March 12th, 2010 by Kate Hedman
The New York Times recently published an article called Test-Takers’ Rights, providing a useful outline of some of the things that are required in a testing environment. Reading it should help prepare you in case something goes wrong.
To clarify the last point on their page – you can get your scores cancelled if you choose to. The article mentions that “best you can hope for is a refund or a free retake.” The refund or retake is in addition to your scores being cancelled, which the College Board will do for you if you ask them by the Wednesday after the test.
Kate Hedman, MSEd, has been helping students succeed on the SAT for seven years. She has been a verbal teacher with ESC for six years, and taught high school English for three years. She loves reading about new advances in brain research that she can use in the classroom to help her students learn how to achieve higher scores on the SAT.
March 7th, 2010 by Marty Rafson
Standardized tests such as the SAT receive a variety of criticism. One classic comment is that these tests just show who is best able to choose the right multiple choice answer. Who says that this is necessarily the brightest person? In the early 1990’s to partially address this critique, the Educational Testing Service sought to create math questions without multiple choices. However, the SAT exam does have to be graded by a scanner, not hand-scored. How could this be done? In 1993, we had the first appearance of the Student Produced Response Questions (students have to “produce” their own responses, not just select a choice). The answers to these questions would be placed in a new four-column grid. Each problem contained no multiple choices. The grid would provide a way for students to enter whatever answer they had determined. In the later SAT revision of 2005, 10 “grid-in” questions took their permanent place as questions #9 through #18 on the 18-question, 25-minute math section.
Marty Rafson wrote the ESC math curriculum and has been an SAT math teacher, tutor, and curriculum developer for 30 years. He has been a high school math teacher for 36 years and a math department chairman for 25 years. He was also an adjunct professor at City College of New York School of Education.
