First SAT exam

Our son Sascha will take his first SAT exam tomorrow. He took biology in his sophomore year, and will take chemistry and physics in junior and senior year. Since he is now finishing biology at school and is studying for the final exam, he figured, he would take the SAT subject test in biology right away so that he won't have to study the material again. It definitely has not been one of his favorite subjects.

His friends told him all kind of horror stories about the exam, and now he is a little nervous about getting a low score and messing up his college prospects. He studied from a prep book for the test and says that some of the topics they never did in class.

From what I read on various websites, this seems to be one of the main hurdles for many students. The content of high school biology courses varies, and therefore many students encounter material on the test that they didn't learn before.

For us this is a new situation. In Europe, each country has a relatively uniform curriculum and all students of the particular country have the same level of education at the end of their school career. In Austria and Germany, students must pass to graduate one big final exam called Matura (Austria) or Abitur (Germany). If you pass, you can go to any university. The test is supervised by the federal department of education of the country and basically the same for all students. Therefore, it's not necessary to do additional testing to compare the ability of students.

In the next two years, my son will encounter many more tests before he graduates. Aside from the SATs, he must also take four AP tests in his senior year if he wants to study in Austria (which we would of course prefer because a semester there would cost only 500 Euro = $770). Without AP exams in math, sciences and one foreign language, Austria will not recognize his high school education as equivalent to an Austrian one. At the moment, Sascha tries to keep the doors open to both possibilities: College here in the States or university in Vienna. We will see....

Websites about SAT:

History of SAT: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/sats/where/history.html

Official Collegeboard website with information about mean scores: http://www.collegeboard.com/student/testing/sat/scores/understanding/average.html