Would love some advice

Marian
Sun, 21 Jan 2007 11:04:55 +0000

I strongly suggest that your daughter get an SAT Spanish subject test preparation book and try a sample test. The curve on the Spanish subject test is remarkably brutal (perhaps because native speakers sometimes take it?).

My daughter took the SAT Spanish subject test after taking an AP/IB Level 5 Spanish course. She got the highest possible scores on both the AP and IB SL tests (5 on AP; 7 on IB SL). But her Spanish subject test score was the LOWEST of all her subject test scores. From her experience, we suspect that a single error can be enough to drop a person’s score as much as 40 points.

Of course, if your daughter is taking the Spanish test with fewer years of preparation, she would not be expected to score as high as a person who has taken AP Spanish would. Still, the curve may be a problem.

Math, on the other hand, is not a problem. The curve on the Level II test is quite favorable; your daughter will probably be pleased with her score. But your daughter may want to get a prep book just to see whether there are any specific topics that she wants to review. (Sometimes teachers skim over or even skip a topic, especially if it comes at the end of the year.) If she has completed precalculus, the Level II test is the right one to take – it’s mostly stuff from the precal course.

A basic principle of SAT II test strategy is to NEVER assume that your child’s high school has taught everything that is covered by the test. Often, the high school curriculum was not designed with the SAT II in mind. It is prudent for a student to buy a review book and try a sample test before taking one of these tests in ANY subject. For example, a couple of hours with an SAT II Chemistry review book made it obvious to my daughter that even though she had the highest average in her chemistry class, she should not take this test. There were many, many questions that covered topics her teacher had not taught, and when she took a practice test, she scored in the low 600s. It also doesn’t hurt to find out how other kids at your child’s high school have done on a particular test or to even ask teachers whether the school’s curriculum is a good match for a particular test. Sometimes, teachers will even announce this publicly. For example, my daughter’s Honors Physics teacher told the kids on the first day of the course that the county’s prescribed curriculum (which is what he is required to teach) omits some topics that are on the SAT II Physics test. There might be similar situations at your child’s high school.

lspf72 mentioned Cornell and the intimidation factor. I went to Cornell (back when dinosaurs roamed the Arts Quad) and my daughter (the same one who was disappointed with her Spanish SAT II score) will be starting there next fall (she was admitted Early Decision). The only parts of Cornell that are inordinately intimidating are the life sciences (where legions of overprepared premedical and preveterinary students who desperately need A’s do devastating things to the curves in the basic science courses) and maybe engineering, where a lot of the students are truly brilliant. In my experience, the only students at Cornell who really suffer from the intimidation/competition thing are those who are not pre-med or pre-vet but who are requried to take many of the same courses that the pre-meds and pre-vets take (for example, nutrition majors who intend to go into dietetics). These kids have to compete with the most intense students on campus. But if your daughter’s interests are unrelated to life sciences (or engineering), I do not think that she would find Cornell to be an unusually intimidating place. I know that my daughter, who plans to major in economics, isn’t worried at all. (Of course, she intends to satisfy her science requirement with something like astronomy or geology, which pre-meds and pre-vets don’t take. She is not a masochist.)