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From my experience as an English language student (non-native), I disagree to some extent. Taking (and learning) the SAT is quite a different experience than le
by loxs 6y ago
From my experience as an English language student (non-native), I disagree to some extent. Taking (and learning) the SAT is quite a different experience than learning the language. It seems that people who are good at "taking tests" excel at it and this does not correlate completely with their ability to use the language. Of course often they ALSO learn the language (by other means), but I know people who successfully took the SAT in order to participate in student exchange programs and when they go to the USA they realize that they are quite poor at English and tend to stick to ethnic communities, because they are not comfortable to use the language at a higher level.
On the other hand, if you study for the SAT when you already know the language, it seems to indeed improve your English a lot.
- jgr0 6y agoOk, my experience is with GRE, and my assumption was that SAT would be something similar. For GRE, to get a good score (85+ percentile) you need to score really well in the comprehension section, which has a significant weightage. It requires considerable command over English vocabulary, its idiomatic usage, and of course along with other things like logical thinking, keen observation etc. Merely remembering word lists without understanding its contextual usage would only get you so far. Definitely not the kind of success exhibited in the article.
- DFHippie 6y agoI think being good at test taking correlates with perfectionism. The ones who test well but then stick to speakers of their native language may simply be perfectionists who are horrified at being seen as stupid when their English isn't perfect.
- loxs 6y agoAs far as I can attest (I studied together with them), this is not the case :)