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- Have them check it out today! The best way to practice for the SAT is now free and personalized for everyone. Our mission is to provide a free, world-class education to anyone, anywhere. Khan Academy is a c 3 nonprofit organization. Donate or...
- This gives you a goal to work towards and focuses your study timeline. Creating a study plan before getting started ensures you cover all the material on the test in the amount of time you have available. Enroll in a Course An easy way to find a...
- Introduction Here's a one-sentence summary of my stance: Khan Academy could have built a much better SAT prep program, but it's being handcuffed by the demands of the College Board. To you, the high school student, the College Board may seem like a monolithic giant bent on ruining your life. But the reality is the College Board is a vulnerable group struggling to justify its existence in a shifting education landscape. This is the entire reason for the SAT redesign. If you're interested in why the College Board is struggling and its strategy to stay alive, then keep reading this from top to bottom. If you just care about hearing the pros and cons of Khan Academy's SAT program, click here to skip down the page. However, if you plan on using Khan Academy for 20 hours or more of prep, I think this article is well worth the 15 minute read, so you know what you're getting out of your studying. Disclaimers Before we start, let's get two things out of the way.
- First, these opinions are my own. I draw my own conclusions from my knowledge of the testing and education industries. Therefore, any information that isn't public like the terms of the contract between Khan Academy and College Board are purely my opinions about what's going on. I'm clearly going to be biased toward thinking that our approach to the SAT is the right way to prep.
- Having worked with our thousands of students and seen our score improvements, I'm confident that we're on the right track. So take all of what I say with a grain of salt, and make up your own mind. If you don't agree with what I say below, then that's cool. I wish you the best on your SAT studying and hope you get an awesome score. If instead what I say makes sense to you, then you'd probably also like our SAT prep program. It provides a great SAT prep experience online with leading score improvement results. I believe we have the best SAT prep program available, and you'll see from my thinking below why that is.
- Of course, you don't need to buy an SAT prep program to do great on the test. On this blog, we've published the best SAT resources available to support millions of students around the world to prep better. But if you could use help organizing your prep and could benefit from an all-inclusive SAT prep program that's effective and easy to use, then check us out. Let's get started. What's Khan Academy? I'll say it upfront and repeat it throughout - Khan Academy is one of my favorite educational organizations. I have a HUGE amount of respect for them. Years ago when I first saw their product and heard of their vision to provide free education to the world, I was blown away.
- Their approach seems like such an obvious idea in retrospect, but no one was actually doing it at scale. Khan Academy started as a collection of math video lessons featuring Sal Khan. Since then, they've expanded their content dramatically to cover subjects beyond math to include art, economics, and computer science. They've also developed a more sophisticated program that tracks your progress and gives you practice questions. On the surface, the program looks great. It's free, slick, and easy to use. But if you peer under the surface, you'll understand why Khan's prep program has fundamental weaknesses, directly attributable to its partnership with the College Board. Here's why. For decades, the SAT was the major game in town. If you wanted to get into a top college, you had to take the SAT. The ACT was around, but it wasn't as popular. Fast forward to today. The higher the score you get, the more likely you'll succeed in college and career—supposedly.
- Colleges thus use SAT scores to admit the best students they can. The problem is, colleges run analyses on their students and started finding that SAT score often wasn't the best predictor of success —grades and coursework were. Naturally, schools started thinking, "why do we even need the SAT? If this isn't problem enough… Problem 2: Richer Students Tend to Do Better on the SAT Income inequality is a hot button topic in this country, especially when it comes to education, which is seen as a universal right.
- Over the past century, colleges have made a huge push to promote diversity and lower inequality where it can. Unfortunately, the higher your family income, the higher your SAT score tends to be. This sounds bad. The first thing people often think when they hear this is, "richer people can afford better SAT prep. Income affects the type of parents you have, your environment, the resources you can access, how others treat you, and many more factors that sum up to your academic potential. So it's not all the College Board's fault. Regardless, the correlation with income still sounds really bad. If colleges take students with higher SAT score, one can argue they're just admitting richer students—which is counter to most colleges' mission statements. This makes colleges think—"if the SAT doesn't predict college success well…AND it correlates with income…why in the world are we still using it? And in , the gap widened—the ACT had 1. So why the changing in positions? The ACT has always positioned itself as a test of what you learn in school.
- Partly for this reason, many states adopted the ACT as a state-wide standardized test like Illinois, Michigan, and Utah. You can tell that these are three HUGE problems. It now emphasizes skills you're likely to use in the future, like algebra and grammar in the context of passages. It got rid of skills panned as irrelevant, like obscure vocabulary and tricky math logic questions. It also closely matches the new Common Core curriculum —no surprise, since a contributor to the Common Core David Coleman became president of the College Board in The College Board will stay alive. With Khan Academy's free SAT prep program, students who can't afford books or prep programs can now prep for free. This in itself is a great step forward—don't get me wrong. With this program, they can now go to colleges and say, "we honestly believe our free SAT program is going to reduce inequality.
- Desired outcome: Ideally, completely level out the playing field and solve income inequality. This will get colleges to swallow the SAT more easily. The more students who take the SAT, the more it'll be accepted as a default part of life, and the harder it'll be to get rid of. Furthermore, more SAT test-takers means more students who apply to colleges using the SAT, which means it'll be harder for colleges to get rid of their SAT requirement. Furthermore, now that students have Khan Academy to prep for free, states won't feel as bad requiring all students to take the SAT.
- This is huge—it takes away major market share from the ACT. Khan Academy has a nationwide reach with millions of student users. In the chess game that is business strategy, the College Board made some brilliant moves here. By redesigning the test and offering a high quality free resource Khan Academy , it has legitimate responses to each of its major problems: correlation to college success, income inequality, and ACT competition. Side note: Despite all these efforts, the New SAT still has really bad inequality data 1 year after its introduction.
- By ethnicity: the average Asian score is and the average White score is , while the average African American score is There's a whole standard deviation of difference here, which is huge. By income: students who used a fee waiver scored a , while those who didn't By parent education which is a good signal of income : kids of parents with graduate degrees scored a , compared to from kids of parents with no high school diploma. Maybe it needs more time to play out - it's only been a year. But I'm very skeptical. Now what does this have to do with Khan Academy's weaknesses? The critical point, for the purpose of this article, is that Khan Academy is a tool in College Board's strategy. The partnership exists to further College Board's mission and achieve its goals. Imagine if the College Board didn't have tight control. College Board can't let this happen. The stakes are too high if something goes wrong.
- So they need to control the Khan Academy program. This is where we run into major problems, because you shouldn't believe many things that the College Board says about SAT - particularly about what it takes to improve your score. Side note: I don't want to sound cynical here or make you think that the College Board has nefarious motives, like a cartoonish villain.
- I respect what College Board and Khan Academy are doing to help even the playing field and get more kids to get into college. They have good intentions, and the problems they are working on are hard and important. Still, the College Board has an agenda and a strategy to meet its goals. Just because it wants to help more students get into college doesn't preclude it from pulling its levers to achieve its goals.
10 Official SAT Practice Tests (Full-Length And Free) | The Olive Book Blog
Want to improve your SAT score by points? We've written a guide about the top 5 strategies you must be using to have a shot at improving your score. This test had its last administration in January Even for the current SAT, these tests are useful for your studying. However, be sure to note the major changes between the old and current SAT. Here's how you should be using these older practice tests: Know that the structure and timing are different. In these old SAT practice tests, Reading passages and questions are all useful to practice with. Writing on the SAT tests similar grammar skills—but they're tested in a different passage-based format. You can use these old SAT tests to practice key SAT grammar rules , but know that you won't be seeing any questions based on isolated sentences anymore.Frequently Asked Questions About The Official SAT® Practice (article) | Khan Academy
Math on the SAT is similar in format, but it now emphasizes algebra and de-emphasizes geometry. Go ahead and use these old tests for math practice, but be sure to focus more on the skills that the current SAT tests. You might find these on other forums or websites. Don't waste time taking these tests, as they're the same tests as the four above. This was back when I took it and earned a perfect SAT score. The following links are a hidden gold mine of old tests that few students know about, so by taking these tests, you'll have that much more of an edge over current students.- However, there are important caveats to know before taking these tests: Skip the analogy questions on Reading sections. That said, the passage questions are all still very useful. Skip the comparison questions on Math sections. These are the ones that show two boxes and ask you to choose whether A or B is greater. Since this question type isn't on the SAT anymore, there's no use practicing it.
- There are no Writing sections on these tests. As a result, you won't get the grammar and English practice you need to do well on the SAT's Writing and Language section. Be grateful you didn't need to do some of these old-format questions—analogies were the main reason that the SAT got a bad rap for forcing students to memorize vocab!
- No singular-plural inconsistency questions. Here's an example: As a pioneer of artificial intelligence in an increasingly digital world, tech giants such as Google and Apple must consider the social impact of their innovations. Singular-plural inconsistency questions appear more often than not at least 1. No questions on question marks. Questions on question marks appear occasionally. No faulty comparison questions. Here's an example: Books written by 18th century authors are harder to comprehend than 19th century authors. Faulty comparison questions appear occasionally. Questions testing you on verb tense are simple. The answer is almost always a verb in past tense e. The answer to a verb tense question will occasionally be the present perfect e. No questions on word pairs. Questions on word pairs appear occasionally e. The occasional question on where to place a paragraph. No questions on where to place a paragraph.
How Accurate Are The Khan Academy Practice Tests? - The College Panda
Overall, questions are more straightforward and not as tricky. The transition questions and data interpretation questions require greater comprehension of the main argument or the surrounding context. Reading It's hard to compare the reading sections of different tests because there isn't a good way to quantify the difficulty of each passage and the question types don't fall so neatly into categories. However, we can pretty much assume the reading section has been refined since Practice Tests After all, it's very unlikely The College Board would make adjustments to both the math and writing sections without also making a few changes to the reading section. My experience indicates that the reading section has in fact been tweaked and is now more difficult. Compared to Practice Tests , the actual exams have passages that are harder to comprehend and some of the questions are trickier.- I hope to provide a more detailed breakdown of the reading section in a future update to this post. My Advice The fact that The College Board has never explicitly acknowledged these differences is a huge disservice not only to students but also to the organization they partnered with—Khan Academy. Though Practice Tests do not fully reflect the current state of the exam, I still highly recommend that you use them as practice material 1 because the vast majority of the questions are accurate and 2 because you should never not do a practice test from The College Board.
- Practice is always a good thing. Just remember to take your scores on Practice Tests with a grain of salt. Failure is making a mistakes on the test. Success is making a mistakes before the test. The College Panda Newsletter Exclusive tips and tricks, updates, college admissions advice, inspirational stories, and resources that go far beyond the useless College Board information packets. No spam, ever.
- No singular-plural inconsistency questions. Here's an example: As a pioneer of artificial intelligence in an increasingly digital world, tech giants such as Google and Apple must consider the social impact of their innovations. Singular-plural inconsistency questions appear more often than not at least 1. No questions on question marks. Questions on question marks appear occasionally. No faulty comparison questions. Here's an example: Books written by 18th century authors are harder to comprehend than 19th century authors.
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