Everybody is lying about SAT prep. Here are 5 of the biggest lies, and the people who tell them.

1) Gaston Caperton, the President of the College Board, which administers the SAT, is lying about SAT prep.

Yesterday in the NY Times, Mr. Caperton responded to this question from a reader, “How does the College Board feel about SAT test preparation?”

His response?

“Research shows that short-term prep can’t replace years of learning, and it won’t result in big score gains.”

He’s completely wrong. Everything is coachable.

Business, politics, sports, dieting, fitness, cooking, and acting are just some of the fields where skilled coaching can help a motivated “student” advance much faster than he or she would otherwise without the benefit of such help.

Why would anybody expect a high stakes test like the SAT to be any different?

I wonder if Mr. Caperton ever had a mentor at some point in his political or business career. Assuming that he did, I would bet that he probably performed better and rose faster because of having a mentor than other people who did not have access to such coaching.

The study he’s referring to states that, “average gains are more in the neighborhood of 30 points.”

What’s the problem? The term “average” is meaningless.

I don’t doubt that if you averaged together all of the students who did any kind of paid test preparation you might get an average increase of 30 points. If you average all the families in America, we have an average of 1.7 kids.

2) The large (and medium size) test prep companies are lying about SAT prep.

They run tons of students through their programs and trot out a couple of them who raised their score a few hundred points.

Then they say, “250 point score increase!”

It’s like a fad diet or a weight loss pill. “Amanda lost 180 pounds and went from a size 24 to size 8!”

Sure, some people do lose that weight, and some students will have huge score gains with competent instruction.

Most people won’t. Not with a generic, “one size fits all” approach.

3) People who say that the SAT only measures how well you take standardized tests, and therefore can be “gamed” with some sort of test taking tricks are lying about SAT prep.

Seriously? There’s a clear difference in academic ability between a student who scores, for example, a 2250 and an 1800. There’s a clear difference between one who scores a 1400 and an 1850.

To pretend otherwise is just insulting to all of the students who worked hard and applied themselves in school, or put in the time with a skilled tutor or good class, and did well on the test.

4) The people at FairTest, The National Center for Fair & Open Testing, are lying about SAT prep.

FairTest claims that because test preparation can help a student raise his score, that makes the SAT invalid for use in the college admissions process.

Again, seriously?

Of course there are many other factors, other than test scores, which contribute to how well a student will do in college.

Want to know the biggest one? Motivation to study hard.

What else does motivation to study hard produce? A better score on the SAT!

5) Some high school college counselors are lying about SAT prep.

I hate to say this one. And I want to be clear that I’m saying “some”, not “all”.

Some college counselors tell their students not to put too much effort into studying for the SAT. They tell their students that high school grades are more important.

That’s true, to a point. But remember this:

By the time most kids get ready to take the SAT, they’ve already completed 5 semesters of high school. Those grades are sealed, and they no longer have any control over them.

What do they have control over? Two semester’s worth of grades, and their SAT scores.

Students who don’t study for the SAT are greatly harming their chances for admission to the college of their choice.

So those are the lies. At least some of them.

Want to know the truth? Stop back soon.

Doing well on the SAT is not about learning a lot of content.

In my last post, I examined the myth that learning some tricks, techniques or strategies can help someone get big increase in their SAT score. They can’t. Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying to you, and you should run the other way.

If you really want to increase your SAT score in a significant way, there’s someone else you should be aware of, too. That’s the person who tells you that the most important thing to learn is the content of the test.

I can hear the objections already.

“What are you talking about? Of course the content is the most important thing. If  you don’t know the content, how can you possibly do well on the test? You even hinted at that in your last post, when you suggested that if you were an expert in psychology you might have been able to help your friend with his exam.”

That’s true, of course. To do well on any test, you have to know the content of the test. If   someone were to make me take a test right now on 17th Century French Literature, I would fail it big time.

But the SAT isn’t 17th Century French Literature. It’s not rocket science. It’s not brain surgery. Most kids already know most of the content that they have to know to do way better on the SAT than they thought was possible based on their PSAT score.

I have no scientific data to back this up, but my gut tells me that most kids have enough knowledge of the content to score 300 points higher.

It’s a bold claim. I know. I’m saying that a kid who gets a 1500 on the PSAT knows enough content to be able to get a 1800 on the SAT. (By the way, multiply the PSAT score by 100 to get the SAT equivalent.) If you got an 1800 on the PSAT, you know enough content to get a 2100 on the SAT. And if you got a 2100 on the PSAT, you know enough content to get a perfect score of 2400 on the SAT.

How is this possible? There’s just not that much content, and by the time you take the SAT at the end of your junior year, you’ve already learned it.

The Math section is mostly basic geometry and algebra. The Writing section covers just a handful of grammar rules. The Critical Reading section? Well, by the time a student gets to the second semester of her junior year in high school, if she can’t read, she probably isn’t taking the SAT.

Yesterday, one of my students asked me how to do a math problem. I said, “Suppose your father told you that if you get it right, you can have any car you want. How would you solve it?”

He got the problem right.

Of course a few key pieces of content can help. Of course. Presumably, everyone who is tutoring kids for the SAT, every employee of every test prep company, understands all of the content and can explain it ad nauseam.

It won’t separate a someone who can really help your child from someone who can only help a little. And that study I referenced in an earlier blog post, Can Preparing for the SAT Really Help You Increase Your Score?, was right about one thing: Most people who pay for SAT prep raise their scores by only a small amount.

Doing well on the SAT is not about tricks and techniques.

A couple of months ago, somebody contacted me about helping him study for the licensing exam to become a psychologist. I thought it was an odd request, because I coach high school students for the SAT and other college admissions tests. Psychology is one of those fields that everybody knows something about, but I didn’t think I could help this man, because, after all, he studied psychology in graduate school and he was already practicing as a therapist.

Of course I couldn’t help him with the psychology content, he agreed. He just wanted the tips and tricks of taking a standardized test. I asked him what he meant, could he give me an example. He didn’t really have one, that’s why he was coming to me.

“The only thing I can think of is on a True or False test. Now, my test isn’t True/False,” he told me, “but everyone knows that on a True/False test, if you don’t know the answer, you always pick True, because that’s the most likely answer.”

In that instant, not only did he validate my childhood refusal to see a psychologist, but he also, more importantly, made me consider how widespread such misconceptions might be.

So I sought out a friend who’s a long term substitute teacher for elementary school here in Los Angeles where I live. Since those kids have to take a lot of standardized tests, I wanted to know my friend’s thoughts about the importance of tricks and techniques.

My friend said that she would do a lot better on a given standardized test than another person with a comparable or even higher level of knowledge of the subject matter because she knows what those tests are like and she knows the techniques you should use on them to do well.

“OK, what are they?” She paused for a second. I expected that she’d have a list, but she didn’t. Like my psychologist friend, she just believed it to be true and assumed that I knew it was true and that I would know what these tricks are. Finally, she said, as though it were obvious, “If you don’t know the answer to a multiple choice question you should always pick ‘C’. It’s the most common answer.”

Nothing could be more wrong.

Tricks and techniques, at least the way we generally think of them, will not help someone do significantly better on his SAT.

I’m not saying that it’s not helpful to know when to guess and when not to guess. It is. It’s helpful to know how to answer a sentence fill in if you don’t know all the vocabulary. It’s helpful, when you read a passage and have to answer the questions about it, to know what to do when you have two answers left and you can’t decide between them. And it’s helpful, when you’re doing math, to know which of several methods to use to solve a problem, and when to skip it entirely.

I don’t consider them tricks. These are methods, ways that you, as the test taker, want to train your mind to think. It’s about learning and applying what you learn.

It’s very coachable, and it can pay off in a very big way.