Princeton Review PSAT Math Mistake

[daveschoen64]

Thank goodness only 400 people or so have seen this. Were you fired by Princeton Review? Your argument is silly, incredibly long, and targets a minor issue that you are not correct about. Our son gained 400 points on his SAT after taking a course at Princeton Review. There was nothing on the test he didn't know was coming. Please.

[TestingIsEasy]

@daveschoen64

I've never worked for Princeton Review, no.

The argument isn't silly, if your goal is to get the highest score you can on the SAT without wasting time and energy.

I am entirely correct about the fact PR asks its students to answer a math question that can't ever appear on the real SAT--if you'd like to prove me wrong, all you have to do is produce a real SAT question that requires a person to evaluate the 3rd root of a number.

[more]

[TestingIsEasy]

@daveschoen64

I'm glad your son's score increased 400 points after his PR course. There are plenty of ways to get ready for a test, and certainly there are students who improve after a PR course. But if he learned everything in the course that the PR teaches in its books, then he spent extra time learning ideas (like finding the 3rd roots of numbers) that he didn't need to know for the test.

If his only source of information was the PR materials, and if they [more]

[TestingIsEasy]

@daveschoen64

contain the same information as the book I cite in the video, then your son would not have known how the College Board handles the passive voice, either; the PR book I cite mentions the passive voice as an important consideration on the writing multiple choice section, but the College Board doesn't care about the passive voice at all, and it's never the reason that something is right or wrong on the SAT (see my other video on PR mistakes for more on that).

My goal is [more]

[TestingIsEasy]

to help students get ready for the test as effectively, and as easily, as possible, which is why this issue is so important. At the time I made the video I was correcting PR's misinformation with my 1-on-1 clients on a daily basis (for some reason a lot of people used PR for that year's PSAT), so I made the video.

My point was, and has always been, that anybody getting ready for the SAT should just avoid the whole issue of third party questions altogether and use the actual SAT [more]

[TestingIsEasy]

@daveschoen64

questions published by the College Board. That way you know that everything you're practicing and learning can really be on the actual SAT.

While your son seems to have had a good experience with PR, I deal with clients all the time who have had quite negative experiences with them, and I think one of the reasons for these negative experiences is that students learn to do certain things (consciously or not) on a practice PR test you shouldn't do on a real test, because [more

[TestingIsEasy]

@daveschoen64

PR materials aren't like the real test questions in some ways (as this video and the passive voice video clearly demonstrate, and as nobody has disproved yet in this thread).

Best,

Mike

[TestingIsEasy]

@daveschoen64

I'm not sure why that posted backwards--sorry.

[1995elhawary]

which review books do you prefer?

[TestingIsEasy]

Hi David! Do you have a link to that question with the 2/3 thing?

[davidmmcg]

Youtube doesn't allow link posting, but the College Board website Practice Questions - Math - Multiple Choice question #6 uses fractional and negative fractional exponents with variables.

The Math Concepts - Algebra and Functions - Exponents page also deems the fractional exponents as fair game.

[TestingIsEasy]

Hi David!

Sorry for the delayed response to your response--for some reason I missed the notification that you had responded.

The question you're referring to requires students to know how to manipulate fractional and/or negative exponents, but it doesn't actually require the test-taker to find the nth root of a number where n is any value beside 0, 1, or 2. The PR question I referred to cannot be answered unless the student evaluates the cube root of 64 as 4. So SAT questions (more...)

[TestingIsEasy]

can certainly involve fractional exponents, but they don't require students to evaluate those exponents for numbers. In the sample question to which you referred, the student should know how to manipulate exponents algebraically but never needs to know what the cube root (or any other root) of an actual number is. The PR question is unlike any real SAT math question I've ever seen because it requires the student to know the cube root of a number (or to have a calculator capable of producing it).

[TestingIsEasy]

And you're certainly right that the College Board says fractional exponents are fair game, but the CB says a lot of things are fair game that don't ever actually appear on the test, sometimes because the test's format precludes them and sometimes because the CB just decides they won't ask about it. For instance, on page 258 of the blue book the CB talks about modeling real-life situations with functions, and then gives a fairly complex (by SAT standards) function and its graph. (more)

[TestingIsEasy]

But you won't see an actual question on the SAT in which a student has to create such a complex model or identify its graph. I recognize that page 246 says you'll need to know how to evaluate numbers just as the PR question requires, but I haven't seen an actual SAT question that involves this.

This type of thing is in keeping with the nature of the rest of the SAT, as well. A few examples: (1) the scoring rubric for the essay on page 105 doesn't fit with how the sample SAT essays (more)

[TestingIsEasy]

are graded, (2) the exercise on page 156 is irrelevant to the SAT since you're never asked to rewrite things on your own, and (3) the advice on order of difficulty from page 219 doesn't explain that the methodology used to determine a question's difficulty makes the ranking meaningless. And so on.

Things like this are why it's so important to use real CB questions to practice with--and why it's so important to ignore most of the SAT-taking advice the CB gives.

[davidmmcg]

@TestingIsEasy

We know the essay is seriously flawed, but there is some consistency to how it is scored.

Rewriting isn't explicitly tested on the SAT, but as an exercise rewriting may help students shape their own essays.

Simply knowing that there is an order of difficulty can help students design a strategy and help them avoid getting trapped by a difficult question; the mechanism that determines difficulty is less important than knowing that there are differences in difficulty.

[davidmmcg]

@TestingIsEasy

I think we would both agree that the CB does not have student's best interests at heart but I don't know that they actively lie to students about what can appear on the test. Because you haven't seen a particular question before does not preclude it from appearing on the next real test.

I would say that virtually every scientific calculator that a student is likely to have will have the cube root function (on my radio shack calc it's the 2nd function of the +/- key).

[davidmmcg]

@TestingIsEasy

I don't know that the question is testing the specific knowledge of a cube root as much as it's testing factoring skills.

In the May 2002 SAT available online, in Section 2 Question 4 students are asked "if x^2=k, and both x and k are integers, what could be the value of k?" which is an example of the CB asking students for the square root of an actual number.

[davidmmcg]

The square root of 81 is defined by the College Board to be the positive root only, so -9 would never be the credited response to the square root of 81 on the SAT.

The College Board has a question in their online practice material that includes x raised to the 2/3 power.