Teaching SAT (and other 3 letter American exams)

Splitting my response to latefor's comment on the IELTS thread, since it really is its own topic.

I'm always interested in new texts, DD, but haven't seen these yet. Now that it's the holiday, I'll head off to the Xinhua bookstore and browse a bit. If I see them, I'll pick up one or two and let you know what I think.
BTW, I'm currently interested in SAT prep. Our glorious leaders have decided that we are going to help highschool students with SAT prep so that they can all go to American collges and unis (a year ago we were sellinghelping students get into Australian unis, now America is the flavour of the year) so my boss is telling me to forget that useless IELTS crap and focus on SAT.(Not in so many words, but. Truly a product of Chinese education)

Somee students at my school take the SAT, I and II. SAT I is extremely difficult for them, since it is designed for native speakers, and each year we have probably less than five attempt it. They need to have extremely advanced grammar and vocabulary skills (they need to be able to define words using English and pick out synonyms and antonyms, so it isn't enough just to know the Chinese translation) and their reading skills need to go beyond simple comprehension and expand into analysis (they need to be able to understand and identify literary concepts like tone, voice, metaphor, etc.). Most Chinese students will do fairly well on the math section of the SAT I, but the language portions will trip them up.

In China you can get Chinese printed versions of SAT test guides like Barron's, which is a staple of American test prep. To really prepare for SAT though they need at least a year of an English course that is conducted entirely in English and geared at literature, composition, and analysis. Not a typical EFL course, in other words.

SAT is absolutely the hot trend recently, with students and parents figuring out that sending their kids to a foundation program in New Zealand or Australia is largely a waste of money. Although American universities have started partnering with Chinese consultancies too, American unis remain, overall, fairly difficult to get into, and SAT scores can give a student a leg up. SAT isn't even required for international students in most cases, but the consultancies here have figured out they can make a load of money in SAT prep and market SAT as a "must have" for USA admissions. However, if a student can't crack a 100 on the TOEFL, or roughly IELTS band 7.5, he doesn't have a prayer of doing well on the SAT. Our school's graduating class last year had about 30 high school seniors, and 3 took the SAT. About 20 out of 30 are studying at American universities now, so SAT is definitely not the "must" that the consultancies are trying to paint it as.

In China you can get Chinese printed versions of SAT test guides like Barron's, which is a staple of American test prep. To really prepare for SAT though they need at least a year of an English course that is conducted entirely in English and geared at literature, composition, and analysis. Not a typical EFL course, in other words.

The research I've read seems to indicate that the most helpful thing SAT takers can do is take lots of practice tests…familiarity with the exam seems to be one of the best ways to get a boost in score. Of course, that research was conducted on native speakers. NNS have their own needs, and your suggestions would probably be a very good start. My SAT students who have earned the highest scores (700+ in writing or reading) have been those who studied in English-only high schools, and I think that what was most helpful for them was having had to do lots of reading in English for school. Actually scoring highly the test requires very specific sets of subject knowledge and textual awareness.
The essay students write for the SAT is basically a load of BS. Scores have been found to correlate to length…as long as the student has a strong introductory paragraph and a body text that fills up the entire response sheet they will wind up with a high score.

SAT isn't even required for international students in most cases, but the consultancies here have figured out they can make a load of money in SAT prep and market SAT as a "must have" for USA admissions. However, if a student can't crack a 100 on the TOEFL, or roughly IELTS band 7.5, he doesn't have a prayer of doing well on the SAT. Our school's graduating class last year had about 30 high school seniors, and 3 took the SAT. About 20 out of 30 are studying at American universities now, so SAT is definitely not the "must" that the consultancies are trying to paint it as.

Overseas students can often substitute TOEFL for the SAT, right? In general, what sort of universities are your school's students going to? Have they had success getting in to more selective institutions without the SAT?

The ACT is another American college admissions test option, but it seems to be even more difficult for NNS.

Yes, exactly MK, overseas students usually take TOEFL not SAT. In fact, even with SAT scores they still need the TOEFL (or IELTS, as more USA unis are accepting it now). My kids are getting into decent universities, but not Ivies or anything super elite, and they mostly do it without SAT scores. They can often get into top 50 universities, sometimes top 20, but more commonly top 100. We send a lot of kids to state schools like University of Washington (had 3 go from last year's graduating class!), Arizona State, Penn State, but the year before last we sent a student to USC and last year one got into Chicago, and a few have gotten into the UC system. The ones getting into top 20 schools are usually the ones who have taken the SAT. Even among the better kids I've never had a NNS student do better than 1800ish total on the SAT, and a lot of that was coming from high math scores, but we're not an English medium school so even getting that was a huge feat for them.

I definitely think practice practice practice works best for kids who have a strong background in English. They need to be doing reading in English like you said, and really there is a lot of cultural background (and bias) to the exam as well. It is for these reasons that I think though that the majority of Chinese students to whom SAT is being marketed towards these days would probably be a lot better off just concentrating on TOEFL. Unfortunately lots of them have been convinced they must have the SAT.

I posted this in another thread, but the Khan Academy has excellent resources for SAT Math.