Reply to prepping for cogat test .. is it cheating?

Forum Index » Advanced Academic Programs (AAP)

Reply to "prepping for cogat test .. is it cheating?"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]A better discussion is what's the most effective way to prep for CogAT. [/quote]

Agree! Anyone who wants to compete these days preps. Those who don't are putting their kids at a big disadvantage.[/quote]

It's toxic to put kids under this kind of pressure. I can see why higher-educations and other school districts are eliminating these tests. [/quote]

Clearly doing nothing

Even something as simple as reviewing the format of a few sample questions with your kid and then having them maybe take a practice test (or even just a few questions on their own) to get used to the idea of the format and how to fill in a scan sheet and so on is often called "prepping" on this forum. To distinguish though, I'll call this "lite prepping". This is pretty lightweight stuff and if a kid is feeling pressure from this then that would seem to suggest some other issue that is going on (that isn't the result of the prepping itself).

Of course, there's also the kind of prepping that's sustained over a period of time where kids are taking classes or doing repeated workbooks at home and actively engaged in trying to raise their score, etc. which I'll distinguish as "intensive prepping". Now some kids just love these kinds of problem-solving workbooks anyway and would have no problem doing these on the regular, the same kids who enjoy doing brain teaser workbooks as an occasional diversion while travelling, etc. Those kids wouldn't be put under "this kind of pressure" either, even with intensive prepping... they just see it as more fun problems and brain games to work on and get better at.

And of course yes, there are some kids where this type of intensive prepping feels onerous, where they're doing it only to satisfy their parents, where it's a struggle, and most likely where the parents ARE putting some pressure on the kids by telling them they need to score high (and why) and are investing a ton into achieving a certain result (namely, raising the score high enough to get them into AAP). And yeah, I'd say that can cross the line into toxic.

One problem is you're bucketing ALL these different types of scenarios into a single bucket of 'prepping', and when you oversimplify in that way you really can't draw any meaningful conclusions or generalizations about it. Another problem is that because some parents won't be aware of or invest anything even into 'lite prepping' (let alone being resourced for intensive prepping if their kids enjoy it), then their kids will be at a relative disadvantage on the scores (even if it's just a few points), and that's going to be disproportionately lower-SES families. But the solution typically being proposed is "well, therefore to make it fair we should all agree on the lowest common denominator of doing absolutely nothing to support our kids in being prepared to take an abilities test", which most folks recognize as ridiculously problematic on the face of it.

I'd also argue that forcing kids to take CoGAT with absolute-zero information about what the format will be or having viewed a question but knowing that it may determine if they get into AAP (kids talk) is way more pressure and stress for them than doing a bit of lite prepping beforehand so that they have some ballpark idea of what to expect.[/quote]

Same goes for any test really even the WISC. [/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics