Reply to Is CogAT gone forever?

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[quote=Anonymous]Love the tongue-in-cheek, above.

It's easy for families with considerable means to encourage/require their children to prep for SATs.  It's not a guarantee, but you do see plenty of 1400+, if not 1500+, among families that do so.

As with many things, it's possible for families not of considerable means to do so, but it is considerably more difficult, and the family focus on education isn't always there to make such pursuit at all likely.

Does this mean outside enrichment/prep is bad?  No, far from it.  It just means that we shouldn't be taking scores on more preppable tests as clear indicators of a student's ability (especially in the absence of or to the diminishment of other factors), but, rather, as indicators of achievement and exposure.  And that's not to say that [i]no[/i] students of high ability would score highly on achievement/exposure-dominant testing; just not all high ability kids would, and we don't want to leave those kids with their needs unaddressed.

I'd argue that such indicators are better suited to decisions about acceleration, while less preppable/"gameable" indicators are better suited to decisions about enrichment programs.  It's almost certain that blended heuristics utilizing both measures of capability and measures of achievement/exposure would be best, perhaps even using different heuristics for the different approaches.  This would be more likely to meet actual student needs, and I hope it would better identify those needs across varying populations.

That gatekeeping comment from before sticks with me.  While whichever selection paradigm is chosen becomes a de facto gate, it occurs to me that overreliance on more gameable metrics in MCPS decisions introduces a gate effectively managed, to a great extent, by those with means, even if not in a particularly organized/cabalistic [non-religious/culturally specific definition, there] fashion.[/quote]

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