Job Discussion Forums

[Voyeur]

I have a 3-year gig teaching SAT and TOEFL at a high school's international program. I'm fairly solid with respect to TOEFL, and learning about SAT on my own this summer in preparation for teaching SAT in the fall.

If anyone has any experience teaching either test, I'd appreciate some advice with respect to improving my lessons.

The goal of my current classes is a mix of teaching actual English using TOEFL and SAT material and gaming the tests themselves. However, over these three years I'd like to really up my game with regard to learning how to really prep Chinese students for the test.

It is easy to find lots of general material about either test, but the really 'hardcore' stuff seems to be proprietary material developed by the elite Korean and Chinese test-prep schools. If I can, I will try to get a part-time job at one of these academies to learn more. But in the meantime, if anyone could point me to any available resources that would help me learn those strategies on my own, I'd really appreciate it.

I'd also appreciate any longer-term advice about sculpting an SAT/TOEFL/AP test-prep career in China. I am Canadian, and don't speak Chinese. Nor have I taken the SAT. I plan to take the SAT test in 2016 when the new test comes out (I'll bomb the math, but that is okay). I realize that most of the best TOEFL/SAT test prep jobs are for Chinese speakers from Ivy-level US colleges. But I have heard that English-only speakers without an Ivy degree can still do well and find a niche if they know their stuff, have a decent resume (like the one I'm building), and have good SAT Reading/Writing scores. Any advice along these lines is appreciated.

[Bud Powell]

Buy a Barron's book or a Kaplan book. You can find them in most book stores near Chinese universities.

[Hermosillo]

There is a wealth of good practice tests at this site:

www.varsitytutors.com

Look at some of the tutor's bios......never seen so many well qualified people trying to get by on part time work. Some very prestigious schools named. Teaching job market is still very poor in the US.

[Shroob]

[Voyeur]

I've got most of the traditional SAT and TOEFL material (Kaplan, Princeton, Thomson, etc...)

Thing is, these types of materials tend to take an 'honest' approach to the test. There are some tips and strategies, but they do not try to 'beat' the test the way Asian students want to.

Korean and Chinese SAT and TOEFL academies have analyzed the test in a variety of ways to find patterns that have led to strategies designed to give students a much better score than they really should get. This includes things like memorizing canned biographies and sentences that you learn to fit into the SAT writing, regardless of the question. Or memorizing 'burnished phrases' (taken from a Korean academy's website, whatever it means) for the TOEFL speaking answers.

For the SAT, Chinese and Korean academies have analyzed far more 'real' tests than are widely available, and have been able to classify the critical reading passages into a certain number of categories, with special strategies for each.

Some of these approaches are probably ineffectual and just created to sell lessons. On the other hand, many of them seem to work. And this kind of knowledge is exactly what Asian kids and parents generally want, and why Kaplans or Barrons do not do well in China. If you have a Princeton Review-level understanding of the test, and simply go through the SAT with students providing general knowledge and reviewing answers, elite Asian students will think you don't know what you are doing. They want you to be able to show them EXACTLY what to do, and how to get a better score than their actual ability deserves.

It's unclear to me how I can learn these strategies on my own. I may need to find a low-level job at an elite Chinese or Korean test prep school and learn on-site.

[Bud Powell]

[Voyeur]

Korean and Chinese academies have effectively created a middle-ground between true cheating and just taking the test in a straight-up way. While there is plenty of actual cheating done in Asia on the SAT/TOEFL tests, that is not what I am talking about. I'm talking about the strategies that have been devised that allow many students to do better than they really should. But they aren't cheating.

I'm not sure which strategies I would actually teach, but in China you have to know them all to succeed. I guess working at one of these academies is the only way to really learn them.

[El Macho]

The useful, cram school stuff just isn't in the PR or Kaplan books…or widely available in print at all, really. Luckily, you can figure out most of the stuff on your own via mastery of the material. Mastering the material is essential if you're going to teach SAT because you will look like a complete fraud and will lose high paying students if you're not able to do what you teach with 100% accuracy.

How to do this? Get your hands on all the old exams you can find. This means buying the College Board's books and then being creative in finding recent tests. Master the materials the way you'd do anything else. Take timed sections. Revise any questions you got wrong (or got right accidentally). Keep doing this. After you can complete sections with 100% accuracy and with time to spare, start breaking the sections apart and grouping question together. Work to identify patterns – question types, knowledge tested, etc. Once you really know the material forward and backwards, you'll start being able to link individual questions across tests. ("This is like question x on test y.")

After you know the test inside out, you're ready to work in a cram school. You'll be much better situated to sop up and understand their tactics. You can then adopt them as you see fit.

Obviously, all this takes quite a lot of time and effort but it's what the top people can do. Whatever SAT job you start out in, treat it as an opportunity to get paid to develop subject mastery.

[Bud Powell]

[Bud Powell]

[buravirgil]

[Bud Powell]

[Mandrews1985]

Before moving to China I worked within an International Program at one of the most prestigious high schools in South Korea.

The whole thing was a sham...a complete mess. Students were 'guaranteed' places at Ivy League universities but 95% of them had no chance of getting the basic prerequisites.

These places are worse than cram schools/academies. They know you're not an American but they're still employing you to teach SATs and probably APs to get the students into American universities.

I wish you the greatest of success and I'm sure you'll earn an unreal wage while you're there but I'd love to hear from you in a few months... or even after 3 years to see how you got on.

Good luck and my advice would be just know it inside out and be prepared to lie/BS to your students.

[Bud Powell]

I have to ask what one tells those who are attending SAT prep classes to assure them that they'll score high enough to get into the school of their choice. Do you tell them that the practice tests are composed of actual test questions? That the vocabulary lists found in Word Power, Barrons, and Kaplan will appear on the test or do you just pick out several dozen words, problems, and passages, then tell them that these are what will appear on the test?

There isn't a whole lot that one can tell a prospective ACT/SAT/GRe test taker that won't sound like an outrageous lie or won't come back at the coach when the student takes the test, learns that NONE of the material on the actual test appeared in the practice tests, fails, then goes looking for the test coach.

The various strategies proposed for taking the test primarily deal with odds, ratio of correct to incorrect answers and improving one's score the second time around, reading the questions/problems before reading the text, addressing all of the questions and problems that appear to be the easiest first. Other than that, The only thing that works is continual practice to improve one's skills.

The test doesn't test as much for hard knowledge as it tests for skills (mathematics/Quantitative excepted). For example, one may have read only Dostoevsky through school, but when a passage from an Auden essay or from a Jane Austen novel appears on the test, it won't make a difference that the test taker never read either Austen or Auden. He will probably have acquired the critical skills to correctly answer the questions about either passage.

It's a bit disturbing to read things about gaming the SAT such as the following passage :

In March 2004, Les Perelman analyzed 15 scored sample essays contained in the College Board's ScoreWrite book along with 30 other training samples and found that in over 90% of cases, the essay's score could be predicted from simply counting the number of words in the essay.[16] Two years later, Perelman trained high school seniors to write essays that made little sense but contained infrequently used words such as "plethora" and "myriad". All of the students received scores of "10" or better, which placed the essays in the 92nd percentile or higher.

This came from Wikipedia. The description can't apply to the SAT because the written module wasn't added until 2005 (and will become optional in 2016). I am incredulous that anyone would believe this cr*p.

Is this the sort of thing being taught in SAT test prep centers in China?

[Janiny]

I have a PowerPoint presentation I made about prefixes, suffixes and root words - mostly Greek and Latin-based English words. It's very watchable, and can be watched and enjoyed by SAT and TOEFL students a number of times.

If the OP or any one else any where would like to use this, please PM me an email address and I can send it to you.