SAT prep. Does it work?

[mercoledi]

I went to a high school where we took the PSAT every year and had SAT prep built into every class. If she hasn't learned any of the basic strategies for taking standardized tests or drilled on the vocab and math, it certainly can make a difference. After all of that work, we had three perfect scores in my class, so I can't imagine that it didn't help!

 

[JulieN]

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[04diamond<3]

Best advice right up front other than looking to see whether she should take the SAT or ACT is to take the class/practice BEFORE the test. Many schools average the scores since the reporting shows them every time the test has been taken. Some schools will consider your best score in each category while others will average. Averaging is scary if your goal is to make big gains.

This is interesting. DD hasn't narrowed her search yet but we were told SATs and that ACT is accepted as an alternative in some instances. I'll definitely have to do some more research on this piece.

Yup! I live in the midwest and am applied to colleges 7 years ago and am again this year to finish my degree finally. Both times I was told I needed to provide an ACT score but that if my SAT was higher they'd look at that. You DD needs to decide where she wants to go to school and prep for whatever tests she's going to take. I would highly suggest a prep course especially since she scored lower than average on psat. If you look around, or just hire a tutor, you can do so for a reasonable price. I will have to retake the ACT this summer and am going to hire someone to tutor me. I'm sure the school she attends has a class for this? Might be worth looking into

 

[MichelleCarmen]

Hi,
We don't have experience with college testing, yet, but my son took a test to get into a program and we did our own "prep," in researching how the test was scored and he did better with knowing how the test worked.

 

[ChristineRose]

Did anyone else notice that this is a very old thread that was resurrected by a spammer?

Nonetheless, it's an important subject and I did a fair amount of research on it since I went back to school in 2010 and had to take the GMAT. In my opinion the only fair way to evaluate whether a prep course works is to have a group of people take the SAT (ACT, whatever), score them, then have them take a prep course and retake the test. A control group just takes the test twice, since almost everybody does better on their second try. The difference between the final scores of the control and prepped groups is the actual improvement.

There really has been only one study that did this. You can read about it here: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124278685697537839.html... They found an improvement of 30 points.

Now that we know that the average improvement is a measly 30 points, we can move onto questions about who benefits a lot and who doesn't, and why. Except that nobody has done this, and nobody knows.

The test prep people use all sorts of tricks to get claimed improvements of hundreds of points. One common one is to base the "before" number on a mock test written by the company. The mock tests are tweaked so that everyone scores 200 points or more lower than on the real tests. I even know of one test prep service that gives the exact same test to its students before and after and bases their claims on that. They do not bother to ask the kids how they did on the real test.

If you do decide prepping is necessary, I would start at the public library. Everything the courses will show you is found in those books. Some people claim they can't force themselves to cram without having a teacher to coach them and a schedule to stick to. Of course nobody can force you to go to the class, so we are really looking at the small number of people who can force themselves to go to a class but who can't force themselves to study on their own. And if we are talking about high school students, you have to consider the role of the parents as well. And before you decide that it makes sense for your temperament and situation, remember that the courses can run into the thousands of dollars.

 

[TC1987]

Fwiw, I have college degrees already but I had to take the high-school-level pre-entrance tests for RN (nursing) schools. English and grammar I do quite well on because schools drilled that into students, back in the day, haha. I was rusty on high-school math, so I bought a GRE Math Review book and practiced until I could do pencil and paper math again. Science wasn't too difficult for me, since my college degrees are that. But I never took general biology, so I used a Cliff's Notes Biology book for that.

So, if the child or adult has problems that are not covered by those SAT reviews, I recommend going to the GRE review books, since they provide drill in the high-school-level material.

My ex-husband got horrible scores on his GRE/GMAT. He bought software, might have been Princeton Review, and practiced and practiced those tests, and broght his score up significantly on the 2nd try.

Nobody walks in cold and takes these preadmission tests nowadays. "Competitive" is the name of the game, so we all must practice the test(s) before taking them, because that's what everyone else is doing. If you don't so that, you just cheat yourself out of points.

 

[TXTahoeZ71]

I would recommend it. It helped me. But I would think you would really regret it if you didn't use every opportunity to get into the school of your choice. Just my $.02