Accordingly, I think the SAT is a bit of a farce. Like BMI, it's essentially worthless without context that, assessed prudently, could advise stakeholders on its own, without the test score. Likewise, it obfuscates the true nature of the strengths and weaknesses of the tested. With a 9xth percentile score, are you like me, possessing a high natural aptitude but dealing with the fallout of a mental health issues, a dysfunctional home life, and the fundamental difficulties of being black in American society? Are you a intellectually-middling child of wealthy parents who can afford to shove test prep down your throat until you "get it," and then provide for your professional needs post-college? Or are you a hard-worker who studied diligently, only to exit undergrad to find that your options are severely limited by your debt load?
This is all kind of beside the point, however. We get stuck in this quagmire of discussing how best to facilitate the sorting and tracking of our youth into will succeed/won't succeed boxes, when we should be working to assure success across the board. Why are some American colleges (entrance into which is the aim of taking the SAT in the first place) excellent, and others not? Why the acceptance of such disparities in educational quality?
Some people, such as Bryan Caplan, believe that college is mostly about signaling.[0] The idea is that most of the value college provides for individual students is to indicate to society that the student can jump through all the hoops necessary. It's much less about what the student actually learns in college. Essentially, college is mostly about being a filter - to weed out those that can't make it. This line of thinking would also explain college acceptance tests - they are the same type of filter, but applied before college. It's there to keep the college prestigious, so that more people will try getting into it, which will allow them to only pick the best of the best.
I think there's a lot of merit to the signaling idea, because a lot of what you learn in college doesn't have much practical value for the vast majority of students. College entrance tests are just one part of this whole process.
[0] https://blog.press.princeton.edu/2018/01/23/bryan-caplan-on-...
However, IMO, the SAT adds another variable for contextualization of these inequalities in the American education system, regardless of if the SAT itself is unequal.
Structural inequality in higher education is a whole different ballgame, and is much more complex. As someone who went to a public college, and then got to see what life was like at Ye Olde Ivy colleges and schools like Stanford/Berkeley, it's pretty apparent that there were some structural decisions from the top down that facilitated that success outside of even the economic differential between schools/programs.
Very tough things worth thinking about. I don't think that people treat standardized testing as some all telling oracle, and if they do, I believe that they're mistaken. I remember that our school offered something called the PLAN? which was like the PSAT for the ACT. The career advice it gave me based on my results was that I'd be good at landscape work.
I've never defined myself by my test taking capabilities but I will admit I always felt a little affronted upon reading everything from the movements that seek to de-legitimize all standardized testing. I felt that something I specifically chose to gamify and study for was being increasingly seen as a negative signal.
Life is tough man. I hope people succeed regardless of if they even go to college or not. With that in mind, I also hope that perhaps there can be a cultural shift that facilitates scoring better on aptitude testing because perhaps that may be a signal about our society, even if that is not a perfect signal.
I get that we should be raising standards across the board whenever possible. Education is extremely valuable and I'd like more people to be more educated. But there is always going to be a continuum of prestige, educational value, intelligence of students, etc. among various colleges.
If one person goes up, another goes down unless they are exactly equal. That level of equality is something I think impossible to achieve and even if we did, humans would find some other way to rank people.
But compared to the past, we can make it better. There is no reason why the 50th percentile today cannot be equal to the 60th percentile of yesteryear.
The Kaplan book had a CD with a few practice tests. I think I did 2. If for no other reason, they are super useful for figuring out how to pace yourself.
The math section was (is?) easy for most people on this site. This seems the norm because the score/percentile relationship was incredibly high.
The English section kills people. My pro-tip is, in the same Kaplan book, they have a list of the most common words. I made flashcards for the top 100, and I'll be damned if like 80 of them didn't show up on the test. I imagine this is similar for the SATs.
You want to leave yourself time for (hopefully) hard questions at the end, but a silly mistake early on hurts, so it pays to take your time in the first few minutes as well.
Fortunately it should be obvious how you are doing after the first group of questions, if they go from roll-your-eyes easy to ones that make you pause a moment. :)
The test prep centers do basically what you did - they just cost more and hold the student accountable (in as much as the student spends time at the center and presumably works through the test exercises).
I was asked to take the SAT when I was 12 as part of the Johns Hopkins Gifted Talent Search (although back then I seem to recall it just being the Talent Search), this was back in 1990. I got a 790 on the verbal and 590 on math. When I took it "for real" in high school, I got an 800 on verbal and 690 on the math. I took one PSAT that I was required to take by the school, I never read any books, I never did practive tets at home, etc. I've ALWAYS been a "good test taker" in that they don't intimidate me at all, no nerves, etc. For me there's no trick to doing well on a test other than knowing the material.
I have friends who are very, VERY smart, and terrible test takers. My wife is very smart, and while she's good on tests, she needs to prep a fair amount to feel ready. Other people get nervous, or freeze, etc.
It's all about how a person deal with the situation of a test, and you have to come up with a psychological plan for that. Aside from that, you either know the information or you don't.
Today, it’s even easier to study for the SAT. Khan Academy offers free, official prep to every single student and 8 official practice exams to take. I also used free practice tests made by other companies to study, too. The only purchase I made for SAT prep was a $20 book from Kaplan that had 1000 practice questions and helpful (guessing) strategies.
The test nowadays seems to be a socioeconomic equalizer-those who can’t afford a book or a computer can always go to the public library and get the same resources. The only real reason anyone would pay for test prep classes is because it forces you to practice at regular intervals. Test prep classes also help students revise material that they may have been rusty on, which again you could do online nowadays. That’s why things like the Collegeboard adversity score seem absurd to me. Anyone, really, can afford to do well on the SAT.
Now, of course, the actual educational value of the test is another question altogether.
...
>Secondly I bought a Kaplan book which just had 12 tests in it for $20.
Did the Kaplan book not have "secrets" of test taking? Mine did, and one of them was actually useful:
When you have an "analogy" question, where they give you an A:B, and then ask which of the five choices have the same analogy.
What do you do if you don't know the meaning of both A and B?
Well, of the five choices, you will find two that are identical as far as analogies go. As an example, if you have two choices:
cat:kitten
dog:puppy
You know neither of these two can be the answer because there would be no reason to pick one over the other.
Then you'll have another choice with absolutely no relationship (e.g. pen:donkey). You can eliminate that immediately. So now you're down to two choices. Pick one randomly.
But yeah - overall I didn't learn any other big secrets - other than the obvious one of working backwards from the answers for many quantitative problems (don't solve an equation for x - just start plugging them in!).
Do you really disagree with that? That's what a lot of the marketing seems to be focused on. I felt like question exposure alone got me those same insights, and in fact, the official SAT book rather explicitly lists those things out.
Most people don't read the annoying small text that accompanies the books that spells out a lot of those strategies. Instead they'd rather pay someone a lot of money to tell that to them :)
For me, those prep courses would likely be a poor value. However, I likely am not in the demographic who would benefit most from them. There are plenty of people out there who haven't learned how to learn from a book, and so having someone teach them will result in better scores. I would have thought such people will likely struggle in college, yet my grad school had quite a few of them. I guess they found a way to compensate.
The trick I mentioned was not in the official SAT book.
I agree that confidence is very important, and aptitude matters too (otherwise everyone who took a class would get a 2400).
Commonly-given wrong advice is about guessing. You should never leave a question blank. Prior to 2016, guessing had an EV of 0, so if you had any hint that any of the answers are better or worse than chance, you should guess. I heard advice like "only guess if you can eliminate two answers", which is clearly wrong.
Now they got rid of the penalty for wrong answers, so guessing has positive EV even if you have no information at all.
To make things more complicated: if you were gunning for a high score in the old system, it was even more important to guess, because your partial points could get rounded up.
I know this isn't important, I'm just trying to understand where my math is breaking down.
I took this from the College Board website:
"Your raw score is converted to a scaled score of 200 to 800 points, the score you see on your score report. We use a process that adjusts for slight differences in difficulty between various versions of the test (such as versions taken on different days).
We do this to make sure there’s no advantage in taking the test on a particular day. A score of 400, for instance, on one day’s test means the same thing as a 400 on a test taken on a different day—even though the questions are different."
https://collegereadiness.collegeboard.org/sat/scores/how-sat...
I never took any prep course. I always was of the mindset that the only value they provided was forced practice. I never bought that they taught secrets of test taking.
Instead I bought 2 books, and 2 books only. One was the official SAT Guide which was $20ish. Secondly I bought a Kaplan book which just had 12 tests in it for $20. Both of these books were also available in the reference section of the public library.
I worked through about a test a week the 4ish months prior to the SAT, and read articles online about the SAT if I came across them. I felt very in the know regarding the test and just flew through it when taking it.
I used that score to tutor others for pay, and my friends for free. I found out that just walking people through the test was about confidence, which really jumped people’s score up. Naturally most people I came across were between a 1500 and an 1800 out of 2400. For people below that, they tended to need remedial education to improve their scores. Between 1800 and 2150 usually was a result of understanding patterns in the test and what to look for. Those were learned through some rigor in prep using the two aforementioned books. Finally, for students who wanted to score above a 2150 to a 2400, the differences in those that did and didn’t were not educational content based, but rather big picture problem solving strategy in how to logic through problems and knowing what to look for.
The SAT, IMO, is a relatively good predictor of someone’s educational attainment the first time they try one prior to any prep. I scored exactly what I predicted and after $40 of self-study, which could’ve been done for free, I scored what I knew I could.