Homeschooling in High School: Standardized Testing
With the degree of emphasis public schools put on standardized testing, sometimes parents ask me if homeschooled children are at a disadvantage, especially when they’re going to take their SAT or ACT before they apply to college. So here are a few hot takes on standardized tests.
First, by definition, a standardized test does not seek to assess your individual child’s learning. The SAT tests language skills and math skills that all high schoolers might know, so all of the history, math, poetry, or music that your teenager has passionately studied is not going to show up on the SAT or even the ACT, with a slightly wider range of subject areas. So these tests may be useful for getting into college, but they’re not a good measure of whether you met your educational goals for your child. If you want to actually understand your child’s intellectual achievements, an interdisciplinary capstone essay or project is going to provide much more insight.
Second, these tests, like many others, do actually serve a function of signaling to colleges that a student has a certain level of baseline knowledge, and the higher score they have, the more likely they are to succeed in college. Because they’re standardized, it’s easier to compare the tests scores of two college applicants than the GPAs of the same two applicants. Think of two homeschool seniors. One has a 3.8 GPA because he has taken rigorous honors and college-level classes, even in his weaker subjects, from demanding instructors who don’t hand out As like candy, and the other has a 4.0 because his mother thinks he deserves an A for everything he tries, even though it’s all self-graded and nothing that he doesn’t like. One of them has standardized test scores in the top 5%; the other doesn’t even bother taking standardized tests because they would be below 50th percentile. I’m not a college admissions counselor, but as an experienced homeschool educator, I would know that the kid with a 3.8 and a 30+ ACT is better prepared for a rigorous college than a kid with a 4.0 who opted out of standardized testing. Many schools are officially test optional, but be very aware of what your lack of test score communicates to an admissions counselor.
Third, test scores can be raised with practice. I don’t actually focus very much on any form of testing until middle school, because I am the one overseeing all of my kids’ work in the early years, and I have a very clear understanding of their strengths and weaknesses. But in two of the states we’ve lived in, we have participated in homeschool assistance programs that fund part of our academic expenses in return for taking the state Common core tests. We never study for those tests, which often test topics we haven’t even studied in a given year, but I encourage my children to use them as a learning experience in how to pace yourself in a stressful testing situation. The results are never actually helpful or relevant to me, though they may be to a less experienced homeschool parent who might not realize how much they’ve neglected fractions or just needs reassurance that their kid is not “behind” their peers, but we do it purely for the test taking experience. By the time they’re ready to take the PSAT during their sophomore year, my kids have had several chances to practice taking a test for someone other than mom.
So how have we handled those high school standardized test? We take the PSAT without studying in 10th grade as a baseline for what to expect. In 11th grade, top performers on the PSAT are eligible for National Merit recognition and scholarships, so we do take time out of our school day to study for that in the six month leading up to the junior year test, when the scores count. The PSAT is a simplified version of the SAT, so the only thing we have done is to go to the public library, check out an SAT study guide, and take a practice section (skipping the writing section, which is not on the PSAT) about 3 times a week. The great thing about those study guides is that they explain the reasoning behind all of the answers, so when we score the exams, we can see if there are specific areas that they keep struggling with. Two or three times before the exam, we take an entire morning to do an entire practice exam. Because the PSAT is actually a little shorter and easier than the SAT, they’ve overstudied, making the PSAT seem a bit easier on test day. We do PSAT in the fall of junior year and ACT in the spring of junior year (in case we want to take it again in the fall of senior year to raise the score), so once we finish the PSAT, we return the SAT prep books to the library and pick up the ACT prep books. With the same system, a subject test every day or two, looking at the reasons for the questions you missed, the ACT doesn’t seem strange or scary. My children have been able to raise their scores by several points with this method.
Homeschoolers can’t take these exams at home, so with the ACT, which you register for online, my kids have just gone in and taken it at the local high school testing site. For the PSAT, I call up the nearest private high school at the beginning of the school year and ask if my student can join their students on test day.
Is this a big waste of time? It depends. As I mentioned, a good test score could get your kid into college and bring in scholarship money. While test taking is not a high priority for me, there certainly are several times since college that I have had to use my test-taking skills: moving to a state that requires you to take the written driver’s exam to change your license, getting certified to be a foster parent or other other volunteer or work-related activities that require certification, and even doing assessments with your child if she has disabilities that might require support. In the grand scheme of things, spending a couple hours a week on test prep has been worth it to us. So no, homeschoolers don’t necessarily have to be disadvantaged when it comes to standardized testing.
