<p>If your child is such an autodidact, why do you need to insist on all that drilling and practice? Autodidacts don’t need people standing over them.</p>
<p>^ Or sitting next to them and taking notes for three hours. ;)</p>
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<p>Didn’t they use to say that behind every great autodidact, there’s a great woman?</p>
<p>Of course, the 2011 version is that behind every great autodidact, there’s a woman with a great video camera!</p>
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<p>In elementary school and their first child, right?</p>
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<p>A Desi friend once explained it all to me… Down to details like “Donation Seats” and the like… There’s some serious set-asides for some people, then there’s the donation and other seats, and so on. Lots of schools and school systems have their own admission process.</p>
<p>At the end, if the country can’t absorb all the graduates, what next? My own birth country (somewhere in Europe) used to have a very rigorous one-shot entrance exam. Then, a lot more seats were added, more colleges were built (which was the exact opposite of what was needed) and we got to the point that 8 or 9 out of people who apply get in. Pfeh. </p>
<p>The same is true everywhere, it’s just that some countries are better than others in making it a bit less obvious.</p>
<p>The SAT has its ‘rigor’ in the high pressure, high stakes sense of things. Getting a decent score simply suggests one has mastered 10th grade. </p>
<p>Success in college is far beyond smarts. It’s all about where to find information, how to organize it, how to present it, how to manage time, how to eyeball courses and see what’s important, and so on. </p>
<p>The SAT is simply a product of the instant replay athletic mentality of the USA. We want to know INSTANTLY how good we are, and quickly. In my birth country (and I’m guessing India) things like math and science were NOT taught multiple choice. My differential equations class in college (shudder-defibrillator-contact-there… much better) was 3 questions for the final. If you could figure it out, 1/2 hour total. If not, 1/2 month. Here, it’s 3 pages of simple problems, not a couple of major ones. Likewise Physics and such. </p>
<p>The SAT appears to be way too much of a gimme to good students; so much so that I have not figured out why we still have it - if everyone gets a 780, why bother? But the answer is simple . </p>
<p>High Schools in this country, for better or worse, have significant variation in difficulty. My kids’ high school is rated in the top 0.5% or 1% of high schools in the US. And it shows, it’s not a cake walk even for the non-AP’s. Drive 30 miles away and a pulse guarantees a 3.5, serious study guarantees a 4.0. Ditto for attending a lot of locla parochial (but way too easy) schools. </p>
<p>So, what’s an AdmOfficer to do?</p>
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<p>What would you do? Hmm … I was going to get one of those bracelets that said WWIPD but here goes::</p>
<p>age 5: This child is displaying NERD symptoms.Remember the talk we already had that nerds have trouble in the procreation department so I would highly advise you, as the parent, to force (yes, in this case force is the appropriate word) the child to do something else for at least 3 hours per day. Maybe you could buy a puppy and make the child teach it geometry or something. Then, get off CC and spend some time with your child playing catch.</p>
<p>age 10: Still showing symptoms of being a NERD. This will cause child to be made fun of at British School and the child’s father to avoid the nerd and spend all of his time on CC. Get help for the father!</p>
<p>age 15: No big deal. Not considered NERDY in American culture as most 15 year old Americans already taught themselves calculus when they were 14 but hide that fact to remain cool with the lady’s (and remain eligible for reproductive opportunities in the future). If this your child, tell him he is a slacker and needs to step up his game! Kid may be a slacker because parent is addicted to CC and spends no time with said child.</p>
<p>Now, if the parent is a NERD, the child should be sent to boarding school so he has a chance to meet interesting people, do interesting things, and perhaps be eligible for a nice college in India. NO NERDS at HYPMS so you have to have a back up plan. There also may be a prep book to help with this problem :).</p>
<p>The level of negativity and insecurity is really saddening.</p>
<p>LMAO, limabeans, best post of the day…or probably even the week.</p>
<p>Turbo, your post saddens me. So many kids in the USA being failed by their schools and their parents from lack of a high standard.</p>
<p>However, it’s not necessary to teach a 5 or even 10 yo calculus to have a high standard. It’s nit necessary to make a child do hours upon hours ofvpractice or homework beyond what the school assigns to have a high standard.</p>
<p>IP, Unlike India where a child’s fate is stamped by a primary school leaving exam at age 12, not to mention their caste or other cultural mores, in the US the university system is also open to those -non-autodidacts- who, shockingly need to actually be taught Calculus as an 18 year old. Hence, the SAT’s are meant to assess a wide swath of students, not only a subset of a subset. They are therefore easy for some, hard for others. </p>
<p>Schools look pretty darn good in the US when you look only to what happens for the ‘cream of the crop’! I would say, also, that most Americans welcome the idea that we have something to learn from the successes of other countries. </p>
<p>I dare say that the duration of your stay in the US is not really all that relevant when it comes to your perspectives and opinions. You self define, after all, as an IndianParent.</p>
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<p>Exactly. Understanding the kid is the key. Unfortunately, almost all parents are not qualified to do a decent job here. One may think his kid is smart, but a real IQ test would tell. Are there other ?Q tests out there to gauge what a kid’s social ability might be, things she loves to do, etc?</p>
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<p>It goes without saying, as the SAT is administered in the beginning of the 11th grade, though some students take it sooner and do as well. It largely depends on one’s speed of processing the information/questions accurately. An 11th grader who’s an avid reader of a wide range of books since the age of 3 or 2 would do well without much or any preps.</p>
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<p>I’m with Pizzagirl on this one, even though doing well doesn’t imply hours and hours practice for some kids (1+/-% of them?), piano excluded. Life is much more than a test or a few. And, any test is there to gauge where one stands, not to prepare for; a few hours of review is fine, but weeks of preps is not. So, the SAT should have a built-in mechanism to scale who takes it cold and who preps for months.</p>
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Yes, a 780 is the most common score. No. It’s a scaled test. If everyone were being taught at higher levels, the test would be rescaled and become harder. I’d argue it’s not necessarily the cause. (Though the fact that we have classes in schools that are designed to teach for the psat/sat is annoying…)</p>
<p>Lake, whether the kid’s IQ is high enough or not has little to do with the point being made, which is distinguishing between true interest and parroting back what the kid thinks parents want.</p>
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Turbo, your post saddens me. So many kids in the USA being failed by their schools and their parents from lack of a high standard. It saddens me."</p>
<p>The kids who are being failed by the US system are the ones who graduate without basic skills, not the kids who are taking calculus as seniors instead of in middle school.</p>
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<p>That’s why I’m looking for other tests, including what “things she loves to do”, not at the moment but in an IQ sense. IQ test should be only one of many at that level (though with faults):</p>
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<p>lakes,
There are IQ tests, aptitude tests, and interest inventories. They are all different.</p>
<p>I haven’t read the whole thread, but with respect to AP Prep books, some of my kid’s AP classes used a test prep book as a supplemental text. My kid did like having the prep books so that he could do an extra practice test when it got close to the exam date, even though 7/8 of his AP classes were very good. Some kids also self-study for certain AP exams, so the prep books are good for that circumstance. </p>
<p>As for SAT and ACT review books, I agree with what fauve wrote on page 1:</p>
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<p>Thank you, jym. I have no experience with any. Only heard that if one does an IQ test at age 4, she needs no more test later. The score would be in the ballpark. Are the other tests similar?</p>