Steven desJardins ([info]stevendj) wrote,
@ 2008-05-04 22:40:00
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Caroline the Moderately Surprising
Back when I was in middle school, I took the SAT's as part of a Johns Hopkins research program, and did pretty well. The program's still going on, and my niece Caroline, who's in sixth grade now, took the SCAT test last fall.

The awards ceremony was today. Caroline had the highest quantitative, the highest verbal, and the highest combined scores in the state of Maryland.

Even for a family that's accustomed to doing well on standardized tests, that's moderately surprising.

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brainiest
[info]betonica
2008-05-05 03:07 am UTC (link)
Wow!! Congrats!

(And here I was pleased when my niece got in to MIT; all my friends who were over visiting me when my sis called sent a cheer over the phone.)

I was just playing with a bunch of visual orientation and verbal tests, because one of my students is doing a research project on blood sugar levels and mental stress (I was a test subject). I found some of the verbal stuff (though it wasn't the type of question that goes on SATs or GREs) to be particularly irritating. The visual orientation was fun.

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Re: brainiest
[info]stevendj
2008-05-05 03:16 am UTC (link)
After I took the SAT's the first time, Johns Hopkins asked me to take some additional IQ tests, and I completely screwed up the visual orientation segment—every other quiz, I was way above average, and on visual orientation I was rock bottom. Problem was the algorithm I'd worked out to rotate the diagrams without actually having to visualize anything was 180° off. It's the one time rushing through a standardized test really tripped me up.

I should have said Caroline was first among 6th graders, by the way. Starting in the 7th grade, they take the SAT instead.

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[info]dsgood
2008-05-05 04:26 am UTC (link)
Congratulations to her!

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[info]jilflirt
2008-05-05 04:38 am UTC (link)
That's really impressive.

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[info]charlieallery
2008-05-05 10:18 am UTC (link)
That's great, though I hope it doesn't result in people developing expectations of her.

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[info]stevendj
2008-05-05 01:16 pm UTC (link)
Expectations aren't necessarily bad—Caroline wouldn't be in the math program she's in if her mother hadn't pushed hard to have her tested for it, and given her extra tutoring over the summer. (That is, she wouldn't be in it now. She'd have been put in it a year later.) And the teacher probably wouldn't have accepted her for the program if she hadn't taught me and my sisters and my brother and Caroline's sister and developed the expectation that we could handle anything she threw at us.

I don't think anyone's going to put destructive pressure on her. Right now our attitude is more like, "You don't have to go into the advanced math program if you don't want to, but we all think you'll do fine and it'll be more fun than the alternative."

She's already dropped one or two programs—she quit gymnastics when the time commitment became too much, for instance. So I don't think anyone is going to push her to do more than she can do or that she can have fun doing, and I don't think she'll become upset when she can't do everything. And her personality is so naturally easygoing and cheerful that I can't imagine her not finding a path that will make her happy.

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[info]mjlayman
2008-05-05 11:58 pm UTC (link)
Wow, congrats to her!

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[info]selki
2008-05-07 12:59 am UTC (link)
woo hoo!

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