For those of you who know me, you might know I am not a huge fan of testing and I didn’t do a lot of testing throughout our high school years. Even though I am not a fan, there are some times when testing can be really helpful to you.

For one thing, you want to make sure that if you are applying to a specific college and they are going to ask you for certain high school test scores that you know that in advance. If they want to see a SAT subject test or an AP test, you cannot really make that up in a month. Sometimes you have to plan years ahead to get those tests taken care of.

So that is one situation where you should find out exactly which tests the college will want. When you really want to go to a certain college you are going to have to do the testing in order to reach that goal.

The other situation is that sometimes you don’t actually know what your children are learning. Maybe they read so much or they are so involved in this project or that activity, that you don’t really realize how much information they know. In that situation, it can be really helpful for you to give them some sort of test so that you can figure out how much they know.

Another example of a good reason for tests is if they are learning a foreign language and you are not using a curriculum, and you really don’t know how much foreign language they’ve learned, you might want to give them an SAT subject test in that foreign language or maybe a CLEP exam in that foreign language. If they pass the exam, you will know how many credits of foreign language to give them. And if they don’t but they come close, then you’ll know that it’s not 3 years, but perhaps it is 2 years. Read the rest of this entry »