<p>I think it was not the case of teaching to a certain level (this was Honors class) but which materials to cover and in what depth. One teacher who was opposed to teaching to the test was one of the best in the school and received teaching awards. But some of his students, whose parents were not savvy about finding out what the test covered as opposed to his curriculum, were left high and dry.</p>
<p>I agree that some of the well-endowed private schools have made great strides in admitting lower income students. But there as in colleges, the big divide is between the well-endowed private schools and the less well-endowed schools and public unis that are at the whim of their local economy. Only a small portion of the college going population can be admitted to the few well-endowed public schools. The majority of college-bound students are not affected by their policies. But it is sad to see how little the overworked GCs have done in the past to prepare their students for college.</p>
<p>As far as I can tell, preparing students for the SAT Subject Tests is simply not a priority in curriculum development for many public school systems since only a small proportion of students take these tests.</p>
<p>At my daughter's high school, several teachers explicitly told their classes at the beginning of the year whether the course would adequately prepare them for the relevant Subject Test. In the cases where it didn't, the reason was that the county's prescribed curriculum omitted some topics included in the Subject Test. In the cases where it did, the correspondence between the topics taught and what's on the Subject Test seemed to be more of a coincidence than anything else.</p>
<p>There also needs to be an awareness among the teachers that the SAT Subject Tests are important for some students, and that they need to know whether particular courses provide good preparation for particular tests. CountingDown's younger son attends the high school that my daughter graduated from. His class was told, as freshmen, that the biology course they take in ninth grade provides good preparation for the SAT Subject Test. Several years earlier, nobody told that to my daughter's class (although it is possible that anyone who asked could have received the answer). Parents had to push for this information to be publicly announced.</p>