If you don’t know li’l brudder you’ve got some viewing to do.

I don’t know if this is going to work or if it’s going to blow up fantastically in my face, but I’ve been toying with this idea for a while now (my original thoughts here) and I’ve decided I want to give it a whirl. I’m looking for a smallish group of students who would be interested in participating in an unorthodox and labor-intensive SAT experiment this summer.

Here’s the deal

I want to see if, collaboratively, a bunch of students can create a mock SAT—a whole test, from soup to nuts. I’ve talked to a few other test prep folks who might be interested in helping me advise the project (I won’t name names until they officially sign on) but my vision is that students do all the heavy lifting and research, and the other experts and I provide guidance along the way. If you participate, you’ll comb through tests in the Blue Book looking for patterns to decide things like how many run-ons should be tested in the 14-question final writing section. You’ll argue with each other about what the essay question should be, or how hard the final question on a math section should be. You’ll debate whether you’re really using a word properly in a sentence completion question. By the end of the summer, you’ll hopefully have a deep understanding of the content and structure of the SAT. My hypothesis is that this knowledge will increase your score.

Of course, it’s only a hypothesis. As far as I know this hasn’t been tried before, anywhere, and I obviously make no guarantees that you’ll see a huge score bump, or any bump at all. I really think you will, but if you decide to devote time to this you do so in full knowledge that it’s not a sure thing. Along those lines, I can’t guarantee that a finished product emerges from this. If you sign on, you take some of the responsibility for keeping this project going. If people lose interest halfway through, then it just fizzles and we all walk away.

logistics

I’m planning for most of the work to be done on a wiki, which will completely open to the public. Obviously, some work (like layout work) will need to be done offline, but that’s only in the final stages and we’ll cross those bridges when we come to them. Our finished product, and the wiki we used to create it, will remain available publicly, too. The idea is that if this works, other people might want to replicate and refine the process. Nothing is going to be bought or sold through this project. All content will be licensed with Creative Commons.

where do I sign up?

You don’t even have to! If you’d like to participate, you can access the project here. Just start contributing!

Feel free to tell your friends about this if you think they’d be interested, too.