One of the reasons we did it is we wanted our perfectionist son to see what it felt like to take a test for which he wasn't expected to know all the answers. He had our full permission to FAIL. He really, really needed to experience that and knowing that it was a test meant for eighth graders made it acceptable for ds.
Strongly agree with that approach and reasoning.
Anything other than that would defeat the whole purpose of above level testing: to see what your dd's capabilities are, not what she already knows. In other words, above level tests act more like ability tests than achievement.
Actually, EXPLORE really does act like an achievement test, not an ability test.
We didn't prep DS-- I couldn't stomach it at that point-- we did show him the sample tests for exposure to the format.
The science one would be sort of hard to prep-- that one really is about analyzing data logically, and I don't know how I'd even have begun teaching that skill, but DS had that intuitively. The English test relied a lot on whether a person has good knowledge of punctuation rules and the like; there again we relied purely on DS's instincts for that sort of thing. Reading comprehension is what it is, too; it tests how good a reader (and answerer of questions) the child is overall.
The math test, a person could certainly not do without having had some exposure to out-of-level material. This is probably where it is most strongly like an achievement test. We still didn't prep, but one could.
I don't think prepping for this sort of thing is cheating or in any way inappropriate. Prepping in that case would be... teaching the material. Which is always kosher by me, if it's not based on illicit acquisition of testing material and so forth.
We didn't prep because we didn't want to, but were just curious about what DS could do. But I don't think prep would invalidate the test.
DeeDee
