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[redacted123]

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[Muz]

I take it you're asking me since I was the last poster?

Yeah, was 20, I think, which is a bit of a bias since I'm older than I should've been. American tests are speed tests.. which is ridiculous in the sense that they expect you to do as much as possible, without much thinking. I'm dyslexic, so I really hated the fact that they expected me to speed read and speed think throughout the whole exam.

The trick is simple.. for the SAT, the easiest questions are first, and the hardest questions are later. All are equal.. and an educated guess overcomes the guessing penalty. If you lose 0.3 marks for a wrong answer, but get 1 mark for a right one.. if you could rule out only one answer, you'd gain points for guessing. Most kids are too scared of losing points to guess.. and the SAT is all about getting higher points than everyone else, even though I probably got high marks for scoring like 60 out of 75 or so.

Simple example:
You have X apples. Using some long method that takes 5 minutes, find out how many apples Bob has.

A. 22 apples
B. 32 apples
C. 44 apples
D. 21 apples

You can score in similar questions by ruling out some answers in 20 seconds. If you can just find the last digit, you can determine that it's A/B, C, or D. That way, you have plenty of time to figure out the right answers for other questions

[redacted123]

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[Leafsnail]

Yeah, I was explaining that SATs in Britain are just retardedly easy.  They do have an impact on your predicted grades, which may have an impact on which 6th form you go to, but they don't matter all that much.

[IHateOutside]

Yeah, I was explaining that SATs in Britain are just retardedly easy.  They do have an impact on your predicted grades, which may have an impact on which 6th form you go to, but they don't matter all that much.

I don't remember much about SATs from 2 years ago, apart  from them being easy. Though I absolutly hate the reading tests they make you do. They have these stupid questions asking you why you think someone wrote something in a certain way. My response in my head when I saw that was "I don't know. Go ask them yourselves if you are that desperate to know."

[redacted123]

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[Leafsnail]

The worst is what they've done to science in GCSE, you honestly get questions like "How do you think Jane feels about genetic engineering?" and there will be a picture of Jane saying "It's wrong to play god and mess with genetics." This would be on a higher tier paper, and there are only two tiers, the other being foundation.

OPJbhdajhfsdjighdfooghdfigh

I completely agree.  I mean, many questions were ambiguous and strange.

[IHateOutside]

Most of the questions on my science GCSE's had very little relevance to what we were taught. An example would be this further biology test I did. One of the questions was about the effects of ectasy on kidneys. We had done nothing on the effects of drugs on the kidneys.

[Yanlin]

That's hardly biology and more along the lines of generic medical knowledge.

[Leafsnail]

They can give you part of a newspaper article, and then ask you questions about it, on often fairly irrelevant stuff (like ecstacy and kidneys).  That's not biology, that's reading comprehension.

[IHateOutside]

there was some graphs about urea production and water taken in with and without ectasy in the bloodstream and wanted to know what the effect was. I couldn't see a link so i just wrote some garbled sentence.

[zchris13]

SAT's in America are taken in the junior and senior years of high school (the last 2 years before college).
The seniors taking the SAT are in sort of a desperate situation, though.

They're pretty easy. Just really fast and long, which makes it hard to think.