Reply to Spin-off: test prep for CES?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]

You really believe in these "classes" they teach you useful "tactics"? I sort of knew that was not the case but to be safe I still sent DC to one of the classes during summer. It turns out that they were no different than reading with your kid or doing some math problems together.

You see many Asians doing that just because: (1) Asian parents tell each other about these things (2) many Asian parents were not really confident about themselves making the right decisions (as immigrants who may not know everything about this country) so sometimes they resort to these schools/classes to help their kids.

I prepared with DC on the high school magnet CoGAT and did the problems together. Did not send DC to any classes for those, and I believe some prep for the CoGAT is useful for getting the children used to the type of problems. But no extensive prep is really needed.
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Yes, occasional home prep is totally different from systematic prep. I don't really see any lack of confidence in Asian parents. Not sure where this is coming from. I think culturally, immigrants (I am the daughter of an immigrant and know this first hand) are more driven to get ahead and make sure their kids achieve. Asian culture also stresses hard work. The result is lots of enrichment, lots of test prep, lots of music lessons/practice. I get it. But, regardless of where it comes from, the test prep/enrichment is a thing, and it affects scores.[/quote]

"Lack of confidence" refers to the lack of confidence in whether they have all the information needed, because they do not consider themselves "local".

As for test prep - put it this way - no one will deliberately just do "occasional home prep". If they do prep, they want to do it the right way - whether or not that can be achieved, is another issue.
I am not familiar with CES prep. My experience with HS magnet prep: before they changed it to CoGAT this year (in fact , last year -2018), the old test format does need some prep work. I don't really see a difference between going to these classes or doing the problems (if you can get the problems) yourself. I registered DC for the summer classes mainly to get the prep materials, and the classes turned out to be exactly the same as I expected.

Then they changed it to CoGAT. I purchased a few CoGAT books, and kept in mind that it was more of a IQ type test so that practicing does not do much. I practiced with DC just to get familiarize with the problems and to see how well DC is doing. I know many other kids went to the same classes (but now focusing on CoGAT) again and I don't believe that was much useful.

So to summarize: (1) test prep may affect scores for certain tests, but for CoGAT, mostly not. (2) it does not matter if the kids go to a test prep class or study hard with their parents/peers/by themselves. If they work hard, I see nothing wrong with that.

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