Written By Mark Greenstein, Founder of Ivy Bound Test Prep, June 2015
Parents and educators routinely post comments that SAT prep is “gaming the system”. I happen to agree. But no student should feel guilty about gaming. “Gaming” is simply making use of coaching to improve skills that are improvable. Students who take advantage of SAT or ACT coaching improve their testing skills as wholesomely as students who improve their athletic skills by listening to their team coaches. The “blockhead belief”, that a mid-range student could not change his SAT scores and was thus “stuck” with that mid-range score, was disproven long ago (by Stanley Kaplan and other test prep pioneers). Meekly following the “blockhead belief”, thinking that your scores won’t improve much, relegates you to second-tier choices. The stoic way of being “above coaching” is a LOSING way. SAT skills are valuable in their own right — the SAT tests grammar, essay writing, reading skills, vocabulary, basic math, practical math, and resourceful math. The lone impractical element on the old SAT was “analogies”, and the College
Board rid the SAT of analogies in 2004. SAT coaching is abundant, and often less expensive than athletic coaching, so it’s wise to take advantage of a good SAT coach. Test prep firms help their students MASTER; that’s not cheating any more than mastering an instrument gets you into some elite ensembles or higher seating in an orchestra. Gaming is a good thing, especially where ingenuity is one of the very elements that colleges like seeing in applicants. Colleges embrace the SAT in part because the skills tested there reveal an element of “resourcefulness” that a transcript alone does not reveal. Highly ranked colleges’ use of the ACT and SAT is one of the most meritocratic things possible for
students. The SAT largely replaced the “primping, poise, and pedigree” that held sway up until the 1960s. The College Board makes the SAT eminently accessible to students with low financial means, and colleges bend over backwards to admit students from disadvantaged backgrounds if they possess strong SAT / ACT scores. When more educators banish the thought that SAT gaming is tawdry, they will help make the SAT the greatest democratizer in human history**. Continue Reading →
