<p>Just to clarify–I was responding to the poster who was dismayed at the thought of practice tests for his D.</p>
<p>I am not talking about different abilities or bright kids who even with practice, don’t do well on tests. Nor am i saying that your scores will increase infinitely with practice. I’ve indeed had a student whose scores increased maybe 80 points max. But I could see that would be the case from the get go–the girl, a great kid, simply did not have the academic ability to do much better than that. But she did TRY. And a good and honest tutor will be able to assess pretty easily what the potential gain will be. You can tell that from the first session or two–whether the errors are, say, basic reasoning errors, inference errors, or whether they’re careless mistakes or strategical mistakes. Depending on the sorts of mistakes and errors, the student can improve drastically with practice, or - in the case of a student who struggles with the sort of reasoning the SAT values - the scores will not increase much at all. But that’s not something you can tell without practicing and analyzing. If you don’t practice and analyze your test scores, you cannot tell what your potential is.</p>
<p>What I am talking about is the importance of at least trying and at least practicing. And I’m not judging the poster at all-some kids don’t want to practice and don’t care about the SAT. What I’m saying is that that’s important info to know–that if his D doesn’t like to read and is shying away from essays and practicing for her SATs then that is something she should know about herself when applying to schools. As glassharmonica says, she can also try colleges that don’t value these tests as well.</p>