<p>Thank you, 314… for your thorough response, and sa… for your perspective and the Polysmit tip. Your responses are really quite helpful.</p>
<p>I think that the greatest improvement in my son’s score will probably come from recognizing which questions to skip. It seems that his biggest weakness is with basic arithmetic- especially regarding speed. In an expression like 4x^2 -3x +12, if i ask him to plug in 2 for x, it takes him waaay longer than i would expect. I don’t think we can overcome this problem. it is a bit the way he is wired. In his pre-calc class, the teacher would sometimes give group quizzes. The others in the group would be much quicker and in the end, he would be basically copying their answers (because they all had to agree on the submitted answers). But, when it came time for the test (taken individually), he often got the highest grade. He just doesn’t do anything terribly quickly. I hope this is not a poor predictor of success in a stem type major. It is very frustrating to me to see a math test where time is such a critical factor. I don’t know of any mathematicians or physicists who would claim speed (in this context) is important in their work.</p>