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Comment by ghaff | Hacker News Reader

But your local library probably has test prep books. I know things have gotten more competitive since back in the day but you can probably get 90% of the way there without expensive test prep courses.

(Yes, it takes time and commitment but it's mostly not the case that paying for test prep courses automatically translates into higher scores.)

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I prepped on my own and did really good, but I was middle class and had a lot of other advantages. Prepping isn’t just about having access to prep material, but coaching that encourages you to actually practice the material.

Absolutely. If someone isn't from a household that values the idea of test prep and education more broadly, that's a huge disadvantage. It's just the idea that if you can't plop down whatever a test prep class costs that, in itself, is a huge inhibitor is mostly not true.

That's what AI is for, and it does a great job of this today.

My friends and I all prepped on our own. It really helped to have that kind of friendly competitive mindset among high school friends to provide each other motivation to one-up everyone else. Of course all of us were middle class, and we were all raised in the kinds of families value education above many things.

If I had suggested to my high school friends that we "prep for the SAT" I think I would have been roundly laughed out of the room.

Right. So if a high school is full of that kind of kids, someone performing well on the SAT shows more grit and perseverance than my kind of peers. Colleges should rightfully award that.

It sounds like an award for breaking Goodhart’s law, but it’s amazing how many kids don’t know this one simple trick to getting good grades and getting into a nice university (study for tests using available prep material).

You can't recognize it's a competition and argue people should be fine with only partial access to what their competitors get.

And yes, money helps a lot to brute force what material works for a kid and get motivated teachers. It's not a magic bullet, but it's a lot better than no bullet.

The real cost is the opportunity cost. Prepping for a competitive test (I don't know if SAT or ACT is one) is a full-time job. If you work for living, you don't have the time and energy to prepare adequately.

A lot of it measures high-schooly type stuff. I imagine if you put a SAT down in front of me today, I'd do terribly (especially in math in spite of having advanced degrees). I just don't have instant recall of a lot of the geometry and other stuff at this point. Heck, I'm not sure I could even do long division.

At least that SAT/ACT isn’t heavy into classic geometry proofs like the gaokao is. It’s literally something you’ll forget after you take the test because trigonometry is so much more effective (Chinese learn both).

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