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Look up the official SAT practice tests, available for free from the College Board. You can find them here: SAT Practice and Preparation https://satsuite.collegeboard.org/sat/practice-preparation You can also find access to the Khan Academy website from on that website. Khan is the official SAT prep provider of the College Board, and its resources are both free and excellent. If you can get a practice SAT book such as Barron’s, Gruber’s, Princeton Review, Kaplan, etc., that would also work. You can often borrow these books for free at public libraries, or get them for free from people who took these tests in prior years (the SAT hasn’t changed since 2016, so any test book from 2016 or later should be fine). For the reading, I suggest you just read many challenging essays - you can find tons of free articles on the Internet - from literally any newspaper or magazine. It’s a good idea to study how essay/editorial writers structure their arguments. Additionally, you should study the grammar and punctuation that is tested in the writing section, and also learn word roots so you can tackle unfamiliar words that use Greek, Latin, or Anglo-Saxon prefixes, roots, and suffixes (suffices? Hmm, I’ll have to look that up). All of these will be in any good review book, such as the ones I’ve listed above. Here’s a website where you can look up word parts to learn to decode vocabulary words: The web’s largest word root and prefix directory https://www.learnthat.org/pages/view/roots.htmlFinally, you can look at YouTube videos such as those on my channel. SAT and ACT https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLF09TfOt7OnlxnTpeSHz7I0DlbXcrK7ifThose are also free and helpful. Good luck! Click here for the original Quora post.
I’m not sure which Barron’s AP test you mean, but most likely, it’s that several of the tests are available only online. Look for the “online” part of the book, which should give you a URL (web address) to find the online tests. The website will then ask you to type in a word or phrase on a given page of the AP book you have. That should solve your problem. Hope this helps, John Linneball P.S. For SAT, ACT, and some AP exam (right now, mostly history), try my YouTube channel! John Linneball Tutoring https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCIz3PV8u4IkEPgo_r7ygZKw Click here to see the original Quora post.
Yes. It will show you’ve managed to overcome whatever academic problems you were having. Good luck! Click here for my original Quora post.
Talk to your guidance counselor. If your school doesn’t one have those, speak to the principal, vice principal, etc., basically anyone who can let you modify your class schedule. I’ve known people who graduated from high school a year early by taking the classes most students take in the junior and senior year (e.g., chemistry in junior year, physics in senior year), all in the same year. That leads to a busy schedule, but you can do it if you work hard. Alternatively, the school may let you take some courses in summer school. I’m fairly certain the high school I attended didn’t have any summer school courses other than driver’s education, and remedial courses students who failed the “normal” versions of those courses. The idea was driver’s ed was more of an “elective” than a real academic course, and summer-school English was meant for kids who failed English and needed that English course credit to move on to the next grade and/or graduate. If you plan this early enough, you might even be able to start taking extra courses in your first and second year, thus making your third year less demanding, while still allowing you to skip senior year. But your school might offer “real” (non-remedial) academic courses if there is enough demand for them. You can also see if your teachers/counselors/the principal can and will accept test scores as proof deserve course credit for a course you didn’t take in school, but obviously studied on your own, which is probably what you meant by “test[ing] out of high school early.” I know you can “challenge” an AP (advanced placement) test from the College Board, simply by signing up to take the test. Challenging a test is taking the test without having taken that course. If you get enough AP scores, or school credits, or things like New York Regents Exam scores, you can pass without get credit for courses in which you did not enroll. See, for example: Get Ahead with AP - AP Students Get the Most Out of AP Taking an AP course this year? Sign in to AP Classroom using your College Board username and password for all your AP resources, including AP Daily videos. https://apstudents.collegeboard.org/TL;DR: Ask your school’s principal, counselors, and teachers. Look into taking AP courses or whatever state, local, etc. tests you need to take to get course credit. Click here for the original Quora post.
It’s a test that someone who didn’t graduate from high school can take to show he or she graduated has learned the same academic material that a high school graduate would be expected to know. Here’s the site for the company that administers the GED test. Get Your GED - Classes, Online Practice Test, Study Guides, More | GED® Get your GED using official GED test study material, classes, and practice questions. Learn how to get a high school equivalency diploma with GED®. https://ged.com/ Click here for the original Quora post.
Here’s the rest of your question, reposted here, so I could see it while writing my response. “My middle school doesn’t offer any advanced classes or clubs so I only did seven normal classes and I can manage straight A’s and have A LOT of free time. So I signed up for Accelerated Math l and Honors English while the other four classes (Biology, PE, GFSF (a college readiness class every freshman has to take), and a not yet assigned elective class) are normal. For clubs, I’m thinking of doing Band, Karebears, Academic Decathlon, and Future Business Leaders of America. Lets say I have procrastination issues and don’t have the best time management skills (although I can get things done on time right now). I am aiming for straight A’s but at the same time, I don’t want to kill my mental health. I don’t want to bite more than I can chew… would you say that I’m doing too much? If so, which ones would you recommend that I drop?” It’s impossible for me to give you a completely accurate assessment of what you can or cannot do. Judging from what you told me, it sounds like you attend a middle school that isn’t too challenging (i.e., not a special school for high achievers or a school in a district where parents, teachers, etc., are extremely demanding), and your high school will probably also be the same. So two honors classes shouldn’t be too much for you. It may be very hard -depending on how “accelerated” your math course is, and how demanding your English teacher is. It’s not likely, but English courses can be VERY difficult if the instructor chooses to make them so. Math, well, it’s generally challenging for most people, since there’s only one right answer to a problem, and your instructor may not teach the math in the way that teaches you best. If you find you don’t understand something, don’t just sit there and think “Oh well;” ask the teacher to explain it again. If that doesn’t work, look for online math resources (literally Googling whatever you’re studying should bring up tons of free math help pages that will explain that topic in detail, using different methods). You’re lucky things like this are available to you - when I was in school, if a teacher couldn’t or wouldn’t teach in way you could understand, you either had to find someone else who could, or go look things up in library, which wasn’t open the best hours (As opposed to the Internet, which is 24/7). Clubs can be hard, but many people join more than one club and get through them. You also can quit a club without consequences, generally speaking. But since I don’t know your particular school, etc., you should ask what happens if you quit a club before you join it. For example, band might be a graded school subject, so dropping out might affect your grades, class rank, etc. It can’t hurt to ask the club advisor, teacher associated with the club, guidance counselors, etc. before signing up. In fact, that’s a good bet for this whole question you’ve asked - go ask the guidance counselors, the teachers, etc., if they think your workload will be too difficult. Find out what the deadline is for dropping courses you find too difficult or just don’t like. I don’t think it will be, but they actually work at, and probably attended, your future high school. Most of them will be happy to help you decide what courses/clubs in which to participate, and you probably shouldn’t take courses taken by teachers who aren’t happy to help you. Good luck! Click here for the original Quora post.
Because most college/grad school/professional school grades are based upon midterm and final exams, with perhaps a few research papers and problem sets (for math and science), and lab reports (for science). So there aren’t as many grades for the instructor (college professor or teaching assistant) to give in a college course as there are grades obtained for in a high school course, where a teacher probably assigns homework and has tests, quizzes, etc. in addition to lab reports, research papers, and midterms/finals. For example, college course might even have just one final exam that is 100% of the course grade, whereas a high school course might have 1 test per quarter, a final, and say, 40 quizzes and 40 homework assignments, where each test/homework/quiz is worth much less than 100% of the course, since there are 85 grades. Since there are fewer tests, etc., in a college course than in a high school course of the same length, each college test must be worth more. Hope this helps! Click here for the original Quora post! The process where “wrong answers count[ed] against you” was called a “guessing penalty.” The idea was, with five possible answers (there were 5 choices before the “new” SAT of 2016 to the present) if you lost 1/4 a point for every wrong answer, you wouldn’t gain net points by guessing. The idea worked as follows. Let’s assume you took SAT sometime before 2016, but you were completely ignorant as to the correct answer to any of the questions, so you guessed blindly. You would gain 1 point for every answer you guessed correctly, but lose 1/4 of a point you already won, rather than simply not getting any points for answer you answered incorrectly. Guessing randomly, you’d get 1/5 of the answers right, and 4/5 of them wrong. I’m speaking generally. I know someone COULD guess all the right answers, and someone else could guess and get NONE of the right answers. On average, people who guess will get 1/5 right, and 4/5 wrong. If you lose 1/4 of a point for every wrong answer, you end up losing (1/4) * 4, or 1, points for every 5 “blind” guesses you make. If you gain 1 point for every 1 out every 5 guesses, your 1 point is cancelled out by the 1 point you lose for guessing 4 questions wrongly. So the idea was people who just guessed blindly wouldn’t be likely to gain any “unearned” points by guessing. However, as even the College Board put on their SAT test booklets, it was to a test-takers advantage to guess if, and only if, the test-taker could eliminate at least one obviously wrong answer. For example, a math problem answer choice that estimates a probability as less than zero or greater than one would be an obviously wrong choice, and could be eliminated. That would work because then then chance of guessing correctly would be 1/4, and the chance of guessing incorrectly would be 3/4. So there would be a 1/4 chance of getting 1 point, and 3/4 chance of losing 1/4 point. Multiplying the 1/4 chance of a 1 point gain, we expect can a gain of 1/4 of a point for each guess where one wrong answer was eliminated. Multiplying the 3/4 chance of a 1/4 point loss, we expect can a loss of 3/16 of a point for every guess where one wrong answer as been eliminated. So, suddenly, for the same 5 guesses, we should expect 5/4 points gained, and 15/16 of a point lost. That’s a gain of 5/4 = 20/16, minus 15/16 points lost, which leaves us with a net gain of 5/16 of a point. So, if someone guessed 16 times, but was able to eliminate only one answer for each problem, that person, on average, would gain 5 “unearned” points, which actually fair, since the kid who’s at least able to tell ONE answer is obviously wrong deserves SOME credit for that, especially if the kid can do that for multiple problems. But SAT changed the system to make it like the ACT’s system (only four answer choices per problem, and no guessing penalty). Is that better? I don’t know, but at least it will make people who would have been too nervous about the guessing penalty to make educated guesses more likely to make at least TRY to guess the right answers. And it’s not as though the people who try to randomly guess all the answers will get very far - either they’ll get low scores, or their scores will be flagged as anomalous (i.e. unexpected, like say, a D-average student getting a perfect 1600 on the SAT) and they may to retake the test, go to arbitration with the College Board, etc. Hope this helps - sorry about the long-winded explanation, but not sorry enough to delete it. :-) John Linneball's answer to Should grades be the only determining factor for college admissions? - Quora <-- Click here for original Quora answer.
TL; DR. answer: No. Not at all. There are too many important things that can’t be measured using grades. Much longer answer: No. At least in the U.S. , different secondary schools (high schools, boarding schools) have different grading standards. Some schools are well-known for grading students very harshly, and others grade very leniently. Some schools are known for math, science, excellence in the humanities, and their students often win national and international academic awards. At other schools, some in the same city as the outstanding public and private schools, students are practically “honor students” if they don’t shoot anyone. Most schools fall in between those extremes. While colleges can, and do, adjust grades by school (e.g., they know a 4.0 GPA from prestigious boarding school is probably much harder to earn than at 4.0 from an inner city with a 40% graduation rate), they can’t be adjusted completely accurately. More importantly, grades don’t tell the whole story. Extracurriculars (sports, clubs, volunteer or paid work), tell admissions committees a LOT about what you’re like, what you’re likely to contribute to the college community, what your goals are, etc. They’re eager NOT to admit people who don’t do anything but study. I’ve heard them called “gunners” as a reference to the U of Texas student who, perched in a campus bell tower, shot people with his hunting rifle. So if all you have on your application is your grades, the school will imagine that’s all you do, and that you’ll potentially be a “gunner” at their school. While “gunners” rarely actually shoot people, they do tend to burn out, drop out, and possibly cause problems for other students and others in the community. Alternately, without knowing your extracurriculars, school admissions people can’t know what you do when you’re not in school or studying at home. Are you training service dogs for handicapped people? Great! Working a part-time job to save up money or help pay family expenses? Great! Is the part-time job cooking meth, Breaking Bad-style? Not great. Grades can’t tell you what’s going on there, asking the relevant questions can. And of course, there are standardized tests like the SAT and ACT. For all their faults, these tests provide a decent basis to compare students’ achievements, regardless of where they went to school, their socioeconomic level, etc. A 1500 score is the same for the kid who went to a fancy boarding school as it for a kid who grew up in the projects. They’re not perfect - kids who take SAT/ACT prep courses or work with tutors (like me!) can learn how to get better scores without necessarily knowing any more of the math and English. Don’t get me wrong; it helps more to learn the actual academics, but generally, quality academic instruction is also easier for students from better high schools and better social environments to obtain. So the prep school kid would probably score higher on the SAT or ACT than the same kid if he grew up in the projects, but it would also mean the kid from the projects would be even more impressive if he got a high test score. Even with all those flaws, the SAT, ACT, and other standardized tests, when combined with grades, recommendations, extracurriculars, essays, are better than not using them. I also know about 75% of U.S. colleges are now test-optional or simply won’t accept standardized test scores. But 25% is still a significant percentage, and there’s no guarantee a “test optional” school won’t select a student who provided the optional scores instead of a similar student who didn’t provide those scores. A good number of people, given those facts, would assume the non-score-reporting applicants took the test, but didn’t do well. Essays (e.g. the Common Application questions) also help admissions officers determine who they want, and who they don’t, by giving the officers some insight into the applicants’ ideas about what matters to them, their motivation for attending the college, and writing skill. Grades aren’t a good substitute for the essays. Finally, recommendations are key at any selective college. Your teachers, coaches, club advisors, and sometimes classmates, will write recommendations that directly address not only your academic qualifications, but your quality as person, ability to work with others, and likelihood to succeed in future endeavors. Think “literally anything a person who knows you can tell others, but a grade transcript can’t.” Those are going to help you get into college. Anyway, this long list boils down to “There are too many important factors to know about a college applicant, that can’t be measured by a grade transcript, to make grades the ONLY basis for determining college admissions.” Good luck! Click here to see the original Quora post.
I think you’re looking for a clever answer, but I’ll start with the real answer a college would use. Verify each person’s identity using government ID, checking with the schools they say they attend, etc. Then have them order them to you directly from the College Board (not from them, since anyone could Photoshop an SAT score report). Otherwise, just have them do a selection of hard SAT math and verbal questions. See who does better; he or she is probably telling the truth, and the other is probably lying. If they’re both very close, then you’re probably just going to know without getting the score reports. That’s my take on it; if someone has a better idea, I’d love to see it. |
Author: John Linneball Who did you think? ;-)I'm the proprietor and only tutor for this business; that's why I named it after me. Archives
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