> not about solving the problem but eliminating options and determining when it's faster to validate if a given answer is correct
Those skills are not specific to test taking, they are general problem solving skills. You'll use them all the time in industry.
BTW, I picked up an SAT vocabulary prep book to see what was in it. I knew nearly all the words. That's simply from reading a lot. I kinda doubt that memorizing words from a vocabulary book is going to help. The SAT prep book had "hundreds" of words in it. The typical high school graduate has a vocabulary of 10,000 words, for college graduates it's 30,000 words. Hundreds of words isn't going to make much difference. Besides, memorizing words is not the same as organically learning them from routinely encountering them.
The TV vocabulary is 3,000 words if I recall correctly. That's right, TV is dumbed down. (On the other hand, that means one can learn a foreign language by only learning 3,000 words!)
I don't agree that math classes are enough because teachers do vary, some sucks, some are great, but also at the end of the day they have to teach whole class, not just you, meanwhile maths on youtube runs at your pace
This is a worthless distinction, that is correct only on an irrelevant technically.
The point being, that when people prepare for the test, they get better scores.
Yes, there are multiple ways to prepare for a test. But preparing is a good thing, regardless of what you call it, or if you are saying that regular math class also covers it.
You'd also be wrong here. Let me give you a simple example, that might not be immediately apparent to someone who doesn't know the rules of these tests.
At one point in time, on some tests, there was a "guessing penalty" for getting a wrong answer.
Having a basic understanding of how that works, and different guessing strategies, can increase your score.
EX: questions like should you guess? Should you rule out answers, and guess on the remaining?
There are even other things to think about, such as one's strategy for how long to spend on a question, and if/when you should give up on that one.
A person not experienced in test taking, might make a mistake of spending too much time on one single question, for example, when instead it could make more sense to skim the test first, for easy questions, and answer those first, so you don't run out of time and miss easy points.
Just learning the material doesn't automatically prevent you from making this mistake.
As the book said, it wasn't a guessing penalty, it was a guessing-wrong penalty. They told you it was a guessing penalty to scare you into not guessing.
The penalty was a quarter point. Most questions had four options. So it was already an expected zero points on average, not a penalty, and if you could eliminate a single answer it was a net positive to guess.
1. Read the rules of the tests. Come on! Does one really need handholding with this?
2. Understanding the probability of success at guessing based on how many of the answers you can eliminate is trivial probability, which goes back to my advice to pay attention in math class.
3. "how long to spend on a question" I'm laughing/crying now. It's third grade arithmetic to figure out the time per question. You know, number of minutes for the test divided by the number of questions. Of course skim the test picking off the easy ones then the medium ones and save the hard ones for last. This is just common sense.
If this is what test prep is, things are much worse than I thought. Who needs to be told that reading the instructions is a strategy for doing well on the test? My gawd.
For some tests, that's not the right approach. Going in order may be a bad idea. Actually trying to immediately solve the problems may be a bad idea. For example, it may be more efficient to check the units of all the multiple-choice answers first, to see if there's only one that's possibly correct.
You could try to figure out the best strategy during the test, but it's far more effective to learn these things before the test.
If you've already done a dozen practice tests, you'll know what kinds of methods there are to quickly eliminate incorrect multiple-choice answers. You'll know, say, that there are fundamentally 8 types of problems, and you'll be able to skim the test and immediately recognize which problems call into which categories.
This is why people who do test prep get higher scores.
That doesn't mean that we should throw out standardized tests, but it is silly to deny that test prep helps (a lot).
And yet despite your incredulous, fake outrage, the stats simply show that test prep helps people significantly.
If you really want more reasons, read the other response that DiogenesKynikos gave to you in the post.
My problem is with you make false statements here. Be as mad as you want about the fake that test prep helps a lot of people, significantly, but do not make false claims, and ignore the fact that the stats show that it works.
Because gaming the test works, as the stats prove. And these tests are very important for college admissions.
There is no reason to handicap one's self, just because someone from the peanut gallery is yelling in incredulous outrage.
I don't see how spending more time on memorizing formulas instead of actually understanding formulas, deriving them, and going above and beyond the high school curriculum would be a deficiency, and you would definitely be penalised in the SAT with such an approach over an objectively worse education where students are exposed to less math and more memorization. There is objectively no value to memorizing what amounts to trivia that you will then immediately forget.
That is to say, I strongly disagree that SAT prep is actually going to be just making you a better student, and we seem to both agree that it is strongly correlated to SAT score, while using such prep is correlated to SES.
It worked for me, too, though I already had a high score, and wanted to see if I could get it even higher. (It worked; I did.)
That's great that you managed to develop SAT-ready vocabulary and math techniques on your own before taking the test. Many, many people don't, and test prep can help fill that gap, not only in their knowledge, but in strategies that work well for the test itself. And that last bit was probably what helped most for me: I, too, had a solid vocabulary (I read a lot growing up), and I never had trouble acing my math classes. But understanding how the test itself worked was helpful too, and netted me a nearly-perfect score.
It's pretty irrefutable that this can work; not sure why this is the hill you've decided to die on.
Preparation absolutely did help. I didn't develop any new generally-applicable skills, but I did:
1. Practice the style of essays these tests require.
2. Improve my speed at spotting specific types of incorrect answers.
3. Learn a few grammatical rules that were different from the way I learned English growing up. (It was a long time ago, and sadly I don't remember the specifics.)
Why? Prior to test prep I was solving the problems as I was taught in calculus. Deriving equations. The test prep re-inforced memorizing key formulas and how to think not about solving the problem but eliminating options and determining when it's faster to validate if a given answer is correct.
SAT test prep does work. Similar to how FANG interview prep also works.