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Test prep is not overblown. Prior to test-prep I got a 630 on my math section. Post test prep I got an 800. Why? Prior to test prep I was solving the problems

Test prep is not overblown. Prior to test-prep I got a 630 on my math section. Post test prep I got an 800. Why? Prior to test prep I was solving the problems as I was taught in calculus. Deriving equations. The test prep re-inforced memorizing key formulas and how to think not about solving the problem but eliminating options and determining when it's faster to validate if a given answer is correct. SAT test prep does work. Similar to how FANG interview prep also works.

WalterBright 4y ago
You'll wind up just knowing the formulas from paying attention in math class, and especially from doing all the homework problems and taking all the math classes your high school offers. To be sure, maybe your high school is deficient in teaching math (mine was). For test prep, then you need some extra math instruction, not test prep. > not about solving the problem but eliminating options and determining when it's faster to validate if a given answer is correct Those skills are not specific to test taking, they are general problem solving skills. You'll use them all the time in industry. BTW, I picked up an SAT vocabulary prep book to see what was in it. I knew nearly all the words. That's simply from reading a lot. I kinda doubt that memorizing words from a vocabulary book is going to help. The SAT prep book had "hundreds" of words in it. The typical high school graduate has a vocabulary of 10,000 words, for college graduates it's 30,000 words. Hundreds of words isn't going to make much difference. Besides, memorizing words is not the same as organically learning them from routinely encountering them. The TV vocabulary is 3,000 words if I recall correctly. That's right, TV is dumbed down. (On the other hand, that means one can learn a foreign language by only learning 3,000 words!)
- tester756 4y ago
  >You'll wind up just knowing the formulas from paying attention in math class, and especially from doing all the homework problems and taking all the math classes your high school offers. To be sure, maybe your high school is deficient in teaching math (mine was). For test prep, then you need some extra math instruction, not test prep. I don't agree that math classes are enough because teachers do vary, some sucks, some are great, but also at the end of the day they have to teach whole class, not just you, meanwhile maths on youtube runs at your pace
- stale2002 4y ago
  > For test prep, then you need some extra math instruction, not test prep. This is a worthless distinction, that is correct only on an irrelevant technically. The point being, that when people prepare for the test, they get better scores. Yes, there are multiple ways to prepare for a test. But preparing is a good thing, regardless of what you call it, or if you are saying that regular math class also covers it.
  - WalterBright 4y ago
    What I mean by "test prep" is learning how to game the test, not actually learning the material the test covers.
    - stale2002 4y ago
      > What I mean by "test prep" is learning how to game the test You'd also be wrong here. Let me give you a simple example, that might not be immediately apparent to someone who doesn't know the rules of these tests. At one point in time, on some tests, there was a "guessing penalty" for getting a wrong answer. Having a basic understanding of how that works, and different guessing strategies, can increase your score. EX: questions like should you guess? Should you rule out answers, and guess on the remaining? There are even other things to think about, such as one's strategy for how long to spend on a question, and if/when you should give up on that one. A person not experienced in test taking, might make a mistake of spending too much time on one single question, for example, when instead it could make more sense to skim the test first, for easy questions, and answer those first, so you don't run out of time and miss easy points. Just learning the material doesn't automatically prevent you from making this mistake.
      - SamBam 4y ago
        That's the only thing I remember from the test-prep book I bought: a brief paragraph about the "guessing penalty." As the book said, it wasn't a guessing penalty, it was a guessing-wrong penalty. They told you it was a guessing penalty to scare you into not guessing. The penalty was a quarter point. Most questions had four options. So it was already an expected zero points on average, not a penalty, and if you could eliminate a single answer it was a net positive to guess.
- sudosysgen 4y ago
  I think your metric of a deficient high school is clearly lacking. My high school math class was taught by an actual mathematician with over a decade of research experience and it was highly skewed towards understanding and derivation instead of memorization. This was highly successful in making for better math students and the class was a statistical anomaly in performance - and since everything shown was proven in class, it was not necessary to memorize anything. Homework was really only to improve mechanical abilities. I don't see how spending more time on memorizing formulas instead of actually understanding formulas, deriving them, and going above and beyond the high school curriculum would be a deficiency, and you would definitely be penalised in the SAT with such an approach over an objectively worse education where students are exposed to less math and more memorization. There is objectively no value to memorizing what amounts to trivia that you will then immediately forget. That is to say, I strongly disagree that SAT prep is actually going to be just making you a better student, and we seem to both agree that it is strongly correlated to SAT score, while using such prep is correlated to SES.
- kelnos 4y ago
  It's a little weird that you're trying to tell someone that SAT test prep doesn't work, when test prep absolutely did work for them. It worked for me, too, though I already had a high score, and wanted to see if I could get it even higher. (It worked; I did.) That's great that you managed to develop SAT-ready vocabulary and math techniques on your own before taking the test. Many, many people don't, and test prep can help fill that gap, not only in their knowledge, but in strategies that work well for the test itself. And that last bit was probably what helped most for me: I, too, had a solid vocabulary (I read a lot growing up), and I never had trouble acing my math classes. But understanding how the test itself worked was helpful too, and netted me a nearly-perfect score. It's pretty irrefutable that this can work; not sure why this is the hill you've decided to die on.
rahimnathwani 4y ago
I've never taken the SAT, but I did take the GMAT. IIRC I used books by Kaplan and The Princeton Review. Preparation absolutely did help. I didn't develop any new generally-applicable skills, but I did: 1. Practice the style of essays these tests require. 2. Improve my speed at spotting specific types of incorrect answers. 3. Learn a few grammatical rules that were different from the way I learned English growing up. (It was a long time ago, and sadly I don't remember the specifics.)

WalterBright 4y ago

You'll wind up just knowing the formulas from paying attention in math class, and especially from doing all the homework problems and taking all the math classes your high school offers. To be sure, maybe your high school is deficient in teaching math (mine was). For test prep, then you need some extra math instruction, not test prep. > not about solving the problem but eliminating options and determining when it's faster to validate if a given answer is correct Those skills are not specific to test taking, they are general problem solving skills. You'll use them all the time in industry. BTW, I picked up an SAT vocabulary prep book to see what was in it. I knew nearly all the words. That's simply from reading a lot. I kinda doubt that memorizing words from a vocabulary book is going to help. The SAT prep book had "hundreds" of words in it. The typical high school graduate has a vocabulary of 10,000 words, for college graduates it's 30,000 words. Hundreds of words isn't going to make much difference. Besides, memorizing words is not the same as organically learning them from routinely encountering them. The TV vocabulary is 3,000 words if I recall correctly. That's right, TV is dumbed down. (On the other hand, that means one can learn a foreign language by only learning 3,000 words!)

tester756 4y ago
>You'll wind up just knowing the formulas from paying attention in math class, and especially from doing all the homework problems and taking all the math classes your high school offers. To be sure, maybe your high school is deficient in teaching math (mine was). For test prep, then you need some extra math instruction, not test prep. I don't agree that math classes are enough because teachers do vary, some sucks, some are great, but also at the end of the day they have to teach whole class, not just you, meanwhile maths on youtube runs at your pace
stale2002 4y ago
> For test prep, then you need some extra math instruction, not test prep. This is a worthless distinction, that is correct only on an irrelevant technically. The point being, that when people prepare for the test, they get better scores. Yes, there are multiple ways to prepare for a test. But preparing is a good thing, regardless of what you call it, or if you are saying that regular math class also covers it.
- WalterBright 4y ago
  What I mean by "test prep" is learning how to game the test, not actually learning the material the test covers.
  - stale2002 4y ago
    > What I mean by "test prep" is learning how to game the test You'd also be wrong here. Let me give you a simple example, that might not be immediately apparent to someone who doesn't know the rules of these tests. At one point in time, on some tests, there was a "guessing penalty" for getting a wrong answer. Having a basic understanding of how that works, and different guessing strategies, can increase your score. EX: questions like should you guess? Should you rule out answers, and guess on the remaining? There are even other things to think about, such as one's strategy for how long to spend on a question, and if/when you should give up on that one. A person not experienced in test taking, might make a mistake of spending too much time on one single question, for example, when instead it could make more sense to skim the test first, for easy questions, and answer those first, so you don't run out of time and miss easy points. Just learning the material doesn't automatically prevent you from making this mistake.
    - SamBam 4y ago
      That's the only thing I remember from the test-prep book I bought: a brief paragraph about the "guessing penalty." As the book said, it wasn't a guessing penalty, it was a guessing-wrong penalty. They told you it was a guessing penalty to scare you into not guessing. The penalty was a quarter point. Most questions had four options. So it was already an expected zero points on average, not a penalty, and if you could eliminate a single answer it was a net positive to guess.
sudosysgen 4y ago
I think your metric of a deficient high school is clearly lacking. My high school math class was taught by an actual mathematician with over a decade of research experience and it was highly skewed towards understanding and derivation instead of memorization. This was highly successful in making for better math students and the class was a statistical anomaly in performance - and since everything shown was proven in class, it was not necessary to memorize anything. Homework was really only to improve mechanical abilities. I don't see how spending more time on memorizing formulas instead of actually understanding formulas, deriving them, and going above and beyond the high school curriculum would be a deficiency, and you would definitely be penalised in the SAT with such an approach over an objectively worse education where students are exposed to less math and more memorization. There is objectively no value to memorizing what amounts to trivia that you will then immediately forget. That is to say, I strongly disagree that SAT prep is actually going to be just making you a better student, and we seem to both agree that it is strongly correlated to SAT score, while using such prep is correlated to SES.
kelnos 4y ago
It's a little weird that you're trying to tell someone that SAT test prep doesn't work, when test prep absolutely did work for them. It worked for me, too, though I already had a high score, and wanted to see if I could get it even higher. (It worked; I did.) That's great that you managed to develop SAT-ready vocabulary and math techniques on your own before taking the test. Many, many people don't, and test prep can help fill that gap, not only in their knowledge, but in strategies that work well for the test itself. And that last bit was probably what helped most for me: I, too, had a solid vocabulary (I read a lot growing up), and I never had trouble acing my math classes. But understanding how the test itself worked was helpful too, and netted me a nearly-perfect score. It's pretty irrefutable that this can work; not sure why this is the hill you've decided to die on.

rahimnathwani 4y ago

I've never taken the SAT, but I did take the GMAT. IIRC I used books by Kaplan and The Princeton Review. Preparation absolutely did help. I didn't develop any new generally-applicable skills, but I did: 1. Practice the style of essays these tests require. 2. Improve my speed at spotting specific types of incorrect answers. 3. Learn a few grammatical rules that were different from the way I learned English growing up. (It was a long time ago, and sadly I don't remember the specifics.)