Tutoring Concern.

It's kind of a concern for me that my home schooler is so fixated on standardized tests.

She is so hung up on making sure she can game a test and get a 650 Latin Sat II score (which would count for language credit at her top-choice college, even though she doesn't need it since she's got that covered with her phenomenal French Sat II score), that she's not even worried about developing long-term translation skills...

She just kind of expects me to teach to the test, even though I've identified long-term problems with guessing that contribute to problems on practice tests and would blow her out of the water in a college classroom (she still has word order problems where she translates in order a lot, and she doesn't look up words and frequently guesses at forms, but she's good at the process of elimination on multiple choice tests, so she tests well, even though that that sort of test is not at all what would happen in college).

Today I was trying to tell her that memorizing forms and working on translation passages would help shore up the weakest areas I saw affecting her practice tests, but she didn't seem that convinced.

I'm doing this anyhow, though; I really do think these skills and concern for detail would help her do well on a practice test, and there's no way I'd let her get into a college classroom and be embarrassed like she would be if she entered one tomorrow, after having had Latin for 2.5 years.

Overall, though, I really do find it mind-boggling that someone can get very high scores on a Latin SAT II test, and not be able to produce a good translation of a simple Latin passage with the help of a grammar and dictionary. There's something majorly wrong with that high school culture.