Thanks. Surprisingly (to us, anyway), our younger DS15 just took it as a sophomore (new school policy, where they now suggest it for sophomores), and he outscored DDs junior year score. Not that it matters as a sophomore, but we were a bit surprised as he is our stealth kid, not very interested in school academics and knew absolutely nothing about the test going in; on top of that he got a major nosebleed on the way out of the house and almost didn’t make it...lol.
But I agree with your assessment, the super-mathy kids here who are less interested (or less capable) in literature or humanities didn’t make the cut, which is a bit jarring, since they seem to be the kids garnering the most attention from the school district. I suspect this is probably because that subject matter (high school math) is just easier for them to measure and accelerate. I second your observation that the math is pretty straightforward, time management and avoiding silly mistakes seem to be the key, at least to me. The reading and writing section is thought to be more “tricky”- I suspect good classroom instruction and generally just lots of reading helped my kids in this area. (By good instruction I don’t mean test prep, which they thankfully don’t do here, but lots of close reading, annotations, literary analysis, etc, in English, but also history and other humanities areas.
