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Comment by byoung2 | Hacker News Reader

When I taught SAT at Kaplan I participated in a program called SAT Advantage where we offered SAT prep for free at high schools in low-income areas. I had several students score in the 95th percentile (Kaplan hires teachers who score 90th percentile or higher), and one got a perfect score in math.

It is possible with a little effort to beat the odds. The wealthy kids I usually taught had parents who could afford $1000 for an SAT class or $3000 for private tutoring. An idea I have for an educational technology startup would level this playing field using the web.

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> It is possible with a little effort to beat the odds. The wealthy kids I usually taught had parents who could afford $1000 for an SAT class or $3000 for private tutoring. An idea I have for an educational technology startup would level this playing field using the web.

I once took an SAT prep class; it wasn't one of the 3k private tutoring classes, but I remember thinking, as I finished the last class, 'I learned and did nothing here that wasn't already in this mammoth SAT prep book'.

Libraries around here have tons of these SAT prep books, even for the newer SATs. I suspect that libraries (school and otherwise) even in your low-income areas have at least 1 or 2 decent SAT prep books.

What could your startup do for the kids in these low-income areas that they can't already do for themselves with the prep books available to them? If it is a lack of motivation or awareness, how would your startup motivate them to actually do the studying or get them more aware of the startup's resources than of the books?

Live instruction is more valuable than self-instruction to a majority of children of any age.

The point can be made by taking your question 1 step further.

If the information is available to kids via books, then why have school at all?

The obvious answer is that what a class buys is a sunk cost, to force the parent to send the kid to the class, and then the kid out of sheer boredom or osmosis will wind up learning something. If the kid had the motivation to begin with, the book would be quite enough. (I had the motivation simply because I wanted to show up my elder sister; so the class was a waste for me.)

Which directly leads to one of the questions I posed: how could this startup force the target kids to learn, if it's remote? Without a good answer to that, I don't think it's a good idea.

(And on a tangent: school can be a good idea, even for motivated students, simply because some things are very difficult to teach yourself out of a book. It'd be kind of hard to learn how to read and write from just books, for example.)

My impression was that it's pretty rare to move more than half a standard deviation by using test prep. And that median is skewed by the fact that scores fluctuate from one session to another, but the lower scores are discarded.

I went from a 1340 to a 1520 after a Kaplan course when I was in high school. On the average, massive score improvements are rare, but there are definitely some test prep teachers who can consistently get better score improvements from students. The secret is tailoring your approach to different students' needs. I always looked at the types of questions my students got wrong to identify patterns. If you can fix a bad habit you can get bigger score gains with less effort. My best success story was a student who went from a 980 to a 1420 (out of 1600). That's about 50th percentile to 95th percentile. Another student went from hoping to meet the NCAA minimum for a baseball scholarship to getting an academic full ride. The last student I taught almost beat my score...I took the new SAT in 2005 along with him and he got a 2180 out of 2400 (I got a 2280...99th percentile).

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