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>"We want fairness. There is no fairness if you do not let us cheat." I've spoken with indians of similar mentality in college: it's surprisingly difficult to argue with. It's just not that different from say, the professor telling you X will be on the exam, and studying the hell out of it, or recognizing testing patterns and multiple-choice limitations, or even that people consistently raise their SAT scores in high school by some 400 points by taking a class that doesn't teach any educational material. Americans don't accept cheating so openly, but they do accept other methods of avoiding the intent of the test (testing your actual understanding). A large part of it simply becomes how well you do on things around the test, instead of whats in them. Of course, you make it too easy to avoid the content and you've lost all value. But otherwise, once you accept that avoiding the test is inherently a part of the test, then it becomes a question of by how much? A pure test is unreachable, simply because of its difficulty to construct, and a pure non-test is useless, because you've lost all content.. but a 25% of the test grade not being content might be fine. If its a result of SAT classes, or cheating, it doesn't really matter. The main issue with cheating is just that leans towards the pure non-test, but if you accept cheating, and account for it, it may be possible to reduce its impact. And as I understand it, by and large, indian professors (and presumably chinese) do account for it, and cheating on an indian test is significantly less effective (but easier to do) than doing so on an american test. It's simply a part of the test taking process, just as much as SAT courses are. And just like it'd be dumb to not take the SAT course in america if it would help your scores, it would be dumb not to cheat in india. (not to say all indians are cheaters, but that cheating isn't nearly as stigmatized) |
In my opinion (granted, I took the SAT for college admissions about 8 years ago), the test taking strategy is taught by the course isn't very useful - the real value just lies in taking practice exam after practice exam. If there was a just a repository of sample SAT tests that people could print out, I think 80% of the value of an SAT prep course could be achieved by just replicating the exam once a month for all of Junior year of high school. Do this enough and taking the SAT becomes second nature. This can be done effectively nearly for free - just the cost to print a few dozen sheets of paper - at your local library.