Private school testing for kindergarten?

[Anonymous]

So you prepped your 4, 5, and not quite 6 on the WPPSI and they did great! Woo Hoo! Congratulations!

[Anonymous]

did! Three years ago, I bought materials from a vendor in New York City who supplies to psychologists. The whole package was closer to $1100, not $800. No kidding.

Then I ran DS through the paces about a month before the test date. He did great, 99%.

Fast forward four years, he is now at the very top of his class in all subjects except art and P.E. in a DC private. So he probably would have done very well without my prepping, I'm guessing. But maybe not, and I didn't feel like leaving that component to chance.

Also, I don't regret in the least what I did.

There is nothing to admit on this end since we didn't buy such materials. Actually, I was spending 45 minutes/day with my children "prepping" them for life years well before the issue of attending private school came up and the necessity to take the idiotic and misguided mandatory WPPSI entrance admission test. Longstanding and consistent face time with my children has created the much deeper academic and intellectual foundation that has made every admission entrance test or national exam a peaceful and breezy stroll in the park without any requirement for "Princeton review type" cramming for a month before any test. Different styles for different folk.

Guess what, dear? These two tactics are not mutually exclusive. I did/do both.

I agree with you wholeheartedly that the use of this test to get a score for admissions is idiotic. That doesn't mean I'm going to just refuse to play the game and enroll DCs in our zoned public or move to Wayzata, MN, or the Yorktown cluster to enjoy excellent public schools. I did what I did as insurance. It seemed to have worked in this case and, for the doubters, seemed not to have been an anomaly (e.g. getting an excellent score out of an otherwise unqualified candidate.)

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Three pages along, and I see no one has admitted to buying WPPSI test prep materials and sample tests.

I did! Three years ago, I bought materials from a vendor in New York City who supplies to psychologists. The whole package was closer to $1100, not $800. No kidding.

Then I ran DS through the paces about a month before the test date. He did great, 99%.

Fast forward four years, he is now at the very top of his class in all subjects except art and P.E. in a DC private. So he probably would have done very well without my prepping, I'm guessing. But maybe not, and I didn't feel like leaving that component to chance.

Also, I don't regret in the least what I did.

PP, I understand you don't regret what you did, and I'm not judging you. But I am curious how you thought about it at the time. Do you feel like you "cheated"? Or maybe you think it was justified, because some other people do it? Or maybe you take an attitude of ends-justify-the-means? You admit to it here on an anonymous forum, but would you tell neighbors or other parents from your child's class about what you did?

I am genuinely curious about your attitude, and not trying to attack you. TIA.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Three pages along, and I see no one has admitted to buying WPPSI test prep materials and sample tests.

I did! Three years ago, I bought materials from a vendor in New York City who supplies to psychologists. The whole package was closer to $1100, not $800. No kidding.

Then I ran DS through the paces about a month before the test date. He did great, 99%.

Fast forward four years, he is now at the very top of his class in all subjects except art and P.E. in a DC private. So he probably would have done very well without my prepping, I'm guessing. But maybe not, and I didn't feel like leaving that component to chance.

Also, I don't regret in the least what I did.

This is why I really detest that private school's use these tests for admissions. All of the 99% scores of prepped kids are changing the national norms of the test. When a child takes this test for it's actual purpose (evaluation for LDs or delays, etc) the results are less accurate because of the private school preppers and their inflated scores. Inaccurate results of a test could change the course of intervention or accomodation for an at-risk child.

Not to worry - the norming is done during test development, not yearly after-the-fact.

[Anonymous]

As a therapist who works with adolescents, I can tell you that this kind of high-strung, intense parenting focused so heavily on academic prepping can lead to all sorts of problems down the line. As can putting your child in the wrong academic environment. But mostly this chain of emails leaves me speechless. I am hoping the repeated posts justifying some of the math drilling etc. are the same poster, or possibly two posters. And I am heartened that other posters feel as I do.

[Anonymous]

PP, I understand you don't regret what you did, and I'm not judging you. But I am curious how you thought about it at the time. Do you feel like you "cheated"? Or maybe you think it was justified, because some other people do it? Or maybe you take an attitude of ends-justify-the-means? You admit to it here on an anonymous forum, but would you tell neighbors or other parents from your child's class about what you did?

I am genuinely curious about your attitude, and not trying to attack you. TIA.

Angel, wake up and smell the roses. You can't ignore tax cheats and the like in every day life by a deep slumber and a short term memory. Have you heard of Macchiaveli?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

PP, I understand you don't regret what you did, and I'm not judging you. But I am curious how you thought about it at the time. Do you feel like you "cheated"? Or maybe you think it was justified, because some other people do it? Or maybe you take an attitude of ends-justify-the-means? You admit to it here on an anonymous forum, but would you tell neighbors or other parents from your child's class about what you did?

I am genuinely curious about your attitude, and not trying to attack you. TIA.

Angel, wake up and smell the roses. You can't ignore tax cheats and the like in every day life by a deep slumber and a short term memory. Have you heard of Macchiaveli?

I don't understand this response. Is this the PP who bought the test? Or is it someone else? Please explain yourself more clearly.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Three pages along, and I see no one has admitted to buying WPPSI test prep materials and sample tests.

I did! Three years ago, I bought materials from a vendor in New York City who supplies to psychologists. The whole package was closer to $1100, not $800. No kidding.

Then I ran DS through the paces about a month before the test date. He did great, 99%.

Fast forward four years, he is now at the very top of his class in all subjects except art and P.E. in a DC private. So he probably would have done very well without my prepping, I'm guessing. But maybe not, and I didn't feel like leaving that component to chance.

Also, I don't regret in the least what I did.

I didn't because I was naive about the test, but with hindsight, sure I would prep. My daughter is tri-lingual with English as the third language, so the test wasn't desgined for her in the first place. She is reserved and shy in unfamiliar environments - not the thype of 4-year old who is comfortable sitting an hour with an unfamiliar tester in a closed-door-room and do whatever the tester asks. She is also a perfectionist. Thus as soon as the was confronted with the first language question where she didn't know the answer - while being intelligent enough to understand that she was expected to know this - she shut down. The tester hardly got a word out of her.

The result was a score in the 60s. We talked to admissions folks who understood what had happened, send someone to observed her in her pre-school, and she got accepted by two good schools. Today she is a fine student.

What's wrong with 4-year-old-aptitude testing is that schools force parents and kids to go through this nonsense - but not that parents do what is needed to get kids through the nonsense with a result that gets them into good schools.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

PP, I understand you don't regret what you did, and I'm not judging you. But I am curious how you thought about it at the time. Do you feel like you "cheated"? Or maybe you think it was justified, because some other people do it? Or maybe you take an attitude of ends-justify-the-means? You admit to it here on an anonymous forum, but would you tell neighbors or other parents from your child's class about what you did?

I am genuinely curious about your attitude, and not trying to attack you. TIA.

Angel, wake up and smell the roses. You can't ignore tax cheats and the like in every day life by a deep slumber and a short term memory. Have you heard of Macchiaveli?

I don't understand this response. Is this the PP who bought the test? Or is it someone else? Please explain yourself more clearly.

I'm not the PP, but by the tone of the answer, I would suggest that it's an "end justifies the means" scenario. One would hope that society has moved beyond the type of social pathology described (I won't say "espoused" as he drew a distinction between public and private morality) by Machiavelli almost 500 years ago, but of course that would be naive.

[Anonymous]

As a therapist who works with adolescents, I can tell you that this kind of high-strung, intense parenting focused so heavily on academic prepping can lead to all sorts of problems down the line. As can putting your child in the wrong academic environment. But mostly this chain of emails leaves me speechless. I am hoping the repeated posts justifying some of the math drilling etc. are the same poster, or possibly two posters. And I am heartened that other posters feel as I do.

I am 100 percent certain the bulk of your disturbed adolescents and victims of math drillings are immigrant children from developing countries in Africa, Asia and Eastern Europe?

[Anonymous]

But I am curious how you thought about it at the time. Do you feel like you "cheated"? Or maybe you think it was justified, because some other people do it? Or maybe you take an attitude of ends-justify-the-means? You admit to it here on an anonymous forum, but would you tell neighbors or other parents from your child's class about what you did?

I am genuinely curious about your attitude, and not trying to attack you. TIA.

PP here. I admit that this is cheating, yes, given the rules of the game. That is, as another PP put it so beautifully, this game wants you to take even a circumspect, tri-lingual 3 or 4 year old and put them in a room with a complete stranger for 45 minutes and answer questions on command with NO chance for a do-over. The results of that game are your "IQ" that is used as a deciding factor between two otherwise identical candidates. The rules are that you can't have seen this test for 12 months, otherwise the results are "inaccurate." I do admit that's true-ish, so that's why I admitted to cheating.

I admitted our approach to a very few (3?) close friends and I gave one of these friends the $1100 materials to boot. I would not tell random neighbors, no, just like they don't tell me (but I know anyway) that they hire tutors in advance of the PSAT, aka, "beginning of the Nat'l Merit Sweepstakes". Some things, acquaintances don't offer without direct questioning.

[Anonymous]

I'm not the PP, but by the tone of the answer, I would suggest that it's an "end justifies the means" scenario. One would hope that society has moved beyond the type of social pathology described (I won't say "espoused" as he drew a distinction between public and private morality) by Machiavelli almost 500 years ago, but of course that would be naive.

Are we living in the same country and century? Ivy League graduates from the banks of the Potomac working on Wall Street worship this Machiavellian doctrine: "end justifies the means". Do you think this is why the global financial empire is on an ICU death bed in need of resuscitation and our country is on the brink of bankrupcy? What's different today than 500 years ago? The rich get richer (and go to elite private schools) and the poor get poorer. It's not the poor running Wall Street and our government!

[Anonymous]

PP here. I admit that this is cheating, yes, given the rules of the game. That is, as another PP put it so beautifully, this game wants you to take even a circumspect, tri-lingual 3 or 4 year old and put them in a room with a complete stranger for 45 minutes and answer questions on command with NO chance for a do-over. The results of that game are your "IQ" that is used as a deciding factor between two otherwise identical candidates. The rules are that you can't have seen this test for 12 months, otherwise the results are "inaccurate." I do admit that's true-ish, so that's why I admitted to cheating.

I admitted our approach to a very few (3?) close friends and I gave one of these friends the $1100 materials to boot. I would not tell random neighbors, no, just like they don't tell me (but I know anyway) that they hire tutors in advance of the PSAT, aka, "beginning of the Nat'l Merit Sweepstakes". Some things, acquaintances don't offer without direct questioning.

I have no kids in this game but this says it all. The other disingenious hypocrites prefer the rich to get richer and the poor to go to public school.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I have two kids. One was a fluent reader at age 4, capable of doing simple addition and subtraction. The other was a more typical 4 year old, who recognized letters but was not yet reading. Guess which one got a 99% on the WPPSI? The second child. The WPPSI is not testing their academic achievement but their aptitude. But it isn't an accurate measure of IQ at that age anyway (see "Nurtureshock").

FYI, they are older now and recently took the WISC. Second child outscored the other one again.

I can relate. DC was tested at 3.5 and got a 63%. DC was reading solidly at a beginning of the year first grade level, probably higher, and was like this across the board academically. I'll take it over scoring 99%. Wish we could have had both, but the test it ridiculous on kids so young. Prepping? That is unbelievable. What a mess.

[Anonymous]

I'm going to let you all know about a dirty little secret. We've been "prepping" for the WPPSI for almost two years with the help of Child Find. If a child is identified to have delays early on then they are typically assessed on what turns out to be the exact areas of the test! My DS's IEP goals are very similar to many areas of the test. He's come a long way in the past 2 years. We just had him tested for private school admissions and he did great. My point is that any special education teacher or developmental psychologist can tell you what you child should be able to do. It's not rocket science.