How I Learned to Take the SAT Like a Rich Kid
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
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?
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).
Now, having been a hiring manager at one of the major tech companies, I've seen how arbitrary the process can be. At least the SAT you can study for and master, if you really want to get a perfect score... but when it comes to hiring, there's so many factors that are unpredictable and out of your control.
Even a few years later, impressive work experience and open source projects should far outweigh what university you went to.
Expensive: Yes. Competitive: Not really. In the state university I went to, if you could not get admission, you really did not deserve it. The SAT score required was fairly low. In fact, if your SAT score was just above the threshold of admission, chances are you'll flunk college anyway.
Compared to some other countries in the world (Turkey, South Asia, etc), the competition is ridiculously low. I know many people in those countries who could easily score well in the SATs but still not be good enough to get admission into a decent public university.
I think what I was trying to say was that getting around 1050 (out of 1600) is very easy as long as you are willing to study. If you do not have the discipline for 1050 (and it really requires very little discipline - most smart students will get a higher score without studying at all), then you likely will not have the discipline to self study in college.
It's designed for 1000 to be the median result of the population taking the test (though it hasn't been renormed, AFAIK, since 1990, and the 1990 renormed was because on both halves the actual results had drifted down from 500 medians since the original design half a century earlier, so there may have been some drift, though there have been a lot less of the kind of changes in population taking the test than those that drove the earlier drift.)
(BTW, I didn't mean to imply 1050 was my school's requirement. I just happen to know it was above the requirement as I knew several students who got in with scores around 1050...)
- can you code in a whiteboard to pass the interview?
- are there visas available to get you to work in your country of choice?
I studied in Chile, and worked there too (in several companies no one has heard of in the US). Six years ago Google interviewed me, and I've been working for them since. Google paid for all expenses to bring me from Chile to the US - and I'm not the only one.
Now, having someone inside Google to refer you and endorse your hiring helps. If you don't know anyone - try open source. There are some awesome communities to join:
- https://medium.com/google-cloud/analyzing-github-issues-and-...
I found it valuable to have a curated list of things to learn (both the class list, and the syllabus within each class), the opportunity to work together in person with other students studying the same thing, access to professors, and to live in an academically-focused community.
I went to a well-regarded, but not top-tier, California State school. That school is currently accepting 4,500 new students every year out of a pool of 50,000 applications. A few years after I started working, I started being contacted by various famous companies. I'm more limited by not really wanting to move to Silicon Valley than I am by my choice of school.
In my opinion, university helped direct my learning path, provided external incentives to learn things that I might've been reluctant to learn otherwise, provided a great learning environment, and put me in contact with people that I wouldn't have met and benefited from without being there. Having a degree from almost anywhere will make it easier to find a first job than trying to do it through self-study.
It's like hiring based on bullshit (cough essays) or work samples.
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.
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.
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/
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.
People mostly act in their short term interest. When we do more forward-looking things like studying or investing in retirement, it's because we strongly believe those actions will pay off in the future.
That strong belief in the value of studying is the advantage rich kids enjoy. Everyone around them agrees that studying is a very good use of time with high expected value down the line, so on any given afternoon it's easy for them to choose that valuable activity over hanging out with their friends.
The same isn't remotely true for poorer kids. Some of their friends tease them for studying because "you're never going to get into college anyway," and the adults in their life probably support studying, but in an abstract and understated way. Studying is "a good thing" for a poor kid, while it's a critical factor for future success to a rich kid.
Yes, with the internet and public libraries it wouldn't be logistically difficult for a poor kid to study as much as a rich one, but without an entire community pressing its importance onto them it's immensely hard to actually do it.
The article describes a studying process that is nearly athletic for an exam that isn't stressed as important to high schoolers in lower income areas, this is a huge information gap between social classes that needs corrected.
As for the SAT, everyone studied their butts off. I also went off the beaten path like the author of the article, and enrolled in a local, inexpensive, SAT study course run by a Korean teacher for mainly Korean-American students in an upstairs office above a takeout restaurant (I was one of the only non-Asian students there). The course involved long hours of drilling vocab and some math, and expected us to drill much more at home.
In the end, the most valuable technique for the SAT was time management. One book[1] even had pages of "answer bubbles" in the back for you to practice penciling your answer, saving precious time. It also recommended skipping/guessing on questions you were having trouble on and moving on to the next one.
Students coming into the SAT with no foreknowledge have no clue that they will be racing the clock. It's not obvious that time management is one of the most important factors and if you simply told someone taking the test cold "make sure you fill in an answer for all the questions" their score would improve by 100 points or more. But I would guess that most students turn in answer sheets with blanks.
As they say, the SAT is a great test of your ability to take the SAT.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAT_Subject_Tests
[1]: https://www.workman.com/products/up-your-score-sat-2018-2019...
It really all comes down to effective studying, and is very accessible to all income levels. Just buy one or two good prep books, and get access to practice tests (I used only the ones in the books, BTW). I didn't enter into any SAT prep program, and always felt they were for people who did not know how to study well.
It doesn't even require much intensity if you do it right. For both the SAT and the GRE, I began studying 9-12 months before I expected to take the exam. I spent only a small amount of time a week on it (1-2 hours). The trick was to be regular and consistent. Towards the end, start taking practice tests. I got a pretty good score on the SAT and a fantastic score in the GRE (easily in the 99 percentile range).
No tutors. No prep programs. Just a bunch of books, and 1-2 hours a week. That's all it takes.
Again, I'm just saying that for many students, reading this article would expose them to something that they haven't really been exposed to so far.
So now we know the secret of poorly performing kids. Well, of course, if you want an ambitious score, you study. If you don't, you do not get a good score.
I think my other point was that it does not require a lot of study! I studied more for my usual classes in school than I did for the SAT/GRE. But if you try to cram it all in 3 months before the SAT, you're setting yourself up for trouble.
I did well in high school only studying on the train into school on the days of exams. That formula worked for me, and I figured everybody else did something similar. I knew I had to "study" for the SAT if I wanted to better than average, and practicing vocabulary during homeroom seemed like more than what everybody else was doing.
I happened to get into a good college and really struggled the first year. I studied harder than usual, but it wasn't until I started studying with some friends that I saw how much more work other people put into school.
once i got there, it wasn't easy. mainly because i didn't really care about school, and refused to put in the time. apparently cramming doesn't work for linear algebra unless you are a genius, which i'm not.
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.
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.
I did well on the SAT (the very top scorer in my class), but how much of that was due to natural gifts, and how much of that was due to having a parent who was both a high school math teacher and someone who spent years tutoring and administering the SAT?
That's the point of the article - why is the concept alien at all? Why should it be strange for children from lower- to middle-income backgrounds to be in academic programs over the summer, but perfectly normal for the rich? What has normalised that divide in society?
It's a valid question. Do poor children not want to work hard, or do they not know how hard they're obliged, or able, or work?
I don't know why, but I don't think it was just because their parents didn't happen to have cash. My totally anecdotal view on this is that looking at income might be the tail wagging the dog. The poor parents tended to have less complete grasps on their lives, which gave the kids fewer role models to figure out what "good habits" were and how they lended to success.
These parents didn't have habits of successful people, which contributed to their poverty, as well as the (lack of) habits of their children.
The poor kids I knew who were successful academically found other role models, people to explain to them that you can take the SATs twice, and if you spend a couple hours a week studying for them you'll do significantly better, and yes, it is worth the time, etc.
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.
Did much better the second time around!
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.
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.
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.
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.
This isn't meant as snark. I really don't understand.
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.
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.
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.
Those tests are not meritocracy, they are a farce of meritocracy.
If education in this country was worth anything the SATs would be unnecessary.
The science section in the ACT is more chart comprehension than anything.
Everyone gets tripped up thinking they need to know more when really they just need to learn to take it better.
http://www.cnn.com/2014/03/05/living/sat-test-changes-school...
The test will shift from its current score scale of 2400 back to 1600, with a separate score for the essay. No longer will test takers be penalized for choosing incorrect answers.
It was set such that if you could eliminate even one answer as "surely incorrect", it became advantageous to guess among the rest of the choices.
Put differently, 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.
In my personal case, I went up about 50 points vs the PSAT. I had some trouble with some of the math problems, but once I worked through them a few times it was no big deal.
Would you expect to get the same exact score taking the test twice if you hadn't studied? How much of the point increase could be ascribed to luck?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Simply retaking the test increases scores by 15 to 29 points.
https://psychsocialissues.com/2011/07/20/sat-the-validity-an...
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.
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.
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.