A friend with a daughter in her senior year of high school turned me onto a hoot of a Web site. It’s from Princeton Review, a company that teaches SAT prep classes. The Web site offers a highly truncated version of the SAT to give parents an idea of what their children are up against (in other words, they are trying to scare us into signing up our kids for their exorbitantly priced classes). The Parent SAT Challenge gives you 15 minutes to answer 12 questions taken from the reading, writing and math sections of the test (fortunately, there is not an essay section of the test). It’s definitely mind-blowing, both in terms of sobriety about how much 20 years will do to your ability to remember academic concepts (particularly mathematical ones) and how different the new test is from the one we took so long ago. The College Board did away with that painful analogy section in 2005 (enfeebling:empowering as severance:?) but held onto the reading comprehension and sentence completion sections.
I remember looking quizzically at my friend a couple of decades ago when she told me that another classmate was taking SAT prep classes. It seemed an unnecessary luxury, like 1000-threadcount sheets—certainly not something my friends and I were doing. But the situation has changed. Getting assistance in studying for the SAT is the norm now, making it important for everyone to do just to even the playing field. We could debate the justice of the situation, but that will not change it. No one said having kids would be cheap!
Of course, there are free full-length tests available online for students who will take the real SAT. The College Board itself offers one, as do 4tests.com and Peterson’s College Planner. The official test takes four hours to complete, indicating that it is as much about endurance as academic fortitude, but the online ones do not include the essay section, so their lengths are shorter and their diagnostic scores are not entirely accurate. The sites score the tests, so the time is not wasted and you get to know how well you would have done had the test been real.
I had my oldest son take the full-length one on Princeton Review’s Web site. He said that it was actually different than what he thought it would be like, even though he took the PSAT a few years ago. There was something very surprising about his score. Although Josh is not much of a mathlete, he did better on the math section than on the reading comprehension section! Who knew? It turns out that vocabulary does matter. He said that he had trouble with the nuances of the words, as the test makers focus on simple words with multiple meanings, and the synonyms they use are not direct. I can see what he means, as even the Parent version uses some slippery vocab. His score was only slightly above average—pretty good for a first try a whole year early! My score on the Parent SAT Challenge? Wouldn’t you like to know!