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>> 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.

As i learned in college, the real "coaching" was rich parents getting rich kids more time on the SAT by getting psychiatric diagnostic classifications that give you more time.

Time has been the real challenge on SATs for most people beyond a certain score threshold, and money can buy time.

From my, albeit rather distant, recollection, if you desperately needed more time on the SAT you are probably already screwed.

For students in the category of "exam easy. finished the exam w/o any time issues", the whole sub-thread is irrelevant. You're going to ace the exam rich, or poor.

The sub-thread and discussion is about wealth bias for exam scores.

I finished the SAT early, and used the extra time to go back to the beginning and verify each answer. More time wouldn't have done much. If you can answer the questions, there's enough time to complete the test.

I understand your perspective-- my test memories were all breezing through tests with copious extra time... But as an educator I've noticed that there is a wide variation in the amount of time needed for a test between students. For some tasks it is nearly an order of magnitude.

The students who are quick and on the competitive math team finish something in 6-7 minutes and some other students are doing correct work but not quite done in 45 minutes. More practice doesn't seem to make them much quicker, either.

And this is in students without a formal diagnosis that allows them to spend extra time.

[There was one time I crashed and burned on a test and ran out of time... where I didn't memorize enough of a big table of identities for a trig test and ended up having to derive everything from scratch]

I hypothesize that the student who took 8 times longer isn't going to do so well at MIT.

A typical exam at Caltech would be 4 problems and 2 hours.

I never memorized the trig identities. I simply knew them from using them a lot. And having worked enough algebra/trig problems, you can just see the answer in your head as you read the problem. (This turns out to be a big timesaver at Caltech, where every course was a math course. When you're dealing with calculus, you really need to have moved past struggling with trig.)

At some point in the last 40 years, however, they've slipped my mind.

> I hypothesize that the student who took 8 times longer isn't going to do so well at MIT.

Sure. But the grandparent's point was: if you're the student taking 3x longer, your parents can buy you a disability diagnosis that gets you extra time.

> I never memorized the trig identities. I simply knew them from using them a lot.

Yah, a reasonable course would make this possible. My analytical trig class was pretty heavy on obscure identities, and the first exams I was like-- no big deal, I know how these are derived, I can figure these out as I need them... For the purpose of that class, nope.

>> I hypothesize that the student who took 8 times longer isn't going to do so well at MIT.

You are assuming the effects of wealth stop at the SAT.

Are you suggesting that wealthy people can bribe the profs to bestow better grades on their students?

Or the grad students who do the test grading?

BTW, Caltech's testing was done on the honor system. That meant no proctoring, and it was entirely up to the student to adhere to the time limits, and any other instructions on the test.

You didn't need wealth to cheat. Any student could, and with half a brain not get caught.

I recall one physics midterm which 2/3 of the sophomore class failed, including me. I suppose that precludes there being large scale cheating going on.

>> Are you suggesting that wealthy people can bribe the profs to bestow better grades on their students? >> Or the grad students who do the test grading?

Not bribe. Hire as tutors with $. This happened pretty regularly at my college (Cornell) where ex-grad TAs were hired as tutors. You could focus on just what you needed to study if you could afford to hire them.

Here in the US we just went thru four years with President Trump (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump) who could not even communicate with clarity and rattled barely coherent ideas. He graduated from Wharton, the most prestigious finance program in the US. He is just one case I thought of. Does everyone really think he was the most qualified candidate to be in the very small inbound class at Wharton? Does everyone thing he was actually qualified to graduate based on merit?

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.

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.

> 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.

I think it's usually not improvement at the highest levels.

I wouldn't be surprised if those improvements were mostly moving below-average scores toward the average, by giving deprived students basic skills that their "education" didn't.

I don't know many tests you can't study for especially tests that are run on an annual basis.

In my personal experience, about seventeen years ago, retaking the test raised my score some 90 points (iirc) out of 1600, excluding writing section.

the relevant question in that in that case is: what would your average score be with and without prep over say 10 tests

And there are books available to help with a lot of that. (And I actually agree with the point that doing some amount of test prep/sample tests is helpful. But it doesn't need to be super-expensive/time-consuming. I do understand that the playing field has probably upleveled over the decades but it's still probably as democratized as any such thing is.

The SAT is a test of your academic preparation, not Raven's progressive matrices. That you can study for it is not inherently a bad thing. Portions that are highly susceptible to coaching are bad, and that's why there aren't analogies any more.

If students learn the vocabulary and practice the math to do better on the test, at some point it just becomes the Key and Peele Heist sketch: "That's called a job!"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jgYYOUC10aM

Agreed. I spent a bunch of time a few years ago doing home-coaching for our two teenagers as they rolled into SAT time. The way you get better at the math section is to genuinely fix whatever gaps might exist in your knowledge of algebra and geometry. As OP says, that "is not an inherently bad thing."

There's probably another 20 points that can be picked up by learning to read the questions very carefully -- so that you don't race to show how quickly you can spin-up an off-task answer that precisely matches the wrong question. Getting that right also "is not an inherently bad thing."

The verbal section is a bit more of a swamp, and there might be a larger element of gamesmanship there. But for schools like MIT, where math aptitude is the main event, I think keeping a math-focused role for the SAT can help a lot.

It identifies not just the elite-school wizards with lots of AP and math SAT 800s -- but also the teens from humbler public schools that didn't have an AP track, but whose 790s on the (pre-calc focused) math SATs speak to their ability to play at a higher level.

Apropos of analogies, I think the test-takers got rid of those because they can be ridiculously skewed to particular (affluent) cultures. For some people, it's obvious if yacht-to-dingy is akin to symphony-to-quartet. For people who grew up with less money, it is a total WTF moment.

I remember an analogy question that required knowledge of alcoholic drink formulations. I was way under drinking age, and had no idea what went into a martini.

You might be under drinking age, but you should have years of practice making mummy and daddy martinis at the end of their work days if you want any chance of succeeding at $PRESTIGIOUS_OLD_INSTITUTION

My parents didn't drink.

Unfortunately for a lot of people it seems to be the Rick and Morty heist sketch at this point

My own anecdotal experience confirms that sat and act tests are very studiable. Honestly even more than average tests just because there is so much material available to study with.

Yeah, I have found that it improves 3 things. (this is for GRE, which is similar)

1. Basics: If you don't know standard permutations and combinations then knowing those formulae off the top of your head is nice to have. The language portions in particular, take a lot of preparation for non-native speakers.

2. Speed: Giving a decent number of sample tests helps put you in game mode for the real thing. It also acquaints you to the manner in which questions are phrased and their intended meanings. (big deal for non-native speakers) Lastly, it helps ease anxiety.

3. Gotcha-proofing: Every examination has some familiar gotcha patterns. Some training helps in looking out for them helps.

The gotchas are answers that match common student mistakes.

What I'd do is solve the problem without looking at the answers so they wouldn't bias me. Then look for a match of mine with one of the answers.

I'd say one of the valuable things an SAT tutor could teach is an attitude: to take initiative, and reject resignment to failure.

The biggest difference I noticed in how I would take a test versus other people I tried to coach is that I viewed the test as a fun game like a challenging video game level. And those who struggled on the test viewed it as dreadful judgement being rendered on them.

It's like when you can tell someone is extremely self-conscious while dancing: Beyond teaching them any actual dance moves, you have to turn off the part of their brain which is blocking their natural mental resources for problem solving, and that's often the fear they are inadequate to the task, will disappoint their supporters, and that it will hurt their future prospects.

> 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.

That is indeed where they're moving. They've recently announced that the SAT will be transitioning to a digital, adaptive test in the next 1-2 years. [1]

Notably, the upcoming iteration of the test will only be semi-adaptive, adjusting the version of the second half of the test based on your performance on the first half, rather than adapting to your performance on a question-by-question basis.

I suspect overall this will be an improvement in the accuracy of the results. As it stands, for students with a strong math background, a majority of the math questions on the current test are far too easy and cloud their results on the rest. With the recent removal of the CollegeBoard's math subject tests, high-level math students have very few opportunities to demonstrate their knowledge using a standardized metric.

[1]: https://newsroom.collegeboard.org/digital-sat-brings-student...

> high-level math students have very few opportunities to demonstrate their knowledge using a standardized metric.

AP math and physics exams? Or IB?

True that these are not accessible to everyone though..

I think that is great. Once you get past a certain threshold, the test loses prediction value. Giving the kids in the top 5% a way to differentiate is great.

My kid didn't get to take an SAT/ACT due to Covid. They did end up with a substantially lower PSAT score due to one of those dumb mistakes. They missed one "easy" question on the math portion while nailing almost everything else. The difference between National Merit Scholar Finalist and a "really good score".

They're doing great at a top 50 university now but it probably was the difference between waitlist and admit at two top 15 schools.

> SAT/ACT coaching doesn't improve scores so much as get rid of some of the "dumb mistakes"

If so, that still doesn't imply that rich kids with access to private tutors will necessarily do better on these tests than poor kids - just that anybody with the motivation to read a test-prep book will.