lajolla3

I'm talking about an English as a Second Language (ESL) student athlete here. He needs to get a score of minimum 860 as NCAA eligibility rule. Scoring any point on CR and WR seems almost impossible for an intermediate-level ESL student. He is not too strong in math either. So I need to play the 200-minimum-score cards right to reach 860. My key questions are:

1) Would leaving CR and WR multiple choice sections BLANK possibly get him a score slightly higher than 200?
2) What does it take to get a 1 or 2 on the Essay section? maybe, one body paragraph? (writing an in-class essay is a huge challenge for the student..)
3) Does a score of 500 in math require that he gets roughly half of the problems right? (while omitting the other half)
4) Which book do you recommend for an easy-to-understand preparation of SAT math ?

An0maly

1. This isn't 100%, but a totally blank section leads to a score of 200 for writing and about 250 for reading.. He would need to get over 400 on the Math to have a shot.

2. A 2 is the lowest possible score, and a thesis will get him that. Teach him how to write a thesis, two 1-2 sentence body's using simplistic language, and a conclusion, and I think that will get him a 4-5 on the essay.

3. 27 right 27 omitted is indeed a 500 on most exams. You have to understand, however, that he will have test day pressure and make mistakes. Getting 35 correct and about 8 wrong will still net him about a 490, so he should be set.

4. Not sure.

By the way, -0 and lower on writing is all 200. Even if he got every question wrong, he would still get a 0, and if he omitted every one, it would stay 200. I would tell him to christmastree the entire section and take whatever points he can get.

silverturtle

Oh, this is interesting.

CR: Do you think he can get the first question in each sentence completion section right? (Maybe not: I just looked over some of the first questions, and I wouldn't know these words if they were in Spanish.)

He should guess on at least two CR questions: even if he misses both, he'll still have 0 as a raw score. If he gets them both, he'll have 280.


Writing: As long as he can grasp a rough understanding of the topic for the essay, he should be able to get a 2 from each grader if he writes a couple paragraphs that are even somewhat coherent.

He could go through the identifying error questions and find all the places where the subjects and verbs don't agree. Is he advanced enough to do this? It could get him around 2-3 right.

If he got a 4 on the essay and 2 questions right, he could get 270. Again, even if he doesn't know any, have him guess on two of them (it can't hurt his score).


Total for those two: 550. He would only need 310 on Math.

lajolla3

Wow. You guys have some really good points there. I think I will drill him in essay writing to get a score of at least 4. Teaching him subject-verb agreement is going to be hard... but I'll try that too. Thank you SO much for the help!

MillionMilesOFun

LaJolla, I hope you realize that the NCAA does not take into account the Writing portion of the SAT. Eligibility for Division 1 athletics is contingent upon a sliding scale system that balances GPA and SAT/ACT scores. Eligibility for Division 2 athletics requires a minimum SAT score (Critical Reading and Math combined) of 820. There are no minimum SAT score requirements for prospective Division 3 athletes.

For more info, check out the NCAA Eligibility Center (https://web1.ncaa.org/eligibilitycen...x_student.html)

Objective789

What a complete joke college athletics are.

keylyme

^^Not true. Just because you have not yet learned English, does not mean you are stupid. My son had a classmate who played basketball for Brown. He had to test three times to get his required min. of 900. It was because he was new to the country and just learning English. He has since graduated from Brown (with a full command of the language) and is now in grad school.

lajolla3

Oh my goodness. I didn't know that the Writing section is not counted as part of the score. That makes this a whole lot harder... I'm just a SAT tutor and don't know anything about athletics. I need to talk to his coach about the Division category and check again on the minimum score requirement. Thank you all for your input.