10th grade PSAT results

[Anonymous]

If your kid is disciplined, you can just do practice tests and study vocab. After about 10-15 tests, they should have it down. The questions basically repeat. A friend of mine did this with the LSAT and got a perfect score. No genius, he just did practice tests over and over again.

[Anonymous]

Georgetown Learning Center. My son went up dramatically and ended up getting in the 97th percentile on the ACT

[Anonymous]

Don't Take Sophomore PSAT Scores Too Seriously
• On a fairly regular basis, I get contacted by both high school sophomores and parents of high school sophomores who are concerned about their or their child's less-than-stellar sophomore year performance on the PSAT and wondering whether there's any hope. Here's my response:

While sophomore year PSAT scores can serve as a general indicator of someone's strengths and weaknesses, they are in no way an indicator of a student's potential and often bear little relationship to the scores achieved in the spring of junior year or the fall of senior year.

Let me make this perfectly clear: the SAT is intended to be a test for eleventh and twelfth graders, not one for tenth graders, and certainly not one for ninth graders. Except in very unusual circumstances, scores attained prior to eleventh grade are not of great interest to most colleges and should not generally be a cause for concern.

While some students will have finished the learning the math they need to know in order to do well on the SAT by the beginning of their sophomore year, a good deal fewer will have acquired the requisite reading or writing skills.

To put that in some perspective, I've only ever had two students who scored above a 700 on CR before they turned sixteen, and one of them was a junior who had skipped a year of school. Most of my current 700-750+ scorers failed to top the low 600s as sophomores, but when they started working with me the summer before junior year, they were already naturally scoring in the high 600s.

To put that in even more perspective, a Critical Reading score of only about 570 would put a test-taker in the 90th percentile for sophomores -- an equivalent percentile for a junior would require a score 60 points higher. Likewise, a Writing score of only 560 counts as the 90th percentile for a sophomore; for a junior, about a 620.

These gaps are not ones that necessarily require extensive test-prep to be remedied; closing them is often largely a question of intellectual maturation. Most sophomores are just coming off of freshman year when they take the PSAT -- in many ways, they're still adjusting to high school. Most of them have net yet completed an AP class or been required to grapple with material written for a college-to-adult audience on a regular basis. They lack both the vocabulary and the literal decoding strategies to make sense out of much of the reading they'll encounter on the SAT.

Many of the skills necessary to succeed on the SAT are typically acquired throughout sophomore year -- not just during the month-and-a-half that precedes the PSAT. Unless a student is truly academically precocious, it is unfair to expect him or her to perform at a level that students a year or two older must often struggle to attain. In fact, forcing students into rigorous, strategy-based test-prep before they have acquired the fundamental academic skills being tested is pretty much useless. It's like trying to hang a coat on a shadow instead of a coat hanger -- there's just nothing there to hold it up.

It also has a nasty tendency to backfire. Students burn out, get discouraged, and end up scoring lower than they would have otherwise. And because their focus has been on acing the test rather than on acquiring a genuine appreciation of words and language, they tend to not to develop the sense of linguistic nuance and dexterity that is absolutely crucial for a 750+. Only after students have acquired those skills can they realistically aim for a very top score.

So the bottom line is that if you're a sophomore or the parent of a sophomore about to take the SAT, it's not worth your time to worry. Go in, take the test, see what it's like, and use the results as a general gauge of the things you need to focus on over the next year or so. And that's pretty much it.

[mcrowe]

Honors Test Prep is probably the best in Virginia. Price is reasonable. Check out the testimonials. DD went from 2000 to 2350: 800 reading, 800 writing, and 750 math along with a comparable PSAT score which qualified her for NMSF.