7 ms·

How I Learned to Take the SAT Like a Rich Kid

58 points by georgecmu 10y ago

santoriv 10y ago
Another thing that is only tangentially mentioned is that more affluent children can afford to take the achievement tests multiple times. When I took the ACT the second time in high school, my composite score went up 4 points without any extra study. I doubt many lower income kids have the opportunity to keep taking it until they get a good score....
- ashark 10y ago
  My second ACT score went up 3 points for no other reason than I had a less-obnoxious "science" (i.e. answering questions about intentionally-misleading graphs and data) portion the second time.
- BeetleB 10y ago
  Is it that expensive? It wasn't when I took it.
  - simplyluke 10y ago
    Most schools/the test company offer it for free with waivers for students who have demonstrated some level of financial need (by receiving free/reduced meals or otherwise)
  - khedoros1 10y ago
    About $50 this year, looks like. For a couple of my friends, the money came out of their food budget.
    - BeetleB 10y ago
      Compared to college application costs, this is cheap.
      - khedoros1 10y ago
        Can't argue with that, of course. At my alma mater this year: $55 application fee, $150 enrollment confirmation fee (applies to tuition and fees for the first term, though), $185 fee for mandatory 3-day freshman orientation. Of course, if you're rejected, you're only out $55 from that school, but last fall they had 50,000 applications and admitted 4,500 students, so you'd better do well on that $50 test.
  - gknoy 10y ago
    Registration: $40, add-on for writing test: $56 There are some students for whom spending an extra $100 to have a chance for a better test score is not seen as something feasible or financially prudent. 0: http://www.studypoint.com/ed/act-registration-fees/ http://www.studypoint.com/ed/act-registration-fees/
- eric_h 10y ago
  I took the SATs twice - primarily because the first time I had gotten so little sleep that I fell asleep (multiple times) during the reading comprehension portion of the test. Did much better the second time around!
basseq 10y ago
The "formula for success" appears to be: study. Is that concept so alien if you're not a "rich kid"? Now, don't get me wrong: there's a clear disconnect in ability and means to prep. Even though there are cheap or free prep courses or materials, many won't be able to dedicate—for example—the time to cram or take Sunday classes an hour away due to jobs or family commitments.
- qntty 10y ago
  Studying with that kind of intensity certainly is. For most kids "studying for the SAT" means doing 1 or 2 practice tests on a lazy Saturday.
  - basseq 10y ago
    But is the difference due to some secret that "non-rich kids" don't know? That most kids don't do more isn't a surprise. But why don't they know more? This article suggests that "they didn't know they could (or should)". I would wager that most kids don't want to put in the work to be a true over-achiever. Or because they haven't been raised that way. Not because they're unaware of the benefits. I'm trying not to fall into the trap of suggesting the reason for success is "hard work" when socioeconomic differences in opportunities explain much or all of the gap. But that truly seems to be the thesis presented here.
    - qntty 10y ago
      I would certainly agree that they are aware of the benefits of going to a good school. I just think you are seriously underestimating the importance that mimicking other people plays in learning to do something you've never done before. We all do it, when you're writing some code that you've never worked with before, you read the code of someone else who has done something similar. When navigating the little rituals involved in going to college, you do what your friend is doing or what your older sister did or (for more ambitious students) what the people on college confidential tell you to do. It's not that there is some bit of knowledge that poor kids don't have, it's that they have no one to mimic. There are a million little decisions that go into how to spend your time in high school. Figuring out the best way to spend it is far too big of a task for any one student. The only way to have any hope of spending it well is to copy what others have done and learn from their mistakes. In elite schools, you have much better role models to mimic. If you want to go to Harvard, you can mimic what that kid who got into Harvard did last year. A general principle like "just work hard if you want to succeed" is worse that useless for a kids in mediocre school districts. Not only does it do nothing to show them how to actually spend their time, but it's so general that it can never be proved "wrong." So if a student tries to do what they consider "hard work" and that doesn't lead to success, people aren't going to stop saying it because it didn't work. Moreover, since the kid who failed knows that they were given "correct advice" they're just going to blame themselves for their failure rather than realizing that they have the same potential as people in better school districts, they just don't have as much opportunity to realize it. Still, advice like "work hard to succeed" will always be "wrong" in the sense that it's the wrong thing to tell a young person. No matter what advice you give a young person, it needs to be much more specific and personalized if you want it to have a reasonably good chance of being understood and used correctly. You can't expect someone with so little life experience to fill in the blanks for themselves.
guyzero 10y ago
Ah, the PSAT. Because one high-pressure standardized test isn't enough.
- sbov 10y ago
  Not necessarily. My circle of friends took the PSAT, but skipped the SAT.
  - guyzero 10y ago
    Sure, but why? Why isn't there just one test? Why are merit scholarships handed out for PSAT results and not SAT results? I can't see any compelling reason other than making more work for the College Board.
dysoco 10y ago
And here I am in Argentina; getting into a public university, without having to pay, take exams or even have a good GPA in High School. How expensive and competitive education is in the USA seems so alien to me; I wonder if it's really worth it. The only apparent benefit is networking and I'd dare say that only matters in Finance/Law. Am I really that screwed if I want to work at Google/Amazon/Whatever and I haven't graduated from MIT or Stanford?
- virmundi 10y ago
  Kinda...if you have work experience from somewhere else you could get into Google. Amazon is a bit more open; you have to put up with their interview crap.
  - oblio 10y ago
    Not really. If you're from a decent university in your country you can at least get an internship at Google. I've had quite a few colleagues in Romania that did that. Google, Facebook, Microsoft, etc.
    - virmundi 10y ago
      That is fair. From watching HN over the years, Google seems to prefer certain US colleges for new US grads. I myopically assumed a US-centric perspective in my comment. If you come from one of the large well respected programs like GA Tech, they'll look at you once they looked at the Stanford folk.
- hrehhf 10y ago
  No. There is something of an echo chamber on these subjects. Just learn and work hard.
- GuiA 10y ago
  > Am I really that screwed if I want to work at Google/Amazon/Whatever and I haven't graduated from MIT or Stanford? The vast majority of Google/Facebook/etc. employees aren't from MIT/Stanford/Harvard/Berkeley/etc. It's definitely much harder to get a job at these companies straight out of college if you didn't attend a big name university. 10 years later, it doesn't matter. I got my undergrad from an unknown French university, and went to grad school at a large US state university with no brand name recognition (as is the case for many, many immigrants). Recruiters from top tier companies ignored me out of grad school, but after a few startups/talks at major conferences/open source projects/etc., I now work at such a company (and now recruiters are very eager to get some of my time).
linkmotif 10y ago
Oh the liberal guilt. It really runs so hard through so much the NYT pumps out. I guess you're rich if you study for the SATs. I'm all for bridging the gap, but this nascent Bolshevism
- misingnoglic 10y ago
  I think you missed the entire point of the article. It's not saying that they just need to study, they also need to know what the secret to the success is. Would you have thought that a test like the PSAT would be useful for 11th graders only so that they could get national merit scholarships? I didn't know this until my wealthy friends told me...
  - linkmotif 10y ago
    The SAT in its own right is total BS. You want to fix the problems with wealth inequality you don't go getting people on equal footing with the SAT. You get rid of the SAT, you get rid of many other things. You put power into the hands of the people instead of huge corporations like the College Board and "universities" that are really just minor league sports centers.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - Bartweiss 10y ago
    > Would you have thought that a test like the PSAT would be useful for 11th graders only so that they could get national merit scholarships? Wait, is this actually not common knowledge? I could swear it was included with the official PSAT materials we got handed in the test, and I know my school publicized it like crazy prior to the exam. It was a mediocre public school, too. I totally believe you, but that (way more than the study-ability of the SAT) is a surprising thing to me. Differences in quality I get, differences in common knowledge still throw me off.
  - BeetleB 10y ago
    >It's not saying that they just need to study, they also need to know what the secret to the success is. I'll grant that the SAT has changed since I took it, but if people are claiming the secret to a good grade in the SAT is to take prep courses for the SAT, they are mistaken. The "secret" is to know how to study effectively. People who need a paid tutor to help them with the SAT are not learning the lessons they should.
Kenji 10y ago
>I couldn’t afford a $3,000 40-hour prep course or tutor. If you aim for an elite college, you should be an autodidact anyway. You should be able to teach literally everything you want yourself, using only resources like the internet and books. Because trust me, nobody will help you with that integral that spans one page and you just can't resolve. Or help you find that annoying bug in your program. You're all alone. But you can resolve it all if you invest enough time. And at the end of the day, at your workplace, you will never have trouble with the challenges they throw at you.
- throwaway9475 10y ago
  How is it down there in Galt's Gulch?
  - Kenji 10y ago
    I also enjoy my stay in sarcasm town.
ftlio 10y ago
I took my SAT scores from 90th percentile to 98th percentile by buying a book, doing a few sample problems every night for a couple of weeks, and reading the test taking tips in the back. Probably the most helpful tip was that all the math diagrams were drawn to scale. The bigger benefit of all of this to me was the SATs as another example of how truly arbitrary the world seems to be, and how little extra effort is actually required to curb that arbitrariness towards your goals.
- SamReidHughes 10y ago
  Some of the improvement was probably age-related brain growth. I noticed in high school and college that as I got older, my performance on repeated math tests or contests mysteriously improved, even if I didn't do any practice in between. Math problems that seemed out of my reach suddenly became attainable. Some friends of mine noticed the same thing when I pointed it out to them.
- diminoten 10y ago
  Even taking it twice is a huge boost, I don't think most folks even realize you can/should. It's so arbitrary, I bet the majority of folks would improve on their second test, but the only people who try are the ones who know about it.
  - sokoloff 10y ago
    I'm not even sure how many times I took the SAT (I think it was 4: at age 11, 12, and then twice in high school). I know I took the PSAT twice. Granted my parents were both in public education and so were more in tune with what was possible, but we were by no means rich (see also: both parents were in public education). I took it twice before age 13 in conjunction with https://my.vanderbilt.edu/smpy/ https://my.vanderbilt.edu/smpy/
siliconc0w 10y ago
I grew up in a SuperZIP and I resent this article revealing our precious secrets.
tabeth 10y ago
The SAT is a pretty silly test. When it was out of 2400 I took it for the first time and got a 1800. I studied for literally a week and increased my score to 2100, which isn't really that good, but a testament to how "studyable" the test is. If education in this country was worth anything the SATs would be unnecessary.
- djtriptych 10y ago
  How do you know your ability to do that isn't rare?
  - Bartweiss 10y ago
    Agreed - most research on SAT studying seems to suggest that this is rare. Big gains are most prevalent with either smart-but-unstudied people who get large gains from learning what to expect, or under-educated people who weren't previously taught major test components like algebra. A 300 point jump is extreme.
    - tabeth 10y ago
      I don't know if a 300 point jump is extreme or not, but I'd like to point out that most people who do poorly on the SAT probably weren't getting the education they needed, which was my overall point. Put differently, I assert that all people who don't do "well" on the SAT fall into the two categories you posed.
      - Bartweiss 10y ago
        > I assert that all people who don't do "well" on the SAT fall into the two categories you posed. I think that's provably wrong. SAT prep courses offer a bump, but even ones with big promises don't deliver all that well. Evidence suggests 300 points is very large. The "smart but unstudied" pool I mentioned is likely small and tends to get strong gains up front - these are people who get 100+ points from the PSAT or 1-2 practice tests. (This pool is anecdotal. I knew several people in it, but I don't know of studies at the high end of the scale.) The other pool is real but not the same as you described. It largely represents people who missed core content like 'geometry' and did prep so long and extensive they learned totally new material there. There are lots of kids with low scores from bad education, agreed, but fixing that is not "studied for a week" stuff. More broadly, I'm saying that in practice "I studied for a week and gained 300 points" is an extreme outlier. Mostly people either see <100 gains from studying or only see big gains from serious, new-content education.
rhino369 10y ago
The real solution is to design a test that you can't study for effectively. However, I suspect the study-ability for the SAT enhances it's predictive ability. Someone who does whatever it takes to learn some words for vocab testing will do whatever it takes to learn about sociology. The truth is that standardized tests aren't less predictive for poor students. Whatever causes the score gap also causes an achievement gap once they arrive at school.
- Bartweiss 10y ago
  > The real solution is to design a test that you can't study for effectively. There's a very strong pressure against that. The analogy section of the SAT was a proxy IQ test, though more study-able than Raven's Matrices. People objected to the parts that could be studied (infamously, "runner : track :: oarsman : regatta"), but the solution was to drop the entire section and preserve only the more learnable portions. Which is frustrating, because as far as I know it undermined your last comment - SAT scores are actually more responsive to wealth than they used to be, because factors like study and the quality of the local math department are more important.
- noxToken 10y ago
  How do you design a test for which you can't study? Even if everything is laid out in the test with complete hypothetical knowledge (e.g. redefine addition for all real numbers from x + y = z to something else like x + y + (x/2) = z), you can still study for it by honing in on basic arithmetic and algebra. This isn't meant as snark. I really don't understand.
  - rhino369 10y ago
    The point of the tests are to test aptitude not knowledge. So if someone can spend 10 hours learning basic algebra and massively raise their score the test is failing at being an aptitude test, it's now a knowledge test. If the college wants to know how much alegrba knowledge a person has they can just look at their math grades. They want to know aptitude. Some standardized tests have fairly narrow topics or have patterns in their problems that are learnable. Beyond just testing knowledge, these only specifically reward studying for the test. The SAT used to have a set of "SAT words" that you could memorize for the verbal section. That somewhat helps your vocab, but only to the words used on teh SAT. The ACT used to have a trick where the short answer of the grammar section was the right answer like 70% of the time. The LSAT has logic game problems that can be categorized and then solved with specific techniques. If you learn the techniques you'll never get more than a few questions wrong. This is purely rewarding studying for the test. If a new type of test is used the techniques fail until someone creates new techniques. If you just learn the five most common equations for SAT algebra your score jumps up but your math ability isn't much better.
vecter 10y ago
> Most took the SAT cold. This really bothers me. Obviously most people can't afford expensive prep classes, but it doesn't cost much to buy your children a few practice books. Back when I took the SAT, the Barron's book was great, and I got most of my value from that. This is just poor parenting.
- Bartweiss 10y ago
  > This is just poor parenting. I disagree. My parents got me a book of practice tests and strongly encouraged me to study. I took the PSAT cold, and the SAT with ~1 hour of study. My school offered free SAT prep classes to students, courtesy of some kind-hearted teachers. Attendance was miserably low, I certainly wasn't there. Even students who studied hard and did well at high-end colleges didn't study for the SAT. I'm frustrated that we ascribe every moment of lost potential to "bad parenting", I think it's a way to disregard both human nature and structural forces. God knows it's not my parents' fault I took the test cold.
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  Waiting till your senior year is poor parenting. Taking it cold before that, assessing the results, and deciding if further investment is necessary before retesting is intelligent.
  - vecter 10y ago
    Why not just take some practice tests and assess then, as opposed to waiting for the real thing? You'll get a very good idea of where you stand and save yourself the pain of having to retake it again in the future when you get a first score that's certainly suboptimal relative to your potential.
    - sokoloff 10y ago
      Testing under the real conditions for practice will make the next testing session be familiar; you'll know exactly what to expect, etc. Taking a practice test at home or on the computer is different from taking a real test at the test site. IMO, it's not that much pain.
11thEarlOfMar 10y ago
The lesson here is that one element to career success (for it's own sake) is understanding how your performance will be measured, and then working specifically to 'score well' by those metrics. Companies that understand this can craft incentives within their culture so that employee goals are aligned with company goals and both employees and the company succeed. Companies that have serious problems, like an Uber or Theranos, are likely suffering from inappropriate reward structure, whether explicitly or implicitly defined. The students who avail themselves of professional test prep are getting a life lesson in climbing the corporate ladder. This is one method by which wealth breeds wealth.
kome 10y ago
When Americans talks about SAT or standardized test in general, I cannot stop thinking about The Rise of Meritocracy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_of_the_Meritocracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_of_the_Meritocracy it was a dystopia, but it became daily reality in the USA. Those tests are not meritocracy, they are a farce of meritocracy.
- rayvd 10y ago
  ... cuz standardized testing isn't commonplace everywhere.
  - kome 10y ago
    Not in continental Europe for sure.
SamReidHughes 10y ago
Note that research shows SAT prep only increases scores by about 30 points, according to an old yummyfajitas comment that I searched for which links to this paywalled article. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124278685697537839.html http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124278685697537839.html My suspicion is that a lot of beliefs about the efficacy of SAT prep are from customers that also observe age-related improvements.
- trendia 10y ago
  There is a scam in India that works like this: A group will offer "guaranteed admission" to top universities if you pay them money and follow their program. If you fail to be admitted, they will give you your money back without hesitation. Here's the rub: They don't actually have to help you that much. As long as enough people get in (who would have gotten in anyway), then they can be profitable in the aggregate.
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  > Note that research shows SAT prep only increases scores by about 30 points Simply retaking the test increases scores by 15 to 29 points. https://psychsocialissues.com/2011/07/20/sat-the-validity-and-reliability-and-its-effect-on-cultural-and-racial-minorities/ https://psychsocialissues.com/2011/07/20/sat-the-validity-an...
  - aswanson 10y ago
    Increased mine by 120 points.
mcone 10y ago
> I only wish that more lower- and middle-income peers knew how to pursue such aggressive strategies. But isn't exclusion one of the goals of these standardized tests? To "weed out" those who can't afford to and/or don't know how to get such high scores? If anyone could attain a high score on the SAT, SAT II, and ACT tests, ivy league schools might need to come up with another way to determine whether or not applicants come from wealthy homes.
- Bartweiss 10y ago
  Eh, not especially fair. The SAT is harder to study than most of the claims here suggest, and they already have your zip code and extracurricular list. Those are a much better proxy for wealth than the SAT.
nyolfen 10y ago
with 'rich kid' levels of prep, how much can one reasonably expect scores to increase vs baseline?
strictnein 10y ago
> "I realized that they didn’t just want to score exceptionally well on the SAT. They were gunning for a score on the Preliminary SAT exams that would put them in the top percentile of students in the United States and make them National Merit Scholars in the fall" Huh. I took the PSAT ~20 years ago without even knowing what it really was. I didn't even know that was how I ended up a National Merit Scholar until I read this.
L_Rahman 10y ago
I grew up in Bangladesh. I had a 12kbps internet connection and access to used bookstores a 1.5hr rickshaw ride away from where I lived. My parents can barely speak English and my dad was a cab (now Uber) driver in New York City. I had no tutors. I didn't know anyone else prepping for the test. I studied alone, with test prep books I bought at $2 a pop and a $40 course from the college board I subscribed to only for the answer explanations to the questions in my pirated book. My test prep strategy came from googling "how to study for the SAT" and reading the multiple hundred page thread on CollegeConfidential about the "Xiggi method" I scored a 2120 on my first SAT and a 2360 on my second. People from disadvantaged communities suffer many challenges and there is real inequality. But standardized testing is too often bashed at the expense of the real systemic problems - that education outcomes are a holistic problem that require us to have better schools, better home environments, better food safety, better primary education, better internet access. The government should actively play a role in providing many of those things. But test prep is not even close to being the problem.
Balgair 10y ago
My SO is a teacher and is proctoring the SAT tomorrow. Our state mandates that all students take it free of charge in their junior year as a general aptitude test used for funding decisions and lots of other stuff. So there are a lot of students taking it together on a single day during class time. The school also provides the PSAT and requires all juniors to take it (paid by the school district only). Students are assigned to rooms based on their last name, alphabetical order and all that. When they gave the PSAT in the fall, it was ... eye opening. I never considered the possibility of a fight breaking out during the test, let alone the 3 that broke out in my SO's proctoring session. How do you control for desks being thrown about during the math section? (Yes really). The reason was that the boys were bored after just writing their names and doing nothing for 4 hours (no phones or books are allowed) and then they started fighting as boys do. The loudness of the room in general is also a factor to control for, as the students that are sitting-for but not taking the test tend to chit-chat and try to hit on each other, as bored teenagers are want to do. Richer areas don't just have studying to help them out, they also have a ... cultural... sense that one should not draw blood or try for a date during these tests.

58 points by georgecmu 10y ago

Another thing that is only tangentially mentioned is that more affluent children can afford to take the achievement tests multiple times. When I took the ACT the second time in high school, my composite score went up 4 points without any extra study. I doubt many lower income kids have the opportunity to keep taking it until they get a good score....

ashark 10y ago
My second ACT score went up 3 points for no other reason than I had a less-obnoxious "science" (i.e. answering questions about intentionally-misleading graphs and data) portion the second time.
BeetleB 10y ago
Is it that expensive? It wasn't when I took it.
- simplyluke 10y ago
  Most schools/the test company offer it for free with waivers for students who have demonstrated some level of financial need (by receiving free/reduced meals or otherwise)
- khedoros1 10y ago
  About $50 this year, looks like. For a couple of my friends, the money came out of their food budget.
  - BeetleB 10y ago
    Compared to college application costs, this is cheap.
    - khedoros1 10y ago
      Can't argue with that, of course. At my alma mater this year: $55 application fee, $150 enrollment confirmation fee (applies to tuition and fees for the first term, though), $185 fee for mandatory 3-day freshman orientation. Of course, if you're rejected, you're only out $55 from that school, but last fall they had 50,000 applications and admitted 4,500 students, so you'd better do well on that $50 test.
- gknoy 10y ago
  Registration: $40, add-on for writing test: $56 There are some students for whom spending an extra $100 to have a chance for a better test score is not seen as something feasible or financially prudent. 0: http://www.studypoint.com/ed/act-registration-fees/ http://www.studypoint.com/ed/act-registration-fees/
eric_h 10y ago
I took the SATs twice - primarily because the first time I had gotten so little sleep that I fell asleep (multiple times) during the reading comprehension portion of the test. Did much better the second time around!

basseq 10y ago

The "formula for success" appears to be: study. Is that concept so alien if you're not a "rich kid"? Now, don't get me wrong: there's a clear disconnect in ability and means to prep. Even though there are cheap or free prep courses or materials, many won't be able to dedicate—for example—the time to cram or take Sunday classes an hour away due to jobs or family commitments.

qntty 10y ago
Studying with that kind of intensity certainly is. For most kids "studying for the SAT" means doing 1 or 2 practice tests on a lazy Saturday.
- basseq 10y ago
  But is the difference due to some secret that "non-rich kids" don't know? That most kids don't do more isn't a surprise. But why don't they know more? This article suggests that "they didn't know they could (or should)". I would wager that most kids don't want to put in the work to be a true over-achiever. Or because they haven't been raised that way. Not because they're unaware of the benefits. I'm trying not to fall into the trap of suggesting the reason for success is "hard work" when socioeconomic differences in opportunities explain much or all of the gap. But that truly seems to be the thesis presented here.
  - qntty 10y ago
    I would certainly agree that they are aware of the benefits of going to a good school. I just think you are seriously underestimating the importance that mimicking other people plays in learning to do something you've never done before. We all do it, when you're writing some code that you've never worked with before, you read the code of someone else who has done something similar. When navigating the little rituals involved in going to college, you do what your friend is doing or what your older sister did or (for more ambitious students) what the people on college confidential tell you to do. It's not that there is some bit of knowledge that poor kids don't have, it's that they have no one to mimic. There are a million little decisions that go into how to spend your time in high school. Figuring out the best way to spend it is far too big of a task for any one student. The only way to have any hope of spending it well is to copy what others have done and learn from their mistakes. In elite schools, you have much better role models to mimic. If you want to go to Harvard, you can mimic what that kid who got into Harvard did last year. A general principle like "just work hard if you want to succeed" is worse that useless for a kids in mediocre school districts. Not only does it do nothing to show them how to actually spend their time, but it's so general that it can never be proved "wrong." So if a student tries to do what they consider "hard work" and that doesn't lead to success, people aren't going to stop saying it because it didn't work. Moreover, since the kid who failed knows that they were given "correct advice" they're just going to blame themselves for their failure rather than realizing that they have the same potential as people in better school districts, they just don't have as much opportunity to realize it. Still, advice like "work hard to succeed" will always be "wrong" in the sense that it's the wrong thing to tell a young person. No matter what advice you give a young person, it needs to be much more specific and personalized if you want it to have a reasonably good chance of being understood and used correctly. You can't expect someone with so little life experience to fill in the blanks for themselves.

guyzero 10y ago

Ah, the PSAT. Because one high-pressure standardized test isn't enough.

sbov 10y ago
Not necessarily. My circle of friends took the PSAT, but skipped the SAT.
- guyzero 10y ago
  Sure, but why? Why isn't there just one test? Why are merit scholarships handed out for PSAT results and not SAT results? I can't see any compelling reason other than making more work for the College Board.

dysoco 10y ago

And here I am in Argentina; getting into a public university, without having to pay, take exams or even have a good GPA in High School. How expensive and competitive education is in the USA seems so alien to me; I wonder if it's really worth it. The only apparent benefit is networking and I'd dare say that only matters in Finance/Law. Am I really that screwed if I want to work at Google/Amazon/Whatever and I haven't graduated from MIT or Stanford?

virmundi 10y ago
Kinda...if you have work experience from somewhere else you could get into Google. Amazon is a bit more open; you have to put up with their interview crap.
- oblio 10y ago
  Not really. If you're from a decent university in your country you can at least get an internship at Google. I've had quite a few colleagues in Romania that did that. Google, Facebook, Microsoft, etc.
  - virmundi 10y ago
    That is fair. From watching HN over the years, Google seems to prefer certain US colleges for new US grads. I myopically assumed a US-centric perspective in my comment. If you come from one of the large well respected programs like GA Tech, they'll look at you once they looked at the Stanford folk.
hrehhf 10y ago
No. There is something of an echo chamber on these subjects. Just learn and work hard.
GuiA 10y ago
> Am I really that screwed if I want to work at Google/Amazon/Whatever and I haven't graduated from MIT or Stanford? The vast majority of Google/Facebook/etc. employees aren't from MIT/Stanford/Harvard/Berkeley/etc. It's definitely much harder to get a job at these companies straight out of college if you didn't attend a big name university. 10 years later, it doesn't matter. I got my undergrad from an unknown French university, and went to grad school at a large US state university with no brand name recognition (as is the case for many, many immigrants). Recruiters from top tier companies ignored me out of grad school, but after a few startups/talks at major conferences/open source projects/etc., I now work at such a company (and now recruiters are very eager to get some of my time).

linkmotif 10y ago

Oh the liberal guilt. It really runs so hard through so much the NYT pumps out. I guess you're rich if you study for the SATs. I'm all for bridging the gap, but this nascent Bolshevism

misingnoglic 10y ago
I think you missed the entire point of the article. It's not saying that they just need to study, they also need to know what the secret to the success is. Would you have thought that a test like the PSAT would be useful for 11th graders only so that they could get national merit scholarships? I didn't know this until my wealthy friends told me...
- linkmotif 10y ago
  The SAT in its own right is total BS. You want to fix the problems with wealth inequality you don't go getting people on equal footing with the SAT. You get rid of the SAT, you get rid of many other things. You put power into the hands of the people instead of huge corporations like the College Board and "universities" that are really just minor league sports centers.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- Bartweiss 10y ago
  > Would you have thought that a test like the PSAT would be useful for 11th graders only so that they could get national merit scholarships? Wait, is this actually not common knowledge? I could swear it was included with the official PSAT materials we got handed in the test, and I know my school publicized it like crazy prior to the exam. It was a mediocre public school, too. I totally believe you, but that (way more than the study-ability of the SAT) is a surprising thing to me. Differences in quality I get, differences in common knowledge still throw me off.
- BeetleB 10y ago
  >It's not saying that they just need to study, they also need to know what the secret to the success is. I'll grant that the SAT has changed since I took it, but if people are claiming the secret to a good grade in the SAT is to take prep courses for the SAT, they are mistaken. The "secret" is to know how to study effectively. People who need a paid tutor to help them with the SAT are not learning the lessons they should.

Kenji 10y ago

>I couldn’t afford a $3,000 40-hour prep course or tutor. If you aim for an elite college, you should be an autodidact anyway. You should be able to teach literally everything you want yourself, using only resources like the internet and books. Because trust me, nobody will help you with that integral that spans one page and you just can't resolve. Or help you find that annoying bug in your program. You're all alone. But you can resolve it all if you invest enough time. And at the end of the day, at your workplace, you will never have trouble with the challenges they throw at you.

throwaway9475 10y ago
How is it down there in Galt's Gulch?
- Kenji 10y ago
  I also enjoy my stay in sarcasm town.

ftlio 10y ago

I took my SAT scores from 90th percentile to 98th percentile by buying a book, doing a few sample problems every night for a couple of weeks, and reading the test taking tips in the back. Probably the most helpful tip was that all the math diagrams were drawn to scale. The bigger benefit of all of this to me was the SATs as another example of how truly arbitrary the world seems to be, and how little extra effort is actually required to curb that arbitrariness towards your goals.

SamReidHughes 10y ago
Some of the improvement was probably age-related brain growth. I noticed in high school and college that as I got older, my performance on repeated math tests or contests mysteriously improved, even if I didn't do any practice in between. Math problems that seemed out of my reach suddenly became attainable. Some friends of mine noticed the same thing when I pointed it out to them.
diminoten 10y ago
Even taking it twice is a huge boost, I don't think most folks even realize you can/should. It's so arbitrary, I bet the majority of folks would improve on their second test, but the only people who try are the ones who know about it.
- sokoloff 10y ago
  I'm not even sure how many times I took the SAT (I think it was 4: at age 11, 12, and then twice in high school). I know I took the PSAT twice. Granted my parents were both in public education and so were more in tune with what was possible, but we were by no means rich (see also: both parents were in public education). I took it twice before age 13 in conjunction with https://my.vanderbilt.edu/smpy/ https://my.vanderbilt.edu/smpy/

siliconc0w 10y ago

I grew up in a SuperZIP and I resent this article revealing our precious secrets.

tabeth 10y ago

The SAT is a pretty silly test. When it was out of 2400 I took it for the first time and got a 1800. I studied for literally a week and increased my score to 2100, which isn't really that good, but a testament to how "studyable" the test is. If education in this country was worth anything the SATs would be unnecessary.

djtriptych 10y ago
How do you know your ability to do that isn't rare?
- Bartweiss 10y ago
  Agreed - most research on SAT studying seems to suggest that this is rare. Big gains are most prevalent with either smart-but-unstudied people who get large gains from learning what to expect, or under-educated people who weren't previously taught major test components like algebra. A 300 point jump is extreme.
  - tabeth 10y ago
    I don't know if a 300 point jump is extreme or not, but I'd like to point out that most people who do poorly on the SAT probably weren't getting the education they needed, which was my overall point. Put differently, I assert that all people who don't do "well" on the SAT fall into the two categories you posed.
    - Bartweiss 10y ago
      > I assert that all people who don't do "well" on the SAT fall into the two categories you posed. I think that's provably wrong. SAT prep courses offer a bump, but even ones with big promises don't deliver all that well. Evidence suggests 300 points is very large. The "smart but unstudied" pool I mentioned is likely small and tends to get strong gains up front - these are people who get 100+ points from the PSAT or 1-2 practice tests. (This pool is anecdotal. I knew several people in it, but I don't know of studies at the high end of the scale.) The other pool is real but not the same as you described. It largely represents people who missed core content like 'geometry' and did prep so long and extensive they learned totally new material there. There are lots of kids with low scores from bad education, agreed, but fixing that is not "studied for a week" stuff. More broadly, I'm saying that in practice "I studied for a week and gained 300 points" is an extreme outlier. Mostly people either see <100 gains from studying or only see big gains from serious, new-content education.

rhino369 10y ago

The real solution is to design a test that you can't study for effectively. However, I suspect the study-ability for the SAT enhances it's predictive ability. Someone who does whatever it takes to learn some words for vocab testing will do whatever it takes to learn about sociology. The truth is that standardized tests aren't less predictive for poor students. Whatever causes the score gap also causes an achievement gap once they arrive at school.

Bartweiss 10y ago
> The real solution is to design a test that you can't study for effectively. There's a very strong pressure against that. The analogy section of the SAT was a proxy IQ test, though more study-able than Raven's Matrices. People objected to the parts that could be studied (infamously, "runner : track :: oarsman : regatta"), but the solution was to drop the entire section and preserve only the more learnable portions. Which is frustrating, because as far as I know it undermined your last comment - SAT scores are actually more responsive to wealth than they used to be, because factors like study and the quality of the local math department are more important.
noxToken 10y ago
How do you design a test for which you can't study? Even if everything is laid out in the test with complete hypothetical knowledge (e.g. redefine addition for all real numbers from x + y = z to something else like x + y + (x/2) = z), you can still study for it by honing in on basic arithmetic and algebra. This isn't meant as snark. I really don't understand.
- rhino369 10y ago
  The point of the tests are to test aptitude not knowledge. So if someone can spend 10 hours learning basic algebra and massively raise their score the test is failing at being an aptitude test, it's now a knowledge test. If the college wants to know how much alegrba knowledge a person has they can just look at their math grades. They want to know aptitude. Some standardized tests have fairly narrow topics or have patterns in their problems that are learnable. Beyond just testing knowledge, these only specifically reward studying for the test. The SAT used to have a set of "SAT words" that you could memorize for the verbal section. That somewhat helps your vocab, but only to the words used on teh SAT. The ACT used to have a trick where the short answer of the grammar section was the right answer like 70% of the time. The LSAT has logic game problems that can be categorized and then solved with specific techniques. If you learn the techniques you'll never get more than a few questions wrong. This is purely rewarding studying for the test. If a new type of test is used the techniques fail until someone creates new techniques. If you just learn the five most common equations for SAT algebra your score jumps up but your math ability isn't much better.

vecter 10y ago

> Most took the SAT cold. This really bothers me. Obviously most people can't afford expensive prep classes, but it doesn't cost much to buy your children a few practice books. Back when I took the SAT, the Barron's book was great, and I got most of my value from that. This is just poor parenting.

Bartweiss 10y ago
> This is just poor parenting. I disagree. My parents got me a book of practice tests and strongly encouraged me to study. I took the PSAT cold, and the SAT with ~1 hour of study. My school offered free SAT prep classes to students, courtesy of some kind-hearted teachers. Attendance was miserably low, I certainly wasn't there. Even students who studied hard and did well at high-end colleges didn't study for the SAT. I'm frustrated that we ascribe every moment of lost potential to "bad parenting", I think it's a way to disregard both human nature and structural forces. God knows it's not my parents' fault I took the test cold.
dragonwriter 10y ago
Waiting till your senior year is poor parenting. Taking it cold before that, assessing the results, and deciding if further investment is necessary before retesting is intelligent.
- vecter 10y ago
  Why not just take some practice tests and assess then, as opposed to waiting for the real thing? You'll get a very good idea of where you stand and save yourself the pain of having to retake it again in the future when you get a first score that's certainly suboptimal relative to your potential.
  - sokoloff 10y ago
    Testing under the real conditions for practice will make the next testing session be familiar; you'll know exactly what to expect, etc. Taking a practice test at home or on the computer is different from taking a real test at the test site. IMO, it's not that much pain.

11thEarlOfMar 10y ago

The lesson here is that one element to career success (for it's own sake) is understanding how your performance will be measured, and then working specifically to 'score well' by those metrics. Companies that understand this can craft incentives within their culture so that employee goals are aligned with company goals and both employees and the company succeed. Companies that have serious problems, like an Uber or Theranos, are likely suffering from inappropriate reward structure, whether explicitly or implicitly defined. The students who avail themselves of professional test prep are getting a life lesson in climbing the corporate ladder. This is one method by which wealth breeds wealth.

kome 10y ago

When Americans talks about SAT or standardized test in general, I cannot stop thinking about The Rise of Meritocracy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_of_the_Meritocracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_of_the_Meritocracy it was a dystopia, but it became daily reality in the USA. Those tests are not meritocracy, they are a farce of meritocracy.

rayvd 10y ago
... cuz standardized testing isn't commonplace everywhere.
- kome 10y ago
  Not in continental Europe for sure.

SamReidHughes 10y ago

Note that research shows SAT prep only increases scores by about 30 points, according to an old yummyfajitas comment that I searched for which links to this paywalled article. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124278685697537839.html http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124278685697537839.html My suspicion is that a lot of beliefs about the efficacy of SAT prep are from customers that also observe age-related improvements.

trendia 10y ago
There is a scam in India that works like this: A group will offer "guaranteed admission" to top universities if you pay them money and follow their program. If you fail to be admitted, they will give you your money back without hesitation. Here's the rub: They don't actually have to help you that much. As long as enough people get in (who would have gotten in anyway), then they can be profitable in the aggregate.
dragonwriter 10y ago
> Note that research shows SAT prep only increases scores by about 30 points Simply retaking the test increases scores by 15 to 29 points. https://psychsocialissues.com/2011/07/20/sat-the-validity-and-reliability-and-its-effect-on-cultural-and-racial-minorities/ https://psychsocialissues.com/2011/07/20/sat-the-validity-an...
- aswanson 10y ago
  Increased mine by 120 points.

mcone 10y ago

> I only wish that more lower- and middle-income peers knew how to pursue such aggressive strategies. But isn't exclusion one of the goals of these standardized tests? To "weed out" those who can't afford to and/or don't know how to get such high scores? If anyone could attain a high score on the SAT, SAT II, and ACT tests, ivy league schools might need to come up with another way to determine whether or not applicants come from wealthy homes.

Bartweiss 10y ago
Eh, not especially fair. The SAT is harder to study than most of the claims here suggest, and they already have your zip code and extracurricular list. Those are a much better proxy for wealth than the SAT.

nyolfen 10y ago

with 'rich kid' levels of prep, how much can one reasonably expect scores to increase vs baseline?

strictnein 10y ago

> "I realized that they didn’t just want to score exceptionally well on the SAT. They were gunning for a score on the Preliminary SAT exams that would put them in the top percentile of students in the United States and make them National Merit Scholars in the fall" Huh. I took the PSAT ~20 years ago without even knowing what it really was. I didn't even know that was how I ended up a National Merit Scholar until I read this.

L_Rahman 10y ago

I grew up in Bangladesh. I had a 12kbps internet connection and access to used bookstores a 1.5hr rickshaw ride away from where I lived. My parents can barely speak English and my dad was a cab (now Uber) driver in New York City. I had no tutors. I didn't know anyone else prepping for the test. I studied alone, with test prep books I bought at $2 a pop and a $40 course from the college board I subscribed to only for the answer explanations to the questions in my pirated book. My test prep strategy came from googling "how to study for the SAT" and reading the multiple hundred page thread on CollegeConfidential about the "Xiggi method" I scored a 2120 on my first SAT and a 2360 on my second. People from disadvantaged communities suffer many challenges and there is real inequality. But standardized testing is too often bashed at the expense of the real systemic problems - that education outcomes are a holistic problem that require us to have better schools, better home environments, better food safety, better primary education, better internet access. The government should actively play a role in providing many of those things. But test prep is not even close to being the problem.

Balgair 10y ago

My SO is a teacher and is proctoring the SAT tomorrow. Our state mandates that all students take it free of charge in their junior year as a general aptitude test used for funding decisions and lots of other stuff. So there are a lot of students taking it together on a single day during class time. The school also provides the PSAT and requires all juniors to take it (paid by the school district only). Students are assigned to rooms based on their last name, alphabetical order and all that. When they gave the PSAT in the fall, it was ... eye opening. I never considered the possibility of a fight breaking out during the test, let alone the 3 that broke out in my SO's proctoring session. How do you control for desks being thrown about during the math section? (Yes really). The reason was that the boys were bored after just writing their names and doing nothing for 4 hours (no phones or books are allowed) and then they started fighting as boys do. The loudness of the room in general is also a factor to control for, as the students that are sitting-for but not taking the test tend to chit-chat and try to hit on each other, as bored teenagers are want to do. Richer areas don't just have studying to help them out, they also have a ... cultural... sense that one should not draw blood or try for a date during these tests.