Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by jacktoole1 4487 days ago
The College Board is releasing previously-unreleased SAT questions on Khan Academy, with answers and explanations [1]. The College Board announcement emphasized the importance of practice, as well as transparency about preparation materials such as practice tests.

While we don't have an ideal test-like practice environment yet, I hope that we will be able to provide one in the future.

[1]: https://www.khanacademy.org/test-prep/sat

1 comments

I should have emphasized that full-length tests is what I think is valuable here.

College Board has been offering daily SAT questions by email for awhile now (and there's no lack of individual test questions online either), but what's useful is a full test, with questions of varying difficulty and a time limit enforced. Taking it on paper is important too; your score when you take the test in front a screen versus when you have paper, pencil, and a calculator won't be the same. There needs to be dozens of these tests -- I found myself getting better each time, but re-taking tests isn't helpful because I simply remembered my mistakes rather than improving my capacity to anticipate mistakes.

This is not at all to downplay the amazing work Khan Academy has been doing! I think this will be a big deal for a majority of high schoolers.

Thanks! Yes, I agree that full-length tests are important. We're not there yet, but I think we'll improve on that with time (there has been some talk of different styles of how/which/how many questions appear in an exercise for other reasons, and I think this just gives another reason to focus on that in the future).