Khan Academy SAT Prep

I'm glad to see that the official URL for the Khan Academy partnership with the College Board is now live.

https://www.khanacademy.org/sat

I have been looking forward to being able to tell all my friends that they don't have to worry about test prep for the SAT anymore, as that is now free and online through Khan Academy. For people who are still inclined to worry about standardized tests, I will mention that this preparation course will undoubtedly provide useful cross-training for the ACT college admission test and for many other standardized tests. If you are still worried after all that, I have one more tip about standardized tests, a tip that has worked to make all such tests easy for me and for my children.

READ, READ

To learn how to score well on a standardized test reading section, the number one piece of advice is READ, READ, READ, and READ. Read about what you like to know more about. Read things that are fun for you. Find books and magazines about interesting topics and read them. Turn off the TV and read. Put away the video game controller and read. Read hard things, and read easy things. Read a lot.

For years, I wondered why it came so readily to mind to write "READ, READ, READ" in all capital letters like that when I give advice on this subject, as I have frequent occasion to do. Recently, I reread the section "Suggestions for Study" in the front matter of John DeFrancis's book Beginning Chinese Reader, Part I, which I first used to learn Chinese back in 1975. In that section of that book, I found this passage, "Fluency in reading can only be achieved by extensive practice on all the interrelated aspects of the reading process. To accomplish this we must READ, READ, READ" (capitalization as in original). Yes, that works for Chinese, and it works for English too. By practicing reading, you gain reading comprehension and reading speed, and speedy reading with good comprehension gives you time to complete standardized test sections with time to spare. That reduces the pressure and lets you relax and think while you take the test. Try it. You may like it, and anyway reading is fun.

That's incorrect.

https://sat.collegeboard.org/scores/how-sat-is-scored

>In our statistical analysis, equating adjusts for slight differences in difficulty between test editions and ensures that a student's score of, say, 450 on one edition of a test reflects the same ability as a score of 450 on another edition of the test. Equating also ensures that a student's score does not depend on how well others did on the same edition of the test.

SAT and all these similar "standardized" tests are a big joke. This outdated testing methodology needs to be evolved. College admissions should be somewhat similar to job interviews. Students walk in, meet admission committee panel (composed of a member of registrar office and professors/lecturers), talk about expectations, solve a few problems, talk about their essays, present design work, piece of literature etc. Such experience is more personal. Better education system needs a better paradigm shift.

Intuitively it must be the case that your score decreases if the SAT taking population gets better at taking it because the entire point of the SAT is to rank students.

I don't quite understand what the discussion in the link is trying to say but I take it to mean that they normalize between different versions of the test in the same year in a way that doesn't depend on the ability of the cohort that took a specific version. That is still consistent with the fact that they do normalize across the entire test taking population.

I understand that to mean that they do normalization between different versions of the test in a given year, not that they do not do normalization across the SAT population in that year. It would surprise me if they didn't do population-wide normalization, otherwise too many scores would be at or near the upper limit, making the score uninformative, and also you could not compare the rank of students between years.

Regardless, because the point of the SAT is ranking, your score is irrelevant. What matters is how you do with respect to your peers. If everyone does better the test has become "harder" because you need to do better to get a higher rank.