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It's far easier for rich students to game GPA, college essays and extracurriculars than it is for them to game the SAT. For GPA, they can hire a private tutor

• thescriptkiddie 5y ago
  I wonder how much taking the SAT multiple times plays a role. Personally I took it at least three times, and my score improved each time (don't remember by how much).
  • Loughla 5y ago
    Which is also tied to socioeconomic status. If you can pay, your score will go up the more you take it, according to my experience, and the college board. If you can't pay, you take it the one time it's offered for free if your school offers that. Then you get what you get.
    • whimsicalism 5y ago
      I think we should learn from the gaokao and only test once a year. The fact that you can pay for more tests (and pay more for "score choice") is the most unjust part of the whole thing.
      • ericd 5y ago
        Counterpoint, you don’t want being sick or having a bad day to ruin your chances at what you’ve been working for for years. Also, being under pressure is generally not good for people’s ability to reason calmly - another reason not to make it so high stakes. So I really hope what you’re suggesting doesn’t come to pass. We should probably make the SAT nearly free, though, if that price actually keeps people who’d otherwise go to college from taking it more than once.
        • logifail 5y ago
          > being under pressure is generally not good for people’s ability to reason calmly - another reason not to make it so high stakes Q: Could be that being able to "reason calmly under pressure" is something that a future employer might well be interested in?
          • Loughla 5y ago
            A: Should your entire future job prospects be dictated by something that an abstract employer in the future might want? Or should the test we use try to get at what is really important; actual knowledge and skill?
          • ericd 5y ago
            It could be, depending on the field you choose, but that’s not particularly relevant to what college you’ll do well at.
• paulpauper 5y ago
  This times 10. GPAs have been rendered close to useless, especially at identifying above average ability, due to grade inflation, and also extreme variability between schools. Same for valedictorian and other appellations.
  • paulmd 5y ago
    yeah this is a really hard problem and I don't see a fix outside of standardized testing. Every school is individually incentivized to use every trick - grading out of 5.0, grading loosely, giving a bonus score for AP/IB courses "because of difficulty", etc and teachers are obviously very sympathetic to the future of their students and the impact that being a Grading Nazi could have. And parents are obviously incentivized to find the school that's going to make Little Billy look best (best educated is great but not sufficient, that's why we're discussing testing). You need a uniform grading system, which means a uniform material and a uniform grading process, which is... standardized testing, or at least AP/IB courses.
    • satsuma 5y ago
      i came from a rural high school that didn't have any ap/ib courses. i wonder how much that affected my college applications. i still got to go to the college of my choice (fire up chips!) but i have to wonder -- if i was able to boost my gpa using ap/ib courses, would i have received more scholarship opportunities/better offers from other schools?
      • mason55 5y ago
        That assumes the AP classes would have boosted your GPA. If the harder class knocked you from an A to a B then it would have been a net negative, at least at my high school (AP counted as a 1.2 weighting, so an A in a regular class is 4.0 and a B in an AP class is 3.0 * 1.2 = 3.6).
      • jacobsenscott 5y ago
        Admissions officers will tell you they are aware of what programs schools have, and take that into account. If your school has no AP with GPA inflation your 3.x is the same as a 4.x at some bigger high school. How true that is idk.
• paulmd 5y ago
  I don't really have evidence for this, but it's always felt like SAT/ACT coaching doesn't improve scores so much as get rid of some of the "dumb mistakes" that cost you score. It's gonna help you when the test writer was playing some gotcha tricks with phrasing or whatever, but if you don't understand the material, even narrowing it down to a 50/50 isn't going to get you a good score, and if you truly don't understand the material you probably won't be able to eliminate half the answers anyway. And they are absolutely aware of the "answer b/c if you don't know" nugget, that's nothing special either. Also "adaptive difficulty" systems where the system throws harder questions at you after successfully answering the easier ones are basically the "elo rating" of academics. Everyone hates elo but... it slots you into a very statistically accurate ranking. If you score highly on Level 600 questions but you are failing on the Level 700 questions, odds are good you are somewhere between 600 and 700. My understanding is that's what SAT/ACT were moving towards about 10 years ago, that it would be computerized and "everyone's test is personalized" by the elo system probing your exact knowledge level from a bank of questions with difficulty scores dynamically based on how "similar ranked" students performed on that question.
  • sjg007 5y ago
    Coaching and studying improves SAT scores. People learn the type of questions they do poorly on and can study to improve. The SAT is a test you can study for.
    • likpok 5y ago
      The top link is a study that shows that the improvement is pretty marginal in practice. It does miss something: in specific ethnic enclaves SAT coaching is much more effective, perhaps because of a culture of out-of-school schoolwork and teaching beyond SAT prep. Those enclaves aren't particularly wealthy either (if I recall correctly it was a Korean enclave). Even then we're talking 70 points -- not nothing, but also not a radical transformation.
      • hhs 5y ago
        > Even then we're talking 70 points -- not nothing, but also not a radical transformation. That would depend on the baseline score. For instance, if it was a 1510 baseline and then went up +70, then it would be useful.
• erdos4d 5y ago
  As a counterargument, a fake ID is all that a rich person needs to put a smart kid in their place at the testing center. Those places are usually huge, nobody knows anyone, and if you flash a legit looking ID, you will have no trouble sitting the test. GPA and such require effort over years to game (and maybe the kid actually learns something from all that tutoring, who knows).
  • LewisVerstappen 5y ago
    Sure. So, 2 things. 1) The solution to that is to improve security measures. Not to remove the SAT entirely. 2) It is significantly harder to find someone who can score well on the SAT and is willing to take the test for you compared to gaming GPA, extra curriculars, etc. I've heard of tons of instances of people hiring homework-help services, their dad paying $5k to get their extra-curricular club going, private tennis lessons, etc. But I've never personally heard of someone paying someone else to take the SAT for them. I'm sure it occasionally happens, but it's a lot harder to pull off compared to manipulating GPA, extracurriculars, college essay.
    • colinmhayes 5y ago
      > It is significantly harder to find someone who can score well on the SAT and is willing to take the test for you compared to gaming GPA, extra curriculars, etc. Idk about that. I found people to pay me for taking the ACT for them through my alma mater's subreddit. Top schools are full of people who got 35/36, I'm sure there are plenty of other people who scored there and would be willing to take the standardized test for 10k too. In fact, in some ways it's easier to find someone to take the test for you than it is to find someone to boost your extracurriculars because you can structure the payout around the score obtained. I got 10k for a 36, 7k for a 35... no guarantees with tutors and coaches.
      • sct202 5y ago
        If the parents/students are willing to cheat on the SAT, they're probably going to have no issue manufacturing extracurriculars. The schools for the most part aren't auditing run of the mill activities (student org leadership, fundraisers, mission trips, local awards), and a lot of local newspapers basically let you write your own articles for them so cheaters can build up documentation if they're really motivated.
• foobarian 5y ago
  > A 30 point increase out of 2400 points is not material to college admissions. Not so sure about that. Beyond the fact that that number is an average, the question is from where to where. So many kids get perfect 2400 scores that going from 2370 to 2400 might be the difference of getting eliminated from competitive admission pools altogether. Whereas nobody will care about you going from 1850 to 1880. P.s. I am dating myself a bit with the 2400 range, which seems to have changed at some point. Transform accordingly :-)
  • paulpauper 5y ago
    But test prep is marketed to people who are average or below average. Saying you can gain hundreds of points is clearly misleading/deceptive advertising.
  • giantg2 5y ago
    Are there really that many kids getting perfect scores? I got a pretty low/average score, but took the test early in junior year so I hadn't taken some of the more advanced math courses yet. I never took it again since I got into everywhere I applied to (didn't apply to ivy league, obviously). Seemed like most other kids I knew did similarly with the smartest kids maybe 150 points higher (2400 time-frame). Nobody I know got a perfect score, or even close to it. Edit: man, after talking about this I want to see what my score was exactly. No way am I paying $30 for an archived score though. I want to say it was only 1200/1600 (the schools only wanted 2 of the sections). But I'm not sure I trust my memory for something so inconsequential from that long ago. Extra edit: found my old score report. It's worse than I thought. The writing was 570 (74th percentile) and math was 510 (47th percentile). I'm a lot dumber than I remember.
    • foobarian 5y ago
      I guess not exactly. But still looks pretty crowded at the top end: https://www.prepscholar.com/sat/s/colleges/Harvard-SAT-scores-GPA https://www.prepscholar.com/sat/s/colleges/Harvard-SAT-score...
      • 5y ago
• Invictus0 5y ago
  I took one of those expensive SAT prep courses and yes, I agree that those don't increase scores very much, the program I took was awful. However, I totally disagree that rich people can't game the SAT. I used to be a moderator at /r/SAT and /r/ACT on reddit. All of the questions and answers for all of the exams, including subject tests are known and published online. Both SAT and ACT routinely reuse exams from prior years, and anyone who puts in enough time to study the old exams can do well on the exams. And rich people have the luxury of more time to study, because they don't have to work second jobs or cook for their families or clean the house after school and have more services that can save them time.
  • diebeforei485 5y ago
    What's great is /r/SAT and /r/ACT are available to basically everyone, even with a very slow internet connection. Extracurriculars, not so much.
  • scarmig 5y ago
    > And rich people have the luxury of more time to study, because they don't have to work second jobs or cook for their families or clean the house after school and have more services that can save them time. Unlike tricks for getting into university like studying after school for classes, hiring private tutors, or taking extracurriculars like lacrosse or rowing, which are great levelers equally accessible to the rich and the poor.
  • visarga 5y ago
    > And rich people have the luxury of more time to study Those rich students, they cheat by studying harder! Btw, I don't actually think being rich correlates with better academic achievements. It's better to be in the middle, not rich, not poor. To keep motivated.
    • cm2012 5y ago
      Nah, there is a straight linear correlation between parental income and sat score. https://static01.nyt.com/images/2009/08/27/business/economy/allscores.jpg https://static01.nyt.com/images/2009/08/27/business/economy/...
• azinman2 5y ago
  I personally went up 300 points with tutoring, and that was when it was out of 1600. n=1
  • sokoloff 5y ago
    I went up 240 points by taking the test an additional time and a grade later, without any tutoring in between. Also n=1.
• balls187 5y ago
  > The NACAC did a study on this and they found that average gains of test-prep students is ~30 points (this was when the SAT was 2400 points). When I took the SAT it was only 1600 (pre 2400), and SAT prep did in fact help scores significantly. Back than, the test was designed not for scholastic aptitude (as it's name suggests) but instead to guarantee a standard distribution of scores. It's been a long time since I cared about the SAT's so I assume once the word got out that the test could be gamed, the people behind it updated it. > It's far easier for rich students to game GPA, college essays and extracurriculars than it is for them to game the SAT. Rich students don't need to game anything. They simply get admitted because their family name is on a building.
  • paulpauper 5y ago
    >Rich students don't need to game anything. They simply get admitted because their family name is on a building. The mean parental income for Ivy League students is 170k, which is above middle class, but not Bezos-level rich. What is considered to be rich is a huge spectrum. The difference between 7 figure rich vs. 9 figure rich..is up to a factor of 1000. Those whose parents can donate enough to be commemorated on a building, is an outlier even for the rich. Unless your parents are dynastically rich, being rich is not that much of an advantage for admissions.
  • samatman 5y ago
    > instead to guarantee a standard distribution of scores Which is precisely what you want in an assessment test. Any assessment test. You only want a normal distribution if the quality under assessment is normally distributed, but you do want a test where the worst candidate does better than chance, and exactly one candidate gets a perfect score. That's an ideal which is only approximated, but it is the ideal.
    • balls187 5y ago
      For context I graduated high school in the late nighties (I took the paper/scantron test). At the time, the SAT was purported to provide a score that predict ability to perform academically at higher learning institutions. Along with other factors such as GPA, and participation in extra curricular activities, a school could reasonably determine how well a student would do. In practice, the normal distribution for scores correlated with the distribution of college performance. It was a reasonable predictor of success, but it did penalize students from certain backgrounds. Because the test was devised by psychologists and statisticians, uncovering the pattern to the types of questions and the expected answered allowed test prep people to devise tricks to improve scores beyond the expected deviation.
• __MatrixMan__ 5y ago
  I used to take the ACT for people, they'd pay me in beer (which I wasn't old enough to buy for myself). You'd get ID'd at the entrance, but nobody kept track of whether the name on your test was the name on your ID, so you'd just take each other's tests. It might be harder now, I don't know.
  • bena 5y ago
    But they also wouldn't be old enough to buy you beer. Unless you are suggesting adults would buy you beer for you to take the ACT on behalf of a minor they knew. Which seems odd.
    • tiahura 5y ago
      He’s old. You used to be able to buy beer at 18. This country used to be a lot less uptight.
      • bena 5y ago
        And 18 year olds aren't taking the ACT. Or if they are, there are other reasons why they aren't getting into certain schools and they aren't as concerned with getting good ACT scores. Not to mention, the drinking age being 18 was for a window of about 14 years in the 70s and 80s. (Unless he's from Louisiana)
      • __MatrixMan__ 5y ago
        This was in 2004. I was 17, they were in their mid 20's. I know that one was training to be a dental hygienist, or at least wanted to be training for that. The other few didn't share as much, but they all knew each other so maybe it was the same thing? I highly doubt I've harmed anyone by enabling their hygienist to get where she was without knowing the formula for the volume of a cone. As far as I'm concerned the gumption necessary to hack your way in is worth just as much as the gumption needed to pass authentically.
    • 8note 5y ago
      Non-adults are capable of getting alcohol, without buying directly from a store. Typically they know somebody who knows an adult that will to the transaction with the store and provide the id. Otherwise, some stores accept good fake ids, or squint to believe that the person buying actually matches the picture on the card
• ar_lan 5y ago
  For anecdotal/lived experience, to your point: The rich kids in my (public) school were the ones afforded not only tutors, but also just the insight into extra-curriculars. They were the ones who had parents who knew to sign them up for college courses at ~15-16 years old to ensure they could maximize their GPA (5.0 scale, so getting a 5.0 was literally impossible unless you did this). This created a competitive disadvantage for kids who just really didn't realize these resources existed (plus, having parents that would support it + take you to the local college to take additional courses). Not to mention that, but there were sports our school didn't participate in, but the richer kids had levels of access to that looked great on college applications - rowing and lacrosse specifically come to mind. So, essentially - rich kids have many easier ways to pad their college applications. It's not that they aren't working hard(er) - they are. But they have easily acccessible opportunities that middle-to-lower-class students (like myself) did not have access to. -- Coming to the SAT, I'm not surprised by that study. I wasn't afforded the same opportunities as these richer kids, but my SAT score was highly competitive with them. I was ranked 50th in my class with a 4.55 GPA (my 4.0s were gym each year, and I think one or two electives that weren't AP), but my SAT score was a 2300, which was relatively similar to most of the hyper-performant, wealthier kids. -- This is all super anecdotal. I was definitely upset by all of this at the time - but it didn't affect my life very negatively. I still was able to get into a great school, and have a great career now. But these disadvantages certainly persist against others, and re-adding standardized tests likely will help level the playing field in my mind.
  • whimsicalism 5y ago
    This rings true with my Gen Z high school experience as of ~7 years ago.
  • WalterBright 5y ago
    As far as extra-curricular activities go, like sports, etc., those aren't really the point. The point is for the candidate to demonstrate that they can accomplish significant things other than academics. This can be anything. For me, I didn't do sports, or any school extracurriculars. What I did do was run a small business (paper route), used the money to fund my hotrodding efforts, was an Eagle scout (back in the days when that was something), etc. Basically, you just gotta find something non-trivial to do that demonstrates motivation.
• synergy20 5y ago
  Being a poor student myself, the EC is way more expensive and challenging for poor families(can not afford those at all), comparatively, SAT/ACT is actually much easier, a few books and keep bugging teachers can carry a long way at extremely low-cost. Comparing to EC's cost(and time), SAT/ACT mentor(online or offline) is still fairly affordable. Living in internet era, I am jealous that nowadays 'poor' students can find so much resources online, most for free, even MIT courses! All you need is an ordinary computer and maybe internet access, which are quite affordable for nearly all families in US. I will vote up for SAT/ACT and vote down on those EC from a socioeconomic perspective if I have to pick one.
• spywaregorilla 5y ago
  Anecdotally I think it raised my scores by maybe 100 points. Not coaching so much as just doing practice tests to learn that, especially for the reading, the questions were actually pretty dumb. Lots of them are asking for the most basic insights. This is surprisingly non obvious or at least was not to me at the time. Many questions were filled with "traps" of answers that felt more insightful and more broadly relevant; but less relevant to the specific passages being questioned on.
• parkingrift 5y ago
  >It's far easier for rich students to game GPA, college essays and extracurriculars than it is for them to game the SAT. Disagree. I worked for the Princeton Review while in college back in the day. We would outright guarantee 99th percentile for one on one tutoring. If you didn't get 99th percentile the course was refunded or you could take it again. For classroom tutoring we would guarantee some improvement of I believe 200 (out of 1600) with the same refund or take it again option. Candidly, no one would pay for a prep course for a 30 point gain. These course are expensive. Some of them hundreds of dollars per hour. The cited research is pretty fundamentally flawed. "Although extensive, the academic research base does have limitations. Most notably, few published studies have been conducted on students taking admission tests since 2000. Only two studies have been published on the effects for ACT scores, and no studies have been published since the 2005 change to the SAT, which added the Writ- ing section among other changes." This position also doesn't pass the sniff test. GPA is accumulated over four years of study. SAT/ACT is a single test. You can't retroactively improve your GPA by doing better in the past. But you can dramatically improve your SAT/ACT results.
  • bzbarsky 5y ago
    > Candidly, no one would pay for a prep course for a 30 point gain. My understanding of the research in this area is that the 30 point gain is if you compare people who take a prep course to people who put in an equivalent amount of time preparing on their own with the widely available (e.g. can check them out of the local public library in many cases) preparation materials. The 200 point gain is if you compare people who did the prep to people who have not done any prep. The set of people who can't make themselves put in the time without the structure of a course would benefit by a lot more than 30 points from the course, and would pay for it. And do.
  • mgh2 5y ago
    Maybe there was another variable at play: language. SATs are in English. If English is not a student's primary language and fluency improves as they advance academically, up to a plateau with age. Not sure if this was properly controlled in SAT studies. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK11007/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK11007/
• hatsunearu 5y ago
  Anecdotally I improved 600 to 400 points from test prep, depending on what you count as my "first SAT test" and my last SAT test.
• bikenaga 5y ago
  Thanks for the interesting link. However, based on the paper, it seems like a "30 point increase out of 2400 points" could be significant. The study says: "A survey of NACAC-member colleges unexpectedly revealed that in a substantial minority of cases, colleges report either that they use a cut-off test score in the admission process or that a small increase in test score could have a significant impact on an applicant’s chances of being admitted." (p. 2) The paper later notes: "These results indicate that in some cases more than one third of postsecondary institutions agreed that a score increase on the SAT-M of 20 points, or a score increase on the SAT-CR of 10 points, would 'significantly improve student’s likelihood of admission.' This proportion tends to rise as the base level of the SAT score before the 20 or 10 point score improvement rises. This is especially true for the more selective institutions. At lower scores on the SAT scale, a small score increase does the most to improve a student’s chances of admission at less selective institutions; at higher scores, the same increase appears to have an equally large or even larger impact at more selective institutions." (p. 19) The graphs on pages 18 and 19 give more detail. The paper also notes that "The College Board gives a specific example of a use that should be avoided: 'Making decisions about otherwise qualified students based only on small differences in test scores'." So it appears that up to a third of the institutions surveyed are not following this guideline. It would be interesting to know who they are. I agree with your comment about rich kids gaming GPA, essays, and extracurriculars. Daniel Markovits addresses many of these points in "The Meritocracy Trap". Since I don't see how you can prevent gaming GPA, essays, or extracurriculars, given the alternatives, you're probably right that the tests may be better in this respect.
• qubitcoder 5y ago
  I'm not so sure about that. About 20 years ago, counselors advised taking the SAT/ACT only once, since your score wouldn't really change. I took the SAT several times. Each time my score went up significantly. My high school ended up creating a new award category for "greatest score increase", or something to that effect. I believe it was ~200 points. I'd taken a prep course being offered by a local instructor. However, the biggest benefit was from dedicated self-study (Kaplan books, as I recall).
• david38 5y ago
  I live in a very rich town, like super rich. I work in tech so am rich by the standards of general population, but by the standards of Silicon Valley. My child did very well on the ACT. All she did was buy a $35 practice book, which almost anyone can do. Literally this was it. Furthermore, she doesn’t know of a single friend or acquaintance that hired a private tutor. All the nay-sayers belly-ache about this but for most children, even the “rich” ones, this simply isn’t true. It’s most definitely not necessary. Considering the weight of the SATs/ACTs you would figure a student would at least buy a cheap book and put in two hours per week for a few weeks in practice. In practice, the vast majority of students who do this do quite well. The improvement is dramatic. Everyone wants to always blame “the system” which yes, has an influence, but nobody wants to put ANY responsibility on the student themselves.
  • dayvid 5y ago
    I agree. I spent some time as a Kaplan tutor. The students in my experience fell into a few buckets: 1. They already know the material/are serious and would do fine without tutoring (maybe some small help here and there) 2. They kind of care, but need structure to study. They probably wouldn't study or study effectively without being in a class or having someone for accountability. 3. They don't care and their parents are paying for someone to babysit them to study Most students were in camps 2 and 3.
  • caffeine 5y ago
    The $250k to put a totally unqualified student through school would pay for a lot of test prep hours at some impoverished schools. It would likely take about 10 contact hours (1h/week, 10 weeks), basically enough coaching so that the result is not artificially low through under-preparation. Let’s say it costs $100/hr all-in to coach 10 kids. So for $1k you can get 10 applications from motivated, underprivileged kids whose SATs are representative of their ability. For one $50k annual ride you could run this in 50 low income schools and get 500 underprivileged applicants and then actually admit some of them who might benefit. Rather than refusing to test, and wasting those resources supporting some kid who obviously won’t hack it.
  • MaximumYComb 5y ago
• dayvid 5y ago
  I have a family friend who does consulting for rich kids w/ college admissions. You basically have someone who's on the board of an elite university coaching kids on their essay, clueing them into extra-curriculars, etc. They get paid pretty well. I also had a dinner conversation from a lady with two children in Ivy league universities who said she emphasized with the parents who went to jail for bribing schools to get their childrens admitted and would do it herself if her children couldn't get in the school. She also personally knows one of the people doing jail time for bribery. I had basically no adult academic/university guidance growing up. I just liked reading books in the library and studying things I liked. I was able to receive a scholarship to my university through my SAT scores. I'm not sure how I would square up in the current academic environment when I see the sheer amount of parent involvement in the application process. I also went to a smaller university where the level of tactics and skullduggery is limited.
• JJMcJ 5y ago
  The SAT, ACT, and even IQ tests, were originally created in part to help identity promising students who weren't from upscale backgrounds. I'm not 100% sure that the tests can't be coached, but certainly not like the "leadership", etc. And even if they can't be raised by coaching, the scores can certainly be lowered by poor education and a chaotic living situation. EDIT: Most people who can pay for coaching are already sending their kids to the kind of high schools that serve to get them ready, so they are close to their peak already. Even things like summer public service, there are consultants who can tell you, based on your target school, the best one for that school, like is it better to work on a clinic project in Honduras, or teach basic literacy in Burkina Faso. Never mind that the plane fare to get your youth group to Burkina Faso would pay the school fees for an entire village, with enough left over to pay 1/2 the teacher's salary for a year.
• Spooky23 5y ago
  Kids who aren't coached on the test strategy do worse. My high school did no SAT prep, and my parents weren't really aware of it. I was lucky in that I had an AP History teacher whose goal was for every kid to get a "5", that meant incorporating test strategy into the flow. You needed to know stuff as the ante, but knowing the magic bullshit that would give you a good essay score was the key to get the top score. I increased my score ~120 points from taking the PSAT blind in 10th grade to the SAT because I understood at that point that strategy was key and found out about it. All of this stuff is a red herring though. The nut of the controversy is that standardized tests correlate to IQ. IQ, rightly or wrongly, is perceived to be culturally biased.
• mathattack 5y ago
  I am all for reinstating the SATs, but it’s a stretch to say that it’s not impacted by socioeconomics. While test prep may have limited value, a lifetime of wealth provides more educational opportunities.
• tester756 5y ago
  >However, there is very limited evidence that SAT coaching actually increases your SAT score. The NACAC did a study on this and they found that average gains of test-prep students is ~30 points (this was when the SAT was 2400 points). IIRC SAT's equivalent of Matura in Poland, so I'll be talking about my case I've been taking advanced math exam and I had some time + some money (like 10% of minimal wage) during winter break and I decided to buy 3 lessons on analytical geometry cuz I've been terrible at geometry, but since that was analytical, then I've seen a chance to get into that I've attended those 3 lessons, did some exercises and guess what on official exam there actually was a task from analytical geometry and I managed to do it and receive full points, which basically increased my score by 10 percentage points (that's a lot, I'd say) Saying that 10% of minimal wage spent was equal to 10 perc. points is naive, but you get the point What if I were attending those for whole year? 2? 3? hard to say.
  • MiroF 5y ago
    The SAT doesn't testing anything as high level as that.
• micromacrofoot 5y ago
  It's been decades, but back when I was in high school rich kids paid people to fake their identity to take the tests (with fake IDs). I heard rumors that it was a dozen kids in my graduating class, and witnessed 2 myself. 1 was caught. Does anyone know if they have better checks for this now?
• skissane 5y ago
  > The NACAC did a study on this and they found that average gains of test-prep students is ~30 points (this was when the SAT was 2400 points). > A 30 point increase out of 2400 points is not material to college admissions. There must be some subset of students who gain much more from "test prep" than others? Even if its benefits for the average student are marginal, maybe there is a certain type of student for whom it is much more beneficial? Not American so never did the SAT, but I honestly think I would have done much better in high school if I had one-on-one private tutoring. I struggled with focus and one-on-one attention helps keep me focused. Our son is similar – he's gifted and demonstrates his giftedness when the teacher focuses on him one-on-one, but then the teacher has to go spend time on the rest of the class, and as soon as that happens he stops doing any work.