SCAT?

[Not_a_Number]

Has anyone's kid taken the SCAT recently? DH seems to want to get DD8 to get into the CTY system (he has warm memories of the camps from when he was a kid), and it's very hard to find much information about what they are testing. 

And since DD8 has a homegrown math curriculum, she doesn't always know all the words she's supposed to on these tests. Which is fine when we can look at old practice tests and make sure she has the words down, but is a little tricky when I have no idea what is covered! 

Edited March 4, 2021 by Not_a_Number

[gstharr]

It has been a while since the 10th grader took scat and advanced scat.  There is almost no outside prep material available. What littte we saw does not follow the scat format.  I made our prep by looking at the few examples on the CTY site, and then making my own practice questions following the scat format.    The math is all equations , no verbal component.  It goes like this:     (equation)   ____    (equation).

                                                                                                                                                    >

                                                                                                                                                    <

                                                                                                                                                    =

Remember the test is math 2 years above grade level.  Doing grade level math is not enough to do well.  i.e 2nd grader doing 2 digit multiplication, basic fractions.  I recommend practicing the format because a typical student will not see this anywhere else.   goood luck.

[Not_a_Number]

1 hour ago, gstharr said:

It has been a while since the 10th grader took scat and advanced scat.  There is almost no outside prep material available. What littte we saw does not follow the scat format.  I made our prep by looking at the few examples on the CTY site, and then making my own practice questions following the scat format.    The math is all equations , no verbal component.  It goes like this:     (equation)   ____    (equation).

                                                                                                                                                    >

                                                                                                                                                    <

                                                                                                                                                    =

Remember the test is math 2 years above grade level.  Doing grade level math is not enough to do well.  i.e 2nd grader doing 2 digit multiplication, basic fractions.  I recommend practicing the format because a typical student will not see this anywhere else.   goood luck.

Thank you for the feedback!! You’re right, the format is weird and we’ve been practicing it. She wasn’t having trouble with that. But as you say, it’s impossible to find practice tests with good content!

Concept-wise, she’s something like 5 years accelerated. So she has done fractions, decimals, and is very comfortable with algebraic ideas. But we don’t use a curriculum, so we constantly run into basics I haven’t bothered with. Like, DH got a practice package that used the letter combination LCM for lowest common multiple, and she had no idea what it was. She could do it once we explained, but the problem is that I have no clue what words I need to teach her.

We’ve also never done bar graphs or pie charts. Again, she’s very accelerated and won’t have trouble learning... I just need to know what to teach 😕 .

[gstharr]

My kid must have been about that age when he did scat, because we had the scores back in time for him to go to cty  the summer after 3rd grade. At the time he had just finished epgy 1-4, and was into Thinkwell pre-alg.  Might help to get an old 6th grade/ pre-alg book  for guidance.  Also, must know the multiplication factors for speed.  I know there won't be charts or graphs on the scat. Good luck.

[Not_a_Number]

4 minutes ago, gstharr said:

My kid must have been about that age when he did scat, because we had the scores back in time for him to go to cty  the summer after 3rd grade. At the time he had just finished epgy 1-4, and was into Thinkwell pre-alg.  Might help to get an old 6th grade/ pre-alg book  for guidance.  Also, must know the multiplication factors for speed.  I know there won't be charts or graphs on the scat. Good luck.

How do you know there won’t be charts? That’s great if true. The totally fake practice ones we got had some.

Multiplication factors meaning factoring integers under 100? Or what?

[gstharr]

I don't recall ever hearing anything about charts in  thee scat ro adv. scat.  Might be diffuclt to use charts given the format of the test, Multiplication factor,, I mean know the times tables 1-12.

[Not_a_Number]

Just now, gstharr said:

I don't recall ever hearing anything about charts in  thee scat ro adv. scat.  Might be diffuclt to use charts given the format of the test, Multiplication factor,, I mean know the times tables 1-12.

She really is working on at least middle school to high school stuff 🙂 . We've had to do lots of fraction simplification and long division, and her times tables are totally solid. 

She's solid in all the concepts -- I make sure of that. There are just some words and formats I haven't covered. 

[saw]

DS14 just took the SCAT a few weeks ago. I had him do the practice test and, on the basis of the result and the fact that I'm tired, decided not to have him prep any more. I figured I'd let him take it and then do a retake (with lots of prep) if he didn't get in. Fortunately he did. He did better on the actual test than the practice.

Having said that, I recently received an email from CTY about a testing pilot program they are running now that will permit students to use scores from a wide variety of tests to qualify: https://cty.jhu.edu/talent/docs/Testing-Pilot-Flyer-2021.pdf 

 

[Not_a_Number]

43 minutes ago, saw said:

DS14 just took the SCAT a few weeks ago. I had him do the practice test and, on the basis of the result and the fact that I'm tired, decided not to have him prep any more. I figured I'd let him take it and then do a retake (with lots of prep) if he didn't get in. Fortunately he did. He did better on the actual test than the practice.

Having said that, I recently received an email from CTY about a testing pilot program they are running now that will permit students to use scores from a wide variety of tests to qualify: https://cty.jhu.edu/talent/docs/Testing-Pilot-Flyer-2021.pdf 

 

Which practice test? The sample on their site?

[saw]

21 minutes ago, Not_a_Number said:

Which practice test? The sample on their site?

I found this as well: https://www.testprep-online.com/scat-sample-questions I didn't pay for any of the prep but would have done if DS had not done well on the test. He's not used to standardized tests at all but managed to do okay. 

[mathnerd]

No practice needed. Just let her go and take it and she will do fine.

my son took it more than 5 years ago and the format was multiple choice at that time. He finished very quickly and was very nervous that maybe he did something wrong because, in his mind, he was taking this awesome talent search test and he finished it easily and had time to spare: so he asked the proctor (he had to raise his hand and the lady was watching on camera and came up to him) what to do if he had finished and she told him that he could take a break before he started the Verbal section of the test. So, he came rushing out and ate a snack and went back in and took the Verbal test. There, he ran into problems: there was a picture of a bunch of police/military types holding "shield" like things and he had no clue what it was (turned out to be "barricade" which he had never encountered!) and a couple of outdated words (e.g. a rotary telephone, typewriter). I believe that the test has been updated in recent years to reflect modern times 😉 He did not want to leave the testing room, so he took an optional Customer Service Survey and gave them some input on the test! We ended up doing the SCAT the next year again because he liked going to the awards ceremony 🙂

Is the test online this year? 

 

[Not_a_Number]

5 minutes ago, mathnerd said:

Is the test online this year? 

I believe so, yeah. And we can take it more than once, maybe? 

 

5 minutes ago, mathnerd said:

There, he ran into problems: there was a picture of a bunch of police/military types holding "shield" like things and he had no clue what it was (turned out to be "barricade" which he had never encountered!) and a couple of outdated words (e.g. a rotary telephone, typewriter). I believe that the test has been updated in recent years to reflect modern times 😉 

Hah! That's pretty funny. 

I'm just worried she's going to miss questions because she doesn't know certain math words or conventions 😞 . She did really well on some practice questions DH found online, but then DH got another bunch of questions that just seemed off, but they freaked me out, because they had SO many words she didn't know. And bar graphs. 

I mean, I can teach her any math words she might see on the SCAT in a month, I'm sure, but the problem is that I don't know what they are and I'd rather continue with our study of high school geometry with proofs instead 😉 . I do plan to cover all these things at some point, obviously, but disconnected things like this have never been a priority. 

 

5 minutes ago, mathnerd said:

No practice needed. Just let her go and take it and she will do fine.

Fingers crossed. We do weekly practice with Math Kangaroos, so she does have decent test-taking skills. 

Edited March 4, 2021 by Not_a_Number

[Not_a_Number]

6 minutes ago, mathnerd said:

No practice needed. Just let her go and take it and she will do fine.

my son took it more than 5 years ago and the format was multiple choice at that time.

Do you remember anything about the content? Like, any bar graphs or lcms or medians and modes? 😛 Or was it mostly integer arithmetic? 

[mathnerd]

26 minutes ago, Not_a_Number said:

Do you remember anything about the content? Like, any bar graphs or lcms or medians and modes? 😛 Or was it mostly integer arithmetic? 

I don't think that there were any graphs or any of the other things that you are concerned about. There were a bunch of analogies I remember. So, you might want to ask her a few such questions in order to familiarize her with them.

It is an easy test for an accelerated 8 year old because they test at approximately 1.5-2 years ahead of an 8 year old public schooler. And you can take it more than once. 

BTW/ I later found out that the CTY courses were not for us and for that pricing, there are many more options out there - even more so now because a lot of good programs went online due to Covid.

Edited March 4, 2021 by mathnerd

[Not_a_Number]

Just now, mathnerd said:

I don't think that there were any graphs any of the other things that you are concerned about. There were a bunch of analogies I remember. So, you might want to ask her a few such questions in order to familiarize her to them.

Yes, we did practice analogies a bunch 🙂 . That was definitely helpful, because she had never seen them before. But now she's doing very well with them. 

I'm glad there are no graphs! That's good to know.

 

Just now, mathnerd said:

It is a rather easy test for an accelerated 8 year old because they test at approximately 1.5-2 years ahead of an 8 year old public schooler. And you can take it more than once. 

That's what their online practice looked like -- absurdly easy for DD8, who's probably doing grade 9 math, if I had to name a number (we aren't on a normal sequence, so I can't tell you precisely.) But that made me more worried that some of the test wouldn't be conceptual but would rather be "does your kid know these words?" Like, some of the Epsilon Camp test is like that -- it checks whether a kid knows what a cone is. Which... is not really a useful piece of information about a child's mathematical ability, from my perspective. Having taught many classes, most kids can learn what a cone is. It's not evidence of acceleration. 

Anyway, DD8 knows fractions and decimals and combinatorics and binary and algebra and all sorts of stuff, but that won't be on the test 😕 . So then she just has to be fast with the stuff that IS on the test... 

 

Just now, mathnerd said:

BTW/ I later found out that the CTY courses were not for us and for that pricing, there are many more options out there - even more so now because a lot of good programs went online due to Covid.

DH was excited about the camps, mostly because he has such fond memories of them from his own childhood. There are probably also lots of options for camps as well nowadays, though. 

What did you wind up not liking about CTY classes? 

[Clemsondana]

If you can, you might grab a 5th or 6th grade version (or just a scope and sequence) for Singapore Math.  I don't know what's on that particular test, but Singapore covers some version of anything a kid would be expected to cover in school (based on older routinely getting perfect or near-perfect scores on regular standardized tests).  I know that one of my kids was taking the standardized test required by our state/umbrella in 3rd or 4th grade and the kids saw the use of a dot for the multiplication sign.  They asked and the proctor told them what it meant, under the theory that the test was checking their knowledge of multiplication, not their knowledge of a less-used symbol.  We almost never used the textbook or instructor's guide and often finished early and supplemented, but part of why I used Singapore was that I knew that I could explain the concepts but I also guessed that there were things that I wouldn't think to cover - charts and graphs (pie, bar, and tally...not sure if there were lines), edges and vertices, calculating oddball areas where you have to add multiple parts or subtract out 'unshaded' shapes in the middle of the bigger shape, dividing complex shapes into squares and triangles to calculate area, etc.  One year had a section on tesselations.  They aren't complicated concepts but I wouldn't have thought about them like I would have for operations, decimals, and use of variables.  

[Not_a_Number]

27 minutes ago, Clemsondana said:

If you can, you might grab a 5th or 6th grade version (or just a scope and sequence) for Singapore Math.  I don't know what's on that particular test, but Singapore covers some version of anything a kid would be expected to cover in school (based on older routinely getting perfect or near-perfect scores on regular standardized tests).  I know that one of my kids was taking the standardized test required by our state/umbrella in 3rd or 4th grade and the kids saw the use of a dot for the multiplication sign.  They asked and the proctor told them what it meant, under the theory that the test was checking their knowledge of multiplication, not their knowledge of a less-used symbol.  We almost never used the textbook or instructor's guide and often finished early and supplemented, but part of why I used Singapore was that I knew that I could explain the concepts but I also guessed that there were things that I wouldn't think to cover - charts and graphs (pie, bar, and tally...not sure if there were lines), edges and vertices, calculating oddball areas where you have to add multiple parts or subtract out 'unshaded' shapes in the middle of the bigger shape, dividing complex shapes into squares and triangles to calculate area, etc.  One year had a section on tesselations.  They aren't complicated concepts but I wouldn't have thought about them like I would have for operations, decimals, and use of variables.  

We’re going to prep for the AMC 8, and I think that’ll be pretty good for forcing us to cover things that I’d forgotten about! I’m just not feeling like redirecting too much for the SCAT if I don’t have to, since we’ve recently gotten to a more fun part of geometry and I’d like to focus on that. Like, I’ll cover pie charts and bar graphs at some point... I would just rather not do it now!

[The Governess]

Dd did this a loooong time ago. I remember buying a few analogy workbooks because they seemed to use analogies a lot. We didn’t really practice for any of the math other than doing a few of the practice tests. She qualified for everything and ended up taking several online Chinese classes with them. We looked into a few of the summer camps but they were so expensive. When she was older and the cost of the summer camps would have been more justified, she wanted to spend her summers training for ballet. 😏

[mathnerd]

On 3/4/2021 at 3:15 PM, Not_a_Number said:

What did you wind up not liking about CTY classes? 

We were able to get access to high quality classes locally and my son did not want to attend the summer camps held by CTY. Their elementary and middle school level classes were not what we needed, so we gave up on it. My son started out at EPGY (it is defunct now) and took many other classes that are available locally and also participated in university math circles, science camps at museums etc that we never utilized CTY for what most people rave about.

[Not_a_Number]

17 hours ago, mathnerd said:

We were able to get access to high quality classes locally and my son did not want to attend the summer camps held by CTY. Their elementary and middle school level classes were not what we needed, so we gave up on it. 

We're definitely looking at the elementary level for now... what made them not what you're looking for? 

 

17 hours ago, mathnerd said:

My son started out at EPGY (it is defunct now) and took many other classes that are available locally and also participated in university math circles, science camps at museums etc that we never utilized CTY for what most people rave about.

Ah, makes sense. I haven't looked at what there is locally for a while, since there IS no locally at the moment for us 😕 . 

[mathnerd]

1 hour ago, Not_a_Number said:

We're definitely looking at the elementary level for now... what made them not what you're looking for? 

The elementary offerings were not up to our expectations: we did not have to go to CTY to learn Scratch programming and do a few writing classes or household science (we could offer a lot of high level content with resources locally and on our own). 

[Not_a_Number]

25 minutes ago, mathnerd said:

The elementary offerings were not up to our expectations: we did not have to go to CTY to learn Scratch programming and do a few writing classes or household science (we could offer a lot of high level content with resources locally and on our own). 

Those do sound underwhelming! 

[Not_a_Number]

As an update for anyone interested: she took it online and did well 🙂 . 

[SeaConquest]

17 hours ago, Not_a_Number said:

As an update for anyone interested: she took it online and did well 🙂 . 

I just saw this thread and was going to tell you not to stress because she would do great.

I remember when Sacha took it, he came out telling me that the only part that was confusing was that he didn't know what all the "slashes" were. I'm like, "the slashes????" He's like, "yeah, they had numbers like 5 slash 6... 4 slash 7." I'm like, "you mean fractions?????" He's like, "oooooohhhhh, is that what those were?" I was totally confused because he understood fractions well at that age. It wasn't until later that we looked at his math curriculum and realized that he had always seen fractions written like this:

5

---

6

 

So, seeing them written sideways made him think it was some bizarre new thing. Lol. He still qualified, but we had a good chuckle about it. He went to CTY camp in the summers after 2nd, 3rd, and 4th and loved it. Last year and this year, he's been going to CTY Live due to Covid. I am not sure if he will ever go back to a CTY camp, but they were fun for him in early elementary and it was nice for him to be around other science-loving kids. 

Edited April 13, 2021 by SeaConquest

[Not_a_Number]

8 minutes ago, SeaConquest said:

I just saw this thread and was going to tell you not to stress because she would do great.

I remember when Sacha took it, he came out telling me that the only part that was confusing was that he didn't know what all the "slashes" were. I'm like, "the slashes????" He's like, "yeah, they had numbers like 5 slash 6... 4 slash 7." I'm like, "you mean fractions?????" He's like, "oooooohhhhh, is that what those were?" I was totally confused because he understood fractions well at that age. It wasn't until later that we looked at his math curriculum and realized that he had always seen fractions written like this:

5

---

6

 

So, seeing them written sideways made him think it was some bizarre new thing. Lol. He still qualified, but we had a good chuckle about it. He went to CTY camp in the summers after 2nd, 3rd, and 4th and loved it. Last year and this year, he's been going to CTY Live due to Covid. I am not sure if he will ever go back to a CTY camp, but they were fun for him in early elementary and it was nice for him to be around other science-loving kids. 

Funny!!

DH went to CTY camps in middle school, I think, and he loved them. That’s why he wanted DD8 in their system 🙂 . 

We’ll see if we use the camps, but I’m pleased she scored as having mastery of elementary math. Not that I didn’t know that she did, but this the first official result that tells us so!!