school. I could “get” concepts intuitively. I could often “see” math problems visually and I liked applied/word problems, as they somehow humanized math to me. But I was truly terrible at computation. I think if things were the same in schools as they are today I could have been tested for some kind of processing disability… or at least had use of a calculator and then done well with math. As it happened, I often explained problems to my struggling classmates but got worse grades because some little calculation errors got me 
I got discouraged and quit math before I got to trig or calculus. My high school only required two years of math. Water under the bridge now, but sometimes I wonder “what if”…
Thank you all for the kind words and thoughts. Very appreciated.
@homerdog and @inthegarden my D sounds similar to your Ds in terms of math. She is in the accelerated class (she’s a freshman…I’m in this group for my S21) which for her is the end of geometry (they started geometry towards the end of 8th grade) and then Algebra II for the rest of the year. She has a 98 in the class. She seems to get the concepts well enough (not as deeply as I’d prefer, but I’m a mathy person and see how it all fits together) while they are working on a particular unit and can grind it out to do well on those particular homework assignments, quizzes, and tests. But ask her about it 6 months later and the recollection will be a bit vague. She can relearn it (and faster the next time), but it doesn’t stick completely because she’s not getting enough of the conceptual understanding the first time around.
Part of it is her - she’s way more a reading/writing kid (her recent PSAT was 700/590, so you can see the huge split), but I think part of it is also a bad math teacher in 8th grade when some of the fundamentals were being covered. And I also blame, in our case, an over reliance on a calculator. She was homeschooled for a few years (grades 4-6), and when we did math, we used a curriculum that focused on deep conceptual understanding. She liked it and felt confident about it and could do a lot in her head because I didn’t give her a calculator to do it and the curriculum didn’t expect the kid to have a calculator…it was more about number sense. But when she returned to school, she found they used calculators for EVERYTHING, and now, 2.5 years later, she relies on it too much (in my opinion). It really slows her down on the SAT/PSAT. I’m talking when she gets questions on her homework that require simple calculations - 50 + 62, 40*9, 1/2 + 3/2, she uses a calculator. It’s faster, she says (which I dispute ?), but it’s also depleted the skill and number sense she used to have so that on these speed based tests, she’s handicapped. I think that when I work with her on SAT prep, I’m going to insist we skip using a calculator for 95% of the problems…get her to get back to being able to do more in her head.
I think the acceleration of the curriculum might be a problem for her (and others), too. I was in the most accelerated math track in my school back in the 80s, and that led me only to calculus in my senior year. She’s less mathy than me yet a full year more accelerated in the curriculum (and of course others in some schools are even a year or more ahead of that). Obviously some kids can keep up with it. But for many, I think they are grinding out the exercises in the short term without enough time and repetition to really absorb the content fully and make the connections and retain the material. Maybe I just have a mathy/logical brain but maybe the slower speed at which I learned the material and the fact that we couldn’t use calculators all that much helped me get the basics better. I’d much rather she have strong algebra skills than get to calculus in 11th grade, but it seems so much these days is about acceleration, number of APs, etc.
@inthegarden for what it’s worth, I think my kids are going to stick to SAT because the speed required on math is, I believe, greater on the ACT, and math speed is not a strength for my kids. If your D is quite fast at math (on the school tests and homework) and quite strong on math fundamentals but just not getting the SAT wording of problems, then ACT might be worth a look. You could have her just do an ACT math section (timed) to see. 60 problems in 60 minutes: https://www.act.org/content/act/en/products-and-services/the-act/test-preparation/math-practice-test-questions.html?page=0&chapter=0 If she’s not a speed demon on math, then you might just want her to stick to the SAT and getting more familiar with the wording of the problems there since her verbal on the test is already going so well.