My son took the SAT last august and scored about 30 pts lower than he was averaging on practice College Board / Khan Academy tests.
Most of the room for improvement is on the Reading section.
So we said to him: it’s already a great score, enough to get you into decent schools, but no harm retaking to see if you’ll improve. Fast forward to last month, he took two KA/ CB tests and scored quite a bit higher than his august score. So far so good.
Then he ran out of practice tests from CB/ KA so I bought him the 2022 Princeton Review book with 9 practice tests. Ever since - for the past month or so - his reading and writing scores have dropped significantly. Like a 50-60 pt drop. Not sure what is happening, but it’s hurting his confidence and now he is worried he’ll score worse when he retakes this Saturday.
My questions are:
Does anyone know whether PR tests are truly representative of the real SAT?
should we cancel registration and just put this off until June to give him time to rebuild confidence?
It didn’t occur to me until yesterday that it might be the switch to PR that might be causing this problem. It’s the same kid, the same brain, more practice, less stress - so why would the performance go down so sharply for no apparent reason?
Could he be resistant to all the prep? My son does not even like gentle reminders to review before the SAT/ACT. Tell him to go to the test with confidence. I wouldn’t do a bit more prep before Saturday.
PR tests have no statistical equating to actual test scores, unlike CB’s tests. General feedback is that scores are generally lower. All the better for them to identify that you need their services and then show your “improvement” based on their services.
The 25+ available official practice/QAS tests should be plenty for a preparation plan. I see no reason to used 3rd party tests that result in scores with no statistical validity. If you’ve actually run through all 25+ tests, effectively, I’d suggest that preparation should be done.
Thanks. We didn’t know 25 were available - he got through the 8 or so official CB ones and a couple Khan Academy and then thought he’d run out. I’ve now found a Reddit thread that archives all of the officially available QAS papers so I’ll have him just skim them to regain confidence and realize that PR was an anomaly.
I agree that he’s more than done with prep - no more between now and Saturday.
Update: I threw out the PR and Barron’s books, and made sure my son read the replies to my question above. I am now having him just look through (not actually take) one of the released college board QAS tests just to regain some confidence and know he’ll be ok.