Are Test Prep Courses a Good Thing?

teenI recently had a conversation with several high school educators about the advantages and disadvantages of test preparation programs for high school admissions tests. All of us agreed on the importance of acquiring basic math, reading, and language arts skills. All of us agreed that it is a good thing for students to learn such basic skills in a tutorial program. But taking test preparation courses just to score better on a placement test could result in spuriously high scores. These skewed scores could result in misplacement in a school or curriculum, which has high standards and high expectations that the student cannot satisfy. Such misplacement results in unhappiness for the student, the parents, and the school staff. Tutorial assistance for basic skills may be just right, but for high school admissions testing, test preparation courses may be better left alone.

Let us know your thoughts about test preparation courses.

jk

John D. Kauffman, Ph.D.
Scholastic Testing Service, Inc.


This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 15th, 2006 at 8:33 pm and is filed under Modern Education. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

One Response to “Are Test Prep Courses a Good Thing?”

  1. Barbara Swicord Says:
    November 27, 2006 at 1:30 am | Reply

    John,
    You have raised a timely issue that is also an important one. I agree with the comments regarding misplacement of students due to test prep. It can really be a disservice to the child as well as the other children in the misplaced class or course. But I don’t think this situation is likely to change in the near future. Highly competitive parents push for these kinds of placements, sometimes at the child’s expense.
    I know in our own SIG summer program, our SAT Prep courses are consistently among our most
    subscribed. I am sometimes frustrated that parents will emphasize these courses at the
    expense of taking some of the other multidisciplinary courses that are more open-ended,
    creative, and focused on helping the students discover and delve into areas they may be passionate about. We educators need to help parents see the value of life long learning while they are still rightly concerned about short term goals that can be affected by test scores. I invite readers to learn more about our offerings at http://www.giftedstudy.com.

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