Austin Scholar #53: Why Alpha High Students Score So High on Their MAP Tests
(& My Favorite Apps for Online Learning)
Hey, y'all!
My friends and I at Alpha High score above the 99th percentile on our academic achievement tests.
We do all this without any teachers–just by using online apps.
In this newsletter, I'm going to share some of my favorite apps for learning 5x faster (literally) than kids in traditional school
But I'm getting ahead of myself.
This week from Austin Scholar...
Austin’s Anecdote: How I Went Viral on Twitter
Why Alpha High Students Score So High on Their MAP Tests (& My Favorite Apps for Online Learning)
Scholar’s Sources: My Favorite Resources on Testing and Accelerated Learning
I gained a bunch of new subscribers this weekend! For those of you who are new, welcome.
My name is Austin Scholar, and I’m a 16-year-old high schooler at a school with no teachers. I also work at Write of Passage building their course for teenagers. I love reading about math, ice skating, trying out new desserts, and, of course, writing about education.
I’ve written about a lot of things, including: what kids can learn from the Kardashians, if learning through adaptive apps really work, and how to outsmart your brain. I’m excited to share more with you in the coming weeks.
Austin’s Anecdote: How I Went Viral on Twitter
I’ve been building my Twitter for months now, and I had a big breakthrough last weekend. I wrote a thread on MAP testing, and it got 2.5 million views. I seriously can’t imagine that many people reading my content.
What changed? Well, you know all of those reaching out to people and marketing skills that I’ve been complaining about for weeks now?
It turns out they actually work. Who knew?
I cold DM’d over twenty people and ended up getting retweeted by Austen Allred, the founder of Bloom Tech. (And Elon Musk liked it. Insane.)
It was pretty cool.
The thread I wrote was about the academic side of schools, but academics aren’t the only important thing to teach kids. Life skills are just as impactful on a kid’s life–if not more. And building my audience and writing my newsletters has been a crash course in life skills.
For example, learning how to build a marketing funnel has been absolutely critical in my journey online–and my new priority is to get in front of as many people as possible and then convince them to subscribe to my newsletter (click the share button below if you want to help!).
Last week, 2.5 million people saw my thread, and I converted 200 of them to subscribe to my newsletter (plus converted 1000 of them into Twitter followers). I feel pretty good about that.
Why Alpha High Students Score So High on Their MAP Tests (& My Favorite Apps for Online Learning)
My thread this week was about nationwide MAP testing. I'm sharing it below, with some context I didn't have room for on Twitter. I'm also sharing my favorite apps that my friends and I at Alpha High are using to get off-the-charts MAP scores.
I wrote about testing in the first place because the numbers are abysmal.
According to nationwide MAP testing, the average high school student in the United States learns… nothing.
For those who don’t know, MAP is the nationwide Measures of Academic Progress test. It assesses K-12 students’ growth in math, reading, language, and science.
MAP takes the scores from students all over the nation and creates tables with the percentile scores for each grade.
These tables clearly show the data from the catastrophe that is our educational system–especially high school.
The average (50th percentile) student learns next to nothing in FOUR years of high school.
It’s only the high achievers (99th percentile) who see growth.
And not only that, but those 50th percentile 12th graders score the EXACT same as the highest performing 3rd graders.
You heard that right. We’re graduating kids who know as much math as a 3rd grader.
What is our education system doing? Certainly not educating kids.
My school, Alpha High, gave all the students MAP tests last week–and I scored off the charts (in a good way–my scores were past the 99th percentile of 12th grade, the highest score on the MAP charts).
It’s not just me, either. My best friends all soar past the 99th percentile numbers in all four core subjects: math, reading, language, and science.
Our growth percentile (how fast we’re learning) is absolutely crazy.
The average high school student at Alpha is improving their test scores at 5X the rate of a normal school. (Ex. instead of improving by 2 points, they improve by 10.)
What are we doing differently?
Well, we weren’t born understanding these complex concepts, we didn’t have a life-changing teacher, and we don’t spend 5X the amount of time studying (in fact, we spend less time).
Our secret is that we use online, adaptive learning software.
These online apps allow each student to learn at their own pace.
For those who are able to quickly understand the material, the apps allow the students to advance to a level that challenges them. For those who are confused, the apps allow the students to be placed at a level to learn the foundations they are missing.
In a traditional school classroom of twenty students, five students may have mastered the concept being taught, five may be missing the fundamentals required to understand the concept, and ten are actively learning. Who does the teacher accommodate?
If the teacher aligns the lesson with the majority, half of the students are not gaining or learning anything from the lesson. Five are bored and five don't understand anything that is being taught.
What’s more, the education system prioritizes “passing” over true mastery, which means you can coast through 12 years of a subject with only a 60-70% understanding. This leads to frustration and hatred of learning.
Online apps ensure that each student masters the content–and reaches the 99th percentile in each grade level–before letting them move on.
And because they’re adaptive, students can move through the content at a much faster pace, since they aren’t waiting for another student to catch up.
I’ve tried pretty much every educational app under the sun, and here are a few of my favorites: