INTEGRITY OF CCers IN QUESTION!

admanrich
Tue, 04 Apr 2006 21:40:12 +0000

Dear SAT Student,

Congratulations, this administration of SAT is finally over! As you may know, The Princeton Review carefully monitors every SAT so that we can provide our students with the most up-to-date guidance and information on the test. We thought that you might be interested in what we observed about this SAT administration.

We have detailed information on four form codes administered on April 1, 2006: AECA, AECM, BWCA, and BWCM. There were at least two distinct tests.

Form
CA
CM
Section 1
ESSAY
ESSAY
Section 2
READING 24q (Single Passage)
READING 24q (Single Passage)
Section 3
MATH 18q (PS/GI)
MATH 18q (PS/GI)
Section 4
MATH 20q (PS)
MATH 20q (PS)
Section 5
READING 24q (Two Single Passages)
READING 24q (Single Passage/ Dual Passage)
Section 6
EXPERIMENTAL
EXPERIMENTAL
Section 7
WRITING 35q
WRITING 35q
Section 8
MATH 16q (PS)
MATH 16q (PS)
Section 9
READING 19q (Dual Passage)
READING 19q (Single Passage)
Section 10
WRITING 14q
WRITING 14q

Writing Highlights:
As our students have come to expect, most of the Error IDs and Improving Sentence questions tested verb or pronoun errors and general sentence construction, such as run-ons and fragments. ETS featured a number of questions testing idioms, modifiers and diction (word choice). Other errors included verb tense, misplaced modifiers, false comparisons and redundancy. In the hardest Error IDs, ETS tested errors not often picked up your ear.

Student Response
Our students were generally optimistic about the essay prompts. Both prompts addressed topics commonly discussed in high school English classes, making it easy to find literary examples to use as support. The issues the prompts asked students to write about are discussed in the biographies of famous historical persona such as Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. Personal examples would also have been useful for many students since the prompts covered issues relevant to high school students.

As for the multiple-choice grammar sections, students seem to comment very little on how these sections went. Both low and mid-scorers wouldn’t have had too much trouble hitting their pacing charts by simply picking out the verb, pronoun and sentence construction errors and ignoring the trickier idiom and modifier errors. The challenge for high scorers was to spot more of the hard-to-see errors, such as those questions that came up late in each section.

Reading Highlights:
Fortunately, most sentence completions contained easily spotted clues, which made choosing your own word easy. However some of the vocabulary in the clues was difficult to understand. When difficult vocabulary appeared in the answers on the easy and medium questions, the right answer was often the more familiar words. Even though the language on all of the passages tended to be clear, some of the reading material was dull which made it tedious to read. However, Process of Elimination was a great tool even on these tougher reading passages. Many answers could be eliminated because they were either never stated, or because they weren’t the point.

Student Response
As always, students complained about the tediousness of at least some of the passages. The ones that students found most difficult were the long dual passage on translating in Form CA and the single passage about art in form CM. Both of these passages made fairly abstract points and the questions that were asked about these passages also tended to be abstract. Some test-takers have been arguing the answers to some of these questions on college forum websites, and judging by the even split of answers and the discussion about why an answer is right indicates that these questions were difficult and many students feel they did not get them right. Feedback from students has also indicates that many of TPR students felt that the vocabulary on Saturday’s test was considerably easier than that found on ours.

Math Highlights:
Students should have felt comfortable with most of questions on the math section, although there were some difficult questions toward the end of each of the sections that required students to use their reasoning skills. Algebra and geometry questions were plentiful and Plugging In was especially useful on the hardest of the questions. The test featured traditional questions testing translation, averages, percents and ratios. There were a number of geometry problems; these tested circumference, perimeter, area, and angle rules in triangles. We hope students remembered to skip around to find easier questions when they were presented with something they found challenging.

Student Response
While most students seemed to think Form CA wasn’t too bad, students who saw Form CM have been less optimistic. Students who saw Form CM reported finding the test difficult and strange and many had problems with what they considered unusual questions. Although many of the questions on Form CM were standard, students who are looking for a score above 650 would have needed to answer as many of the difficult questions as they could. While it is likely that many students could have found the points they needed by skipping around and avoiding the unusual and difficult questions, high scorers may have struggled to answer enough questions to hit their goals. Remember, though, that a harder test will have a more lenient curve, so unless you let yourself get overly flustered by the test, your scores will not necessarily suffer just because you had a “tougher” form.

On April 17th your scores will be available by phone or web. Your scores will be mailed to you starting April 28th. We are very interested in knowing how you did, so please reply to the “Would You Recommend Us?” email we will be sending you near the time your scores come in. But for now, relax and enjoy knowing that the SAT is finally behind you.