DS will be dual-enrolled at his high school and a local community college next year. The people running his program want the kids to take the math and English placement exams now (they can retake any portion of the test later to boost scores). The college uses the ACT Compass, and its math portion has different starting points; DS will start at level 3 out of 3 ("College algebra," which I think is also known as "Algebra 2.") If you do well on level 3, they move you to Level 4 (trigonometry).
I downloaded a large set of sample math problems and we saw that the test is pretty serious (sample problems from the
Accuplacer were equally serious). There were a variety of problems on functions, as well as stuff on geometry, complex numbers, and so on. The goal of this test is clear: it wants to know if you can work with numbers. None of the questions I saw were of the clever-sneaky types that dominate the SAT, and they test what you need to know for calculus extremely well.
The tests aren't even timed. The College Board owns the Accuplacer and ACT owns Compass. So my question is, why don't they use these tests in place of the SAT and ACT? Is it because so many students would bomb a serious test, and we can't have that until they've already enrolled in college and have therefore fulfilled our national
everyone must go to college requirement? And by extension, now that the box has been checked, no one cares if how many kids fail the REAL college entrance exam and end up in remedial math purgatory?
With only a bit of ingenuity, these tests should be easily adaptable to SAT-type use. Given that a lot of kids are taking advanced math/precalc in 10th or 11th grade, using the tests this way would have a
huge bonus of telling the kids if they're ready for college calculus (or at least on the right track) well in advance of enrollment. Personally, I would rather learn where I stand in October of my senior year rather than, you know, the week of the deadline for registering for classes (obviously, the kids would retake the test at college, but they'd have a good idea of what to expect and where they stood for over a year at that point).
For the colleges, serious tests would also serve to give a much more accurate picture of their applicants than the current tests.
Food for thought.
