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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]
If there are no special needs involved, there is no such thing as "doesn't test well". What it means is that there is grade inflation at your kids' school, and the national standardized test score reflects his true performance.

You can help with that by paying for test prep and tutoring. I recommend the senior tutors at Prep Matters, but they're incredibly expensive (they did wonders for my son, though - got him from a 28 to a 35). 
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Boy, the College Board really has done a number on you. Standardized tests are not objective. They don’t measure “true performance,” whatever the hell that means. The only thing a standardized test score indicates is how you did on that standardized test. It has no relationship to the grades you get in school or any other measure of success.[/quote]

Sorry, but the USA has gone crazy with the holistic admissions and "tests only measure how well you do on the test" garbage. The rest of the world still looks at national exams because they want intellectual cohorts in their universities. MIT, Georgetown and a few others here are the only ones who are prepared to lower their application numbers by bucking the trend and requiring test scores, because they prefer to take a dent on their popularity reputation rather than get a lower-quality cohort.

SAT, ACT, AP tests... they all indicate knowledge AND problem-solving abilities. They are an excellent indicator of how well a person will do in college and the workforce.

I say this, not because I approve of the College Board holding the entire US educational system hostage (actually I hate that idea), but because as a foreigner who has received education in multiple countries and taught at universities, I've experienced academic rigor both as a student and professor, and most American universities greatly lack academic rigor... because they don't select the right students. They force families to pay for 4 years of lackadaisical and often nebulous studies, which don't necessarily prepare young adults for the workforce. US higher education can so easily turn out to be an extremely expensive endeavor for so many families - it should really offer more transparency in its admissions, and better instruction once the students get on campus.

Of course you can point to deep problems at the K-12 level that pave the way for issues at the university level. High schools here do not operate with a specific federally-mandated curriculum, they don't give out the same end-of-high-school national exams, if they give exams at all, and they cannot easily be compared. A lot of high schools are just complete shitshows where no learning happens. Students graduating from such high schools aren't exactly prepared for a rigorous college experience anyway.

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Fully agree with this. 
The SAT being a combination of 10th grade math and basic English comprehension, a decent score should be a basic requirement... if US universities were not money machines eager to accept any average student with rich parents.
 [/quote]

+1. Parent of student at Oxford.[/quote]

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