No magic...just pattern recognition
Written: Jun 13 '00
|
Product Rating:
|
|
|
Pros: Good material to train your mind for pattern recognition
Cons: Will not work if you don't study the material
|
|
|
| slimtae's Full Review: Kaplan SAT I Course |
I've taken more than my share of standardized test. Starting with the PSAT's in high school all the way to medical board licensing exams, I have probably taken at least a dozen standardized tests in one form or another. I've used Kaplan test prep courses for two of these. When you take that many tests, you begin to get some perspective on this whole business. What you have to realize is that all of these tests are administered by some agency or governing body comprised of experts and academicians whose job is to formulate questions that are designed to test competence in various disciplines. This means that these people sit around, come up with questions, and collectively determined whether these are good (or bad) questions. In fact, that is how I would make up a test.
When this process is used, something very predictable happens. The collection of questions that is used for a test is limited. That is to say, since they try to include only those question which are "valid", there are only a limited number of questions they can come up with. It is sometimes very hard to come up with these "valid" questions. That is why many standardized tests have repeat questions year after year, the good questions are recycled. There is also another consequence of this situation. Since every effort is made to formulate these types of "valid" questions, the same type of thought pattern is reflected in those questions.
As a ridiculously simplified example, if you wanted to test someone's competence in say, subtraction, you would ask a question like "John walks into a store with $5 to buy a $3 toy. How much does he have left?"
Any and all questions designed to test your command of subtraction will be a variation of the example I gave above...ask it enough times and even the dumbest idiot will recognize a pattern. And this is what I believe Kaplan courses exploit to improve test performance. If you look very hard at these standardized tests, you will begin to see that all of the question follow a certain pattern. Sometimes, you can't pinpoint it with words, but by seeing the types of questions that are asked over and over again, you begin to get a feel for how to find an answer. Kaplan test courses work NOT because of the dozen or so classes they offer, but because of the thousands and thousands of questions they have accumulated for your perusal. By practicing on them over and over again, you begin to train your mind into thinking along the pattern in which those questions were framed.
Kaplan courses do work, but to be honest there is nothing special about these courses that make them work, there is no magic. Simply put, the real reason it works is because it forces you to practice, practice, practice. Kaplan prep courses appear to have amassed a huge number of questions which seem to pretty accurately reflect the pattern of questions you are likely to encounter on standardized tests. In my case, these would be the SAT's and MCAT's. I actually think that if you spend enough time taking practice tests from one of those thick test prep course books you buy at Barnes and Noble, you can achieve higher scores. The benefit of the Kaplan course is that because you pay so much money to take the course, you feel obligated to take advantage of it. Also, as I said before, Kaplan courses seem to have a very good collection of questions.
If you sign up for a Kaplan course, it will cost you. I last took a Kaplan course over twelve years ago, so I have no idea how much it costs now. But if you sign up, and earnestly avail yourself of the material, your scores should reflect your efforts. If you think you will only be wasting your money, you would benefit as much from investing a few bucks into one of those thick test prep books at Barnes and Noble.
Recommended:
Yes
|
|
|
|
Epinions.com ID:
slimtae
|
|
Reviews written: 95
Trusted by: 11 members
|
|
|
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.