High Achiever Vocabulary Review

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(More customer reviews)This is a bad, almost dangerously bad, product. The thought of its being used to try to expand the vocabulary of younger students -- or being bought by well-intentioned parents who want to help their children expand their vocabulary -- is enough to chill the blood.
The major problem is that frame sentences in the quiz sections are radically defective. Either they don't give enough context to permit the user to see how the word is used, or they quite misleadingly create a context into which the "correct" choice has to be inserted in violation of every convention governing its correct use. It's almost as though this were a program created by foreign speakers of English who were perfectly competent at designing software, but whose command of the language was so approximate that they had no idea how to design an actual teaching program. (If you remember the old Japanese and Chinese instruction manuals that came with electronic devices you'll have a pretty good idea of how this program sets about "teaching English vocabulary.")
When I said that the product is "dangerously bad," I meant this: a learning program is designed for people who have a genuine desire to improve. Anyone who tried to expand his or her English vocabulary by using this program would wind up either using common English words in a grotesquely wrong way or being just plain confused. That seems to me almost a betrayal: you not only don't teach the student -- a lot of products don't do what they say they're going to do -- but you wind up making him or her LESS educated than before.
Please believe that (1) I'm competent to make the judgment that I'm making here -- I've written a great deal about psychometrics, including the SAT Verbal and similar exams -- and (2) that I don't have some kind of unannounced animus against whoever designed this program. I have NO personal or hidden agenda. I sent away for this product only because I was looking for a learning program that I might give to my own students, and I've just installed and tried it on my own computer. It is a real disaster, just awful. Stay away.

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