I don't know what the OLSAT measures, but DD was given the OLSAT at one of the local private schools. I had never heard of it and so got her a practice booklet from Bright Kids NYC just so she would be familiar with the type of questions they were asking. It was a little hard to find out more about the test because apparently it is not as widely given as some of the others and IIRC also because the test makers don't put out official practice tests??? Not sure about that, but it wasn't as easy to find as other test prep stuff. However, having myself been disadvantaged by not knowing the type of question that was going to be asked on a particular test (in my case, the logic part of the GREs), I believe it is appropriate to at least be able to see the format of the questions and to understand the type of answer the test is 'looking for'--something that has been discussed at length elsewhere on this board. She went through one practice test once and we went over the answers and discussed for the ones she missed what they were probably looking for and that was it. But the questions were very different from anything I (or she) had seen--I guess one way to describe them is kind of geometric analogies or progressions, where a shape changes in the first three parts of a progression and then you are to project the shape change that would occur in the fourth part of the progression. So if you hadn't seen them before I think it might be very confusing. At any rate, she didn't miss a single question on the actual test, but didn't get into the school anyway, possibly because I told the admissions person about DD practicing once beforehand. So probably there are people on this board who are going to jump all over me (to put it politely) for having gotten the practice test, but I strongly believe that a test that relies on the student's unfamiliarity with the questions to create a bell curve is not testing the student's ability to reason and is also particularly unfair to kids who tend to 'overthink' the test. Whatever--just our personal experience. Also of course doing the practice test would ensure that your kid was familiar with the instructions.
