<p>xiggi, I’m sure that mini’s D is superior to everyone who was educated in what mini likes to call “day jail” in every way. No denigration was intended by hypothesizing --apparently incorrectly-- that she didn’t need HS SATs to go to Smith. </p>
<p>What is the Yale 2003 Early Admission debacle?</p>
<p>This is the first time I’ve ever heard of kids coming home from CTY thinking their parents are stupid. :rolleyes:</p>
<p>Actually mini’s situation is sort of interesting - one daughter aced the SATs as a middle schooler, the other can’t do a standardized test worth beans, but has excelled in college nevertheless. So I don’t think he would tell you that homeschooling leads automatically to high SAT scores.</p>
<p>While I think the SAT is a good proxy for IQ tests in the absence of anything else, it’s not the be all and end all and will miss plenty of gifted students whose particular strengths don’t also make them good at bubble tests. Neither of my kids practiced for middle school SATs beyond looking at the very short practice test they send when you register. I do feel sorry for kids who get caught up in the testing arms race by their parents and study for them in middle school. The original idea had been to see how kids did without any special prep. </p>
<p>Only one of my kids went to CTY. He didn’t come home thinking his parents were stupid - or at least not more than any pre-teen does. He did come home knowing a bunch of math and cryptography I was not familiar with, since it’s not part of the normal high school/calculus curriculum.</p>
<p>mathyone, #39: The school used the SAT to identify students who could be permitted to skip a year of the language/literature curriculum, although that just put students in AP Lit in the senior year, so it wasn’t very accelerated. I suspect that while the teachers could identify who should skip, they preferred not to have to deal with parents who wanted the student to be skipped, when the teachers did not think that the student was ready. Shifting the qualification requirement to an external test freed them from any charges of favoritism . . . and the resultant squabbles.</p>
<p>@QuantMech, I think the SAT is a pretty poor measure of how a student would do in an literature class. If the SAT is supposed to measure literary analysis skill, evidently every single one of my English teachers was wrong. I agree with the problem of parents pushing their kids into honors classes where they don’t belong, this problem is rampant in our school.</p>
<p>“Some kids should take the SAT and/or SAT, not only for eligibility for summer courses, but to find out where they stand academically before HS. Instead of being at the 99th percentile whenever standardized tests are taken a kid many find s/he is only at the 90th percentile of gifted kids who took the test that year” </p>
<p>@wiz75, I don’t think the SAT is much help in this respect. You can get a very precise percentile number on whatever group of kids happened to take the test, and some of them were getting extensive prep, and many of them just walked in and took the test, and probably a few of them were made to do so by their parents, hated the idea, and spent the time randomly bubbling. This is not a norm group, and it really doesn’t have any bearing on how your child should be educated. For placement into courses at your school, you really need to know how your child compares to others at various grade levels at your school, not a random group of kids, some of whom may be at magnet schools, some of whom may be at inner city schools, and all are taking the test under wildly different circumstances (of preparation).</p>
<p>Not saying that using the SAT was a good way to select students for advancement in language/literature, just that it is what the local school did.</p>
<p>It’s hard to imagine more test scores being needed for any kids coming through after NCLB. My 8th grader will enter high school with 6 nationally normed reading tests (2 per year), and state tests on reading and writing. There are plenty of test scores if they care to use them. She also has these things called grades and teacher recommendations.</p>
<p>As a student who took the ACT during 7th grade, I can honestly say it didn’t stress me out and it only benefited me. I (looking back now) know that I got a 27, which qualified me for the belin blank youth scholarship award. That basically gave me a full ride to my state school if I wanted to go there. The argument that students will be disappointed if they see their scores isn’t a very good one in my opinion, because that can be avoided. My parents decided and told me they weren’t going to show me what I got beforehand, and I didn’t find out until this year(I’m a junior) when I checked my report for my recent ACT and saw the scores for the old one as well. So if a parent doesn’t want their kid to see it, all they have to do is tell them that. I personally didn’t really care at the time, my dad just told me that I was taking a test next Saturday and that was it. I think the benefits definitely outweigh the costs.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Same here. Our feeling was that if he didn’t get a good enough score without prep, then he didn’t belong in the program. The thought of people making their kids drill to get a good score at that age is horrific, to me. On the other hand, you can look at the list of kids who score over 700 on the math section and see what population is doing it. To be fair, perhaps they are just doing a lot of extra math tutoring in general, without the goal of scoring well on the talent searches.</p>
<p>The problem with NCLB testing is that it’s all on grade level. The whole idea of using the SAT on middle schoolers was to use a test that ought to be much too difficult for most kids, but some kids do well anyway.</p>
<p>The advantage of the SAT is that it is an out of level test for middle school students. When your students aces the on-level test each year, all it tell’s you is that they have mastered the minimum skills. The SAT/ACT tests allows for more differentiating between the students who are at the top of their class. </p>
<p>Both sons took the sat in middle school. It was no stress for them, since there was really nothing at stake. They each just looked at the practice questions you get when you register.
They both did well enough that they got a scholarship for a course at a local university/college.</p>
<p>Unexpected bonus we had is that when we pulled DS out of abusive 7th grade english teacher’s class, and principal tried to bully us into having him return to the classroom, his SAT scores arrived showing him doing better than 95% of our high schools senior class. Hard for school to show that he was missing 7th grade english and we were able to reach a compromise solution with the school district.</p>
<p>I still don’t see why decisions about any individual kid in any particular program should depend on a percentile ranking vs. a group to which they don’t belong (eg high school seniors), but if you are going to do that sort of thing, I don’t think the SAT is the best choice. The MAP test is designed to be an out of level test. It has norm groups for each grade. It’s not something that kids get private tutors or test prep books or Kaplan classes, or spend years prepping for. Kids take it on an equal footing with no prep. I’m not sure how the difficulty levels of the two tests compare, or which test has the higher ceiling. I think the MAP isn’t terribly good at testing high level students, and the company admits this, but neither is the SAT. </p>
<p>An honors class in one school might be at an entirely different level as at another school, and the typical student in such classes might also be very different. What matters is to match kids with their peers.</p>
<p>I think that kids who PREPARE for the SAT (or ACT) while in middle school are wasting their time, as well as the time of everyone around them. The whole point of talent search competitions is to see how a kid does on an out of level test. If the kid studies for that test, it becomes an in-level test of how well they’ve learned the material they’ve studied in preparation for the test, not an out of level test. And it tells you much less about that kid’s potential.</p>
<br>
<br>
<p>What is the Yale 2003 Early Admission debacle?<<<</p>
<p>I know there was no denigrating involved! The Yale debacle was a reference to what happened to the many CC members who applied early in 2003. In that year the admission rate plummeted from the previous years with many deferrals and outright rejections. Fwiw, it turned out superbly for most of the non-accepted students. The posts should still be up on the old CC site.</p>
<p>@IJust Drive, You’re right that if the kids do prepare, then a significant part of their score will simply reflect how well they prepared. But if the kids don’t prepare, they are still being compared to a group which includes many students who did prepare. The SAT just isn’t a good test to assess out of grade level achievement. </p>
<p>What school has a curriculum designed for kids with various SAT scores anyhow? At our school the classes are called things like 9th grade honors, 9th grade academic, 9th grade standard. Placement is largely by teacher recommendation, although I think families are allowed to overrule the teacher recommendations at their own peril. But the classes aren’t called 9th grade 650+ SAT, 9th grade 500-650 SAT, 9th grade 300-500 SAT.</p>
<p>No need to take SAT early unless interested in a program, if the school uses it for some purpose or if the kid simply wants to see how he or she will do. One of my kids did this and did a CTY class; the others did not. It was a great experience for him.</p>
<p>As to the Jack Kent Cooke foundation, it is not at all affiliated with JHU, CTY, Duke, TIP or any of the other programs. The Talent Searches seem to suggest to kids that they apply (and at this point seems like a student has to be very low income to get a scholarship). The scholarship site says the foundation supports the child and pays for things like summer programs, tuition or technology. </p>
<p>Mini: are you saying that JKC uses CTY to do the advising and CTY is pushing their own programs (or was 10 years ago?). Interesting.</p>
<p>@xiggi, where can we read more about what happened in the “Yale 2003 Early Admission debacle”?</p>
<p>I was trying to learn more about it and ran into an economics journal paper that uses game theory to understand EA and ED strategies (by school and maybe by applicants) <a href=“http://www.stanford.edu/~jdlevin/Papers/EarlyAdmissions.pdf[/url]”>http://www.stanford.edu/~jdlevin/Papers/EarlyAdmissions.pdf</a>
I don’t understand it – will have to ask my son who took game theory at CTY (hah). </p>
<p>But to the original question, despite what someone said earlier, there <em>are</em> people who get anxious about standardized testing. I’d be interested to know if such people have less anxiety later if they have had a chance to take the test in realistic conditions when it doesn’t really matter. Could increase it, could decrease it.</p>
<p>I don’t see that there are enough advantages to justify sucking up time prepping for a test in middle school, unless the student wants to. Nor is it critical to make anybody take a three hour test they don’t have to take. But those who choose to do it often see a benefit.</p>
<p>Here you go</p>
<p>[College</a> Confidential Discussion](<a href=“http://www.collegeconfidential.com/cgi-bin/discus/show.cgi?70/40259]College”>http://www.collegeconfidential.com/cgi-bin/discus/show.cgi?70/40259)</p>
<p>Although this is old news to many old timers, please realize that many who were caught in that Yale rejection adventure ended up at prestigious schools for both UG or graduate schools. </p>
<p>From memory, that includes Harvard, Duke, Brown, Chicago, etc plus PhD and Masters at Princeton, Berkeley, and Stanford Law, as well as collecting small awards a la Goldwater and Rhodes. </p>
<p>And I am sure I forget many from that same cohort.</p>
<p>Huh? What was the “controversy”? I skimmed the front page, but it seemed like the usual CC - parents who overfocused on a handful of elite northeast universities because that’s what the world revolves around, with low acceptance rates, who were shocked, shocked i tell you, that their kids weren’t among the select chosen?</p>
<p>I think that is a very unfair characterization. I just see people offering sympathy to kids who didn’t get into their first choice school, and a balanced view that they will go somewhere, and it will be good for the kid in the long run.</p>
<p>Is it a crime to actually have Yale as your first choice? It was S’s first choice, and he was deferred SCEA. His classmate was accepted. By the time S got to school on Monday morning someone–not us–had told everyone and he had to put up with people offering sympathy. It was pretty humiliateing for him. I actually had someone stop me in the supermarket and express shock.</p>
<p>You know, it is possible for a kid to have an Ivy as a first choice because they actually like THAT school.</p>