Most college bound students have to take standardized tests. I
recently had the misfortune of having to study for some such tests,
namely the SAT and the SAT II, which play an important role in
college admissions (especially the University of California) and
are generally regarded as things that should not be taken
lightly.
Most college bound students have to take standardized tests. I recently had the misfortune of having to study for some such tests, namely the SAT and the SAT II, which play an important role in college admissions (especially the University of California) and are generally regarded as things that should not be taken lightly.
As such, I took the time to drop by the bookstore and pick up a few SAT preparation books. I didn’t expect much from them, maybe a good vocabulary list and some practice tests at most. What I did expect, however, is that each book be completely and entirely accurate when it came to formulas, answers and proofs. But apparently, even that I can’t take for granted.
I’m not usually one who nitpicks about typos and minor mistakes. In fact, as editor-in-chief of the school paper, I both see and make them occasionally. Sometimes at 1:30 in the morning at the end of a late deadline, you just have to let some things slip by.
I also don’t mind so much when I see a typo in a novel I’m reading. While it may break the flow of the story, I can usually fill in the blanks when I see the word ‘gigger’ and the rest of the story describes how something is getting larger. Typos and misspelled words happen every once in a while, and they are completely understandable.
The same applies to speech. When someone misspeaks a single word, yet everyone in the room knows what he or she meant to say, it is very rude to interrupt them just to let them know that they misspoke. If, however, the misspoken word can cause confusion, then it is perfectly fine to correct them politely so that everyone understands what was meant to be said.
Which brings me back to my original topic: SAT prep books. Mistakes in SAT prep books can cause an enormous amount of confusion. And when it comes to such an important test, confusion can be very harmful.
When I read through these books, I was completely shocked at the number of mistakes I was noticing. That’s not to say that test preparation books have a higher percentage of errors than other books – though from experience that may be entirely possible – only that when it comes to studying, I tend to hang on every word and try to make sense of it, which accounts for why so many mistakes jump out at me.
It’s not so much the SAT preps books as it is the SAT II and AP test prep books that deal with numbers and formulas. I took the SAT II in Physics two years after I took AP Physics in school, so I bought a prep book to review my formulas. It would seem to me that of all the sections in any book that would be looked at closely, the formula sheet for a test prep book would have to be near the top of priority list.
To this day I still can’t imagine how huge companies like The Princeton Review and Barron’s can publish books that have mistakes on their formula sheets.
What bother me the most aren’t the mistakes I found. What scares me is that there must have been mistakes I didn’t find: inaccurate formulas, wacky proofs, incorrect answers, ones that I most likely relied on during the test.
And of course, seeing as that I started studying the night before (as per high school student standards) any formula I read in the books overrode in my mind an entire year of Physics classes and I went into the test armed with the knowledge that 1 is actually equal to 2 and gravity points up.
So perhaps I exaggerate, but we all know that gravity doesn’t point up only from previous experience. Had the book told us that _s = V0*t + _*a*t2 many people would be unable to argue against it.
It’s not even so much that the book have mistakes (though a less temperate man would be infuriated at that alone) it’s that nobody seems to care. The mistakes don’t get corrected.
Back in 7th grade I had to take the SAT as placement into the program. So I bought a Barron’s SAT prep book and was just as mad as I am now that I found a mistake that could have harmed my score had I not known better.
Now that it’s my senior year I have to take the SAT again in order to get into college. This time, I didn’t buy any books, but when my friend came over to study some vocab words, he brought over one of his. It was the exact same book that I had, only it was a newer edition that he’d just bought.
Of course you already know where I am going with this: You guessed it, five years later it still had the exact same mistake. I even went back and looked at my book, and sure enough, it was the same mistake.
I said before, that as editor-in-chief I’ve overlooked my fair share of mistakes. But I differ from the people at Barron’s in three very important ways that gives me the right to criticize.
The first is that I don’t get paid $20 a copy to be absolutely flawless.
The second is that my staff puts out a paper every three weeks, and it only goes out once. While the paper we create is considerably smaller, if we had 5 years to edit and redistribute an issue, it would be absolutely flawless.
And the third, which is the key point here, is that when I make a mistake, thousands of students don’t score worse than they otherwise would on a test that may very well decide the next four years of their lives.
Yasser Elassal is a senior at Live Oak High School and editor-in-chief of the student newspaper, the Oak Leaf.
