How do you feel about tutoring and doing a lot of prep for testing if it affects a child’s ability to keep up when they are in school?

If you do test prep correctly, you are strengthening the underlying abilities a child needs to test well.  These would be his abilities in the areas of language, knowledge/comprehension, memory, math, visual-spatial, thinking and fine-motor skills.  If you do this, whatever your child scores on a test will reflect his actual ability to keep up in school.

If all you do is teach your child the material that is on the test (which would be cheating – HELLO!), then his performance won’t reflect his actual abilities and you risk placing him into a program where he isn’t able to do the work.