These people are the gatekeepers to a higher education, they should be held to higher standards.
> The college counselors' report concludes that, on average, prep courses yield only a modest benefit, "contrary to the claims made by many test-preparation providers." It found that SAT coaching resulted in about 30 points in score improvement on the SAT, out of a possible 1600, and less than one point out of a possible 36 on the ACT, the other main college-entrance exam, says Derek Briggs, chairman of the research and methodology department at the University of Colorado in Boulder and author of the admissions counselors' report.
https://slate.com/technology/2019/04/sat-prep-courses-do-the...
> Once scholars control for all these factors as best they can, they find that coaching has a positive but small effect: Perhaps 10 or 20 points in total on the SAT, mostly on the math section, according to careful work by Derek Briggs of the University of Colorado Boulder and Ben Domingue of Stanford University.
> Some estimates run a little higher: A 2010 study led by Ohio State’s Claudia Buchmann and based on the National Education Longitudinal Study found that the use of books, videos, and computer software offers no boost whatsoever, while a private test prep course adds 30 points to your score on average, and the use of a private tutor adds 37.
Based on info from a buddy of mine who runs an SAT prep business, this is a half truth. He says:
- It is tough to get gains from a kid who doesn’t want to be there — that is, the parents are pushing the students to prep when the student doesn’t want to. My friend actually tries to filter out these folks in his sales funnel.
- Motivated kids can get ridiculous amounts of improvement (40-100 per skill), especially if they are starting off in the lower or middle part of the scoring range (people at the top are capped in improvement by max scores).
- I have done some minimal tutoring for a friend’s kid, and his SAT score went up by 110 in math and 80 in verbal from a middling starting point. Anecdote, but still... My “curriculum” was just have him take a practice test every week under test like conditions, review the principles behind the math problems that he missed, review any test strategy issues that pop up, and give him 50 vocab words a week with skills on how to search for how these words are used in a natural setting. With a longer runway, I think he may have been able to double that improvement (the kid was smart enough to get a perfect math score, but didn’t have the confidence to execute in a testing context).
Parents who sent their kids to cram school, or tutoring or whatever, and kids with perfect scores are mad that schools aren’t basing admissions solely on scores and grades.
What it boils down to is that Asian American kids are outperforming most other groups on the SAT for whatever reason. Elite colleges don’t want student bodies that are 70% Asian American.
Also, middle schoolers don’t really have a choice in the matter. If it were up to them, they’d play Roblox and watch TikToks all day.
And it should be noted that they changed the tests before these studies too.
> Many of the key studies of coaching effects were based on kids who took the SAT or ACT in the 1990s and 2000s, Briggs told me. The tests have since been changed a fair amount, in an effort to make them more like statewide achievement tests and to minimize their similarity to intelligence tests.
For example, looking at specific question formats; learning the only topics that would be covered by tests and nothing else.
That’s all the referenced studies show.
That doesn’t mean that the SAT isn’t “coachable” with much intensive efforts, or that more minimal efforts don’t result in large improvements for some subset of test takers.
"The SAT isn't gameable" is an extraordinary claim. And "suburban families try hard to game the SAT" is not so much a "claim" as "a fact your own analysis acknowledges". I could be persuaded, but what you've presented here doesn't constitute extraordinary evidence.
(Your other argument in this thread, about the possible Cobra Effect of eliminating the SAT, is much more persuasive).
2. What those studies call coaching isn’t remotely comparable to years of 20 hour a week cram school.
3. Of course the SAT is coachable. How do you think you learn the math techniques and vocabulary in the first place?
If it’s not possible to increase your vocabulary, how do people learn new languages?
4. The percentage of students who make a perfect score on a similar test, the ACT, has increased by 5x in the last five years while the average score has only risen slightly.
Clearly a subset of test takers has figured out a way to reliably prep for the test.