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If I remember my days as a test-prep teacher, I believe one of the largest predictors of SAT score was simply the age of the student. In other words, if you gi
by YokoZar 13y ago
If I remember my days as a test-prep teacher, I believe one of the largest predictors of SAT score was simply the age of the student.
In other words, if you give a thousand students a free practice test, then sign them up for a course that summer, by the time they actually finish the course six months later they're already expected to have improved regardless of whether you teach them anything at all.
- rlanday 13y agoI hadn’t thought of this effect, but it’s kind of an ingenious way to market test prep. I think at some point, students’ scores stop improving, from a combination of having been exposed to all the background material necessary for the test to be accurate, and their brains finishing development (after which intelligence is largely stable), but up until then, students’ scores improve with age. You can still use a test like the SAT to compare younger students, but you have to norm it against students of the same age (I think it’s actually better to test students at a younger age because a test of the same difficulty has more ceiling room).