Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Identification, Testing & Assessment When is it too young for SAT?

Good luck to your DS on making the SET cut-off.

I guess SET is something to consider, although DS could take the SAT with the talent search in 7th grade when he is 12.

The test length is what concerns me as well. I worry that DS will be burned out by the essay part on top of the math and CR.

According to the information on MAP, the only trigonometry topics were sine, cosine, tangent, logarithmic functions, and law of cosines so it is aomewhat basic trig. I don't think DS got all the trigonomtry questions but he must have gotten more than half of them to get 268 in that section. It may be that he is a good guesser since it is multiple choice.

Edwin, do you have a feeling for how active SET is and what it's actually like? I wondered about it a while back (and posted about it in fact) but I've rather gone off the idea, paradoxically because at this point I'm not convinced success at SAT maths shows much about maths talent (as opposed to competence) so I mistrust an organisation that uses it to judge that. Tbh SAT math questions have all been too easy to hold any interest for DS for over a year; the challenge to getting a high mark would be purely in speed, and the biggest component of that would be speed filling in the answer sheet. So I wonder whether in SET one might more find well-prepped kids rather than very talented ones, kwim? But I'd be glad to be wrong; maybe it's overwhelmingly v talented kids who bother to jump through the hoop, even if it is the wrong hoop!

In the hopes that my prior post wasn't totally offensive...

I'm not meaning to imply that people here are doing massive prep for these tests and I really do see a big difference between doing something like review questions that the test company sends and working with the child on test taking strategies vs. signing the child up for a full Princeton Review course prior to taking the SAT at 10. The former, IMHO, is something that helps the kid know what to expect and develop skills that will help him in school overall.

SAT math has 30% on Basic Algebra, 15% on Advanced Algebra and only 7% on Geometry. So kids with solid pre-Algebra background would still be able to rise up to the challenge. MAP test can be a bit tricky. My DS was upset by one hard question in MAP math last time, the difficulty of the questions went down from there, and he was not given any second chance for the challenge before the test ends.

Is the SAT normed by age or grade level? In other words, will my 11 year old 7th grader get scores based on his age or his grade level? He's taking it Jan 26. We're not prepping at all - just a "this is how this test works" class by the school.

There is just one set of national norms for the SAT and they are based on everyone who takes the test, so mostly 11th graders. His scores and percentiles will reflect how he did in comparison to the most recent norming group, which will be as compared to high schoolers. Some of the talent searches also have percentiles as compared to other kids in the same grade, but I've never seen percentiles for age, which would be interesting to see especially for those kids who are not of the typical age for grade.

Oh, yeah, duh! Sorry for the dumb question. I don't know what I was thinking:)

It would be very interesting, though, to see it broken out by age. Thanks, Cricket.