SAT Prep Scam

A parent of a junior in high school just sent me this information I thought was good to share:

Someone from Dallas, Texas may call your house and pretend to be from College Board or any other college prep company. They will tell you that your child has requested and ordered some prep materials for the SAT and ACT and that the materials are in the mail and they need your credit card payment for the amount of $129. If you ask where all of this was ordered, they will say that your child has fill out a card at school for it or at a college fair.

I called the high school to report the scam and College Board. I was told by College Board that they never call their customers and if you ordered something online you would have to pay first before they send the materials. They said to be very wary of people calling and pretending to be someone from their company.

The telephone number from Dallas, Texas is 1 469 547-6860 and if you try to call this number there is no connection. They called me several times and I am glad that I felt uncomfortable so I did not gave them any of my payment info.

Here is a related article and a section from the Today Show about this scam.

Any comments? Has anyone else come across this?

STAR Testing

We are in the midst of STAR testing now in our school district. I invite readers to go back to my earlier post on STAR testing here. If you get a chance to read it, please also see the comments that followed that post.

I see a lot of time spent on preparation for tests in our high achieving district. This year one of my son's teachers gave a practice, graded STAR test. I felt that was a waste of my son's time. Instead I would have preferred his teacher to continue teaching the content.

As Alfie Kohn says in his new book Feel-Bad Education

"The more time spent teaching students how to do well on a particular test -- familiarizing them with its content and format -- the less meaningful the results of that test. What those results mostly tell us is how well students were prepared for that test, not what knowledge and skills they have in general."