Princeton Review PSAT Math Mistake

http://www.TestingIsEasy.com

No sooner did Mike finish his last video about the Princeton Review being wrong about passive voice on the PSAT then he noticed a glaring problem with their practice math questions. There are rigid standards that determine what is fair game in a real SAT or PSAT math question, and the Princeton Review doesn't seem to know about them...

Category:

Education

Tags:

• sat
• psat
• test
• prep
• preparation
• princeton
• review
• wrong
• math
• exponents
• exponential
• fraction
• practice
• questions
• college
• board

[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

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.

[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

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]

[1995elhawary]

which review books do you prefer?

[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.