Just finished first year! Advice for 2014ers

JHS
Tue, 08 Jun 2010 09:01:32 +0000

Right. From what I have seen, they are basically pretty simple. If you understand something, the relevant question will be easy. If you don’t understand it, the question will bring that out. There aren’t that many questions – just enough to cover the representative topics. They aren’t designed to distinguish between someone who has done A- work and someone who has done A or B+ work (which is what most high school tests do). They are designed to assess who understands a broad area of inquiry completely and who doesn’t.

Why in the world would anyone want to try to fool the placement test? Let’s posit for the moment that you COULD cram for a test and give the appearance of understanding a topic on which you don’t really have full command. Congratulations, you’ve won! Your reward is that you will be placed in a course that will be hard and demanding for people who REALLY understood what the test was testing. In a few days (weeks, if you are unlucky), your lack of true understanding will become a critical problem, at which point you will either have to do the work of two courses to catch up and stay current, or you will have to drop back into the perfectly challenging course you should have taken in the first place, where you will now be behind everyone else.

Why do that? The placement tests do a good job of sorting kids into the classes they need most, and will benefit most from. Go with the flow, not against it.