A Guide to Standardized Testing-NEW-Final
CCO-MKA A Guide to Standardized Testing Standardized testing is far and away the most complicated and misunderstood part of the college admissions process. Some students even begin SAT testing at age 12 as part of summer talent identification programs at universities like Johns Hopkins. The testing doesn’t stop until winter of the senior year. But college admissions testing, most educators agree, is necessary. No one claims that a test of four hours is as important as classroom performance day in and day out, year in and year out. No two schools, however, are alike and the United States, lone among developed countries, has no national curriculum. It is impossible for colleges to compare the value of an A in rural Idaho with its counterpart in northern New Jersey. College admissions examinations have been developed as a national yardstick to help compare the performance of two students anywhere. This is an important concept to grasp. Because more and more students are presenting more and more honors grades to colleges, standardized test scores gain in importance as the only academic common denominator. Almost all MKA students sit for College Board examinations designed by the Educational Testing Service. These tests, briefly outlined below, include the PSAT, SAT Reasoning, SAT Subject, and Advanced Placement. In recent years, the ACT examination and its preliminary test, PLAN, have increased in popularity among MKA students. Test Academic Coverage Section Time Critical Reading: passages, sentence completion 2 50 min. PSAT Math: numbers, operations, algebra, functions, geometry, measurement, 2 50 min. data analysis, probability, statistics Writing Skills: sentence errors, sentence/paragraph improvement 1 30 min.
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