Why are you prepping?
I guess I view prepping at this age (unlike prepping for the SAT for college apps) kind of counterproductive. SCAT is an aptitude test (I always think of it as kind of quasi-IQ/quasi-achievement, although I realize that is not completely accurate). You wouldn't prep a kid for an IQ test, so why this?
Sorry if I sound judgmental, I don't mean to. I am just curious why you would feel the need to prep for this sort of thing. I mean, the summer programs are nice if you live close enough to use them, but if your kid can't test in without prep, they may not be a good fit.
I have my kid take SCAT so that I can get a true picture of where he is, to give me information about where he should be placed academically. We used information from SCAT (along with other information) to accelerate him 2 grades in math. If I had prepped him (beyond giving him the practice test), I would have been far less comfortable using the score for that purpose - I wouldn't have viewed it as a true indication of his aptitude.
That being said, I gave my DS (who was 7 and in 2nd grade at the time) both the practice tests (and that was it, besides making sure the day of the test I told him to slow down and use his paper and pencil on the math problems). He actually did better on the verbal 4th/5th practice test than the verbal 2nd/3rd. He did equally well on both for math. I have no way to tell for sure, but I wonder if the actual questions are not that dramatically different between the two tests, and what really just changes the score is the norm.
