Test Prep Professionals

(Forbes) By Willard Dix–Let me be direct about this topic: Over-emphasizing the ACT and/or SAT at the expense of other necessary college application components like academic achievement, doesn’t make sense. It’s far more productive for college admission and personal development to approach school and education as an ongoing enterprise instead of as the make-or-break proposition that college admission testing creates. Habits of testing will not be a part of a good college education, but habits of mind will.

When looking at colleges, especially highly competitive institutions, it’s easy to head for the test scores. They stand out with their neatness and apparent precision. They appear to indicate something concrete against which prospective applicants can measure themselves. They strike fear into the hearts of students (and parents) everywhere. Everyone assumes that without stellar scores, students are automatically disqualified from excellent colleges and that with high scores, they are practically shoo-ins. But obsessing about scores at the expense of other aspects of students’ applications and lives can interfere with what genuinely matters to colleges.

OK, fine, highly competitive colleges do look at scores, and they need to be good. (There’s a certain cognitive dissonance in the way colleges talk about scores.) What they don’t need to be is perfect. My point is this: It is far more valuable in the long run to have worked hard in school on developing, deepening, and expanding one’s intellectual capacities than to cram or “study” for an exam of dubious personal educational value. If you say, “Yes, but without the highest possible score Sarah won’t get into Dartmouth,” the reality is that even with the highest possible score she might not be accepted. If she spent more time studying for the exam instead of doing her schoolwork, that’s truly time wasted.

Too often I’ve worked with students with a score of 30 (out of 36) on the ACT who feel they need to gain at least two points to be “admissible” to a particular set of colleges. Sometimes they’ve taken the test several times, so their “superscore” (a selection of the best subscores from each test) might add up to a 31 or even a 32. Even students with “average” scores feel as though they need to get them into the stratosphere. They become obsessed with getting that last point, enrolling in extensive, time consuming and expensive test prep courses to eke out that final score. I always advise against this course of action, instead encouraging students to read more, devote themselves to doing well in their courses and activities, and otherwise demonstrating how they’ll be good additions to a campus.

Admittedly, I come from a time when the competition for spots in highly selective schools was much less cutthroat. We took the SAT once and lived with the results. So I understand that times have changed. But over the years, colleges have consistently put strength of a student’s curriculum and GPA as primary in the evaluation process. This survey of important admission factors has remained essentially unchanged for many years:

Rank of college application elements in the decision-making process.

Whereas 81.5% of colleges surveyed said grades in college prep courses were most important, only 58.3% said the same about test scores. Second, at 63.7% was strength of the curriculum. Again, there’s some fudging going on here if you listen carefully to what colleges say and note what they do, but it’s true that someone with top scores but a mediocre academic record isn’t generally considered a strong applicant at a highly selective college.

Often, students think that working for higher test scores can make up for mediocre grades. This realization often comes late in students’ high school careers as they realize they should have worked harder in chemistry or English. Taking “boot camp” test prep courses to improve their scores seems like an easy way to balance things out. Unfortunately, this strategy can backfire: A high score in conjunction with mediocre grades reads to an admission officer (all other things being equal): “Smart, but hasn’t really worked very hard. Probably won’t add to our academic life here.” More insidiously, students who by some miracle increase their scores significantly (that is, beyond the statistically expected rise) can expect to have their tests flagged on suspicion of cheating.

Students may see taking the tests multiple times (three, four, even five times) as a way to get the scores they want, but more often than not, they score within a certain range higher or lower, ending up at more or less the same spot at which they started. That’s not to say that some students don’t do much better on a second round (perhaps they were ill or distressed the first time) or that a “superscore” can’t add up to an overall improvement, but continual testing betrays not only desperation on the students’ part but also a diversion of resources from more important activities.

Focusing on testing at the expense of other elements also raises the anxiety factor unreasonably. It’s exhausting enough to take either the ACT or the SAT once. To have to do it over and over again for what will most likely be modest gains (and even losses) simply drains students of their energy. It seems that students now take either test (sometimes both although it’s not necessary) at least twice. That’s the maximum I’d recommend, and if scores are decent the first time as well as in line with colleges being considered, once is plenty.

Testing is easy for admission offices to use because it’s a number. It seems to say something and gives admission officers a seemingly objective way to measure applicants against each other. But despite the pressures among the most selective colleges to maintain high scores, there is always room for exciting applicants in the “mid-50%” and below. “Holistic evaluation” institutions don’t have cutoffs for scores below which they automatically weed out candidates, so opportunities to shine are always there.

Finally, the movement to de-emphasize test scores even more has been slowly catching on at colleges of every level of selectivity. They’ve been adopting optional test submission, alternative ways to evaluate students and other methods of seeing students “whole,” acknowledging that a number from a high stakes test may not be the best element on which to base an admission decision. (Designed to predict the first year of a student’s performance in college, the tests have been shown to be no more effective than GPA in a college prep curriculum.)

1. Take the SAT or the ACT once and see how you do. Unless something really went wrong, you probably don’t need to take it again. Many people take each one once (they are slightly different, although as they battle for market share they’re trying to be closer in what they emphasize. The SAT Subject Tests are more topic oriented and still required by some highly selective schools.)
2. Be sure to sign up for dates that coordinate with your school and application schedules. If you plan to apply Early Decision, you should take the test at at time when results will be available by the ED due date. For the ACT test dates, go here. For SAT dates, go here.
3. Acquaint yourself with the format and basic elements of the tests. Familiarity is essential. You can  practice for free at the College Board and ACT websites.
4. Be sure you know about changes coming up in the tests. For example, the SAT no longer penalizes for incorrect answers, making guessing, once frowned upon, less problematic. The websites will tell you what’s new.
5. Brush up on the basic academic concepts the tests are designed to measure, especially in math and science (formulas, for example). Do it as close to the time of the tests as possible.
6. Opt for short, highly focused test prep if you decide to use a service. Long, highly involved classes stretching over many weeks have not, to my knowledge, been shown to definitively or consistently raise scores (although anecdotal examples exist). If you were weak in English on the PSAT, go for that, for example.
7. Pay attention to the strategies that test prep can offer you. One of the advantages of good test prep is its ability to show you how the tests are constructed and ways to choose correct answers even if you don’t fully understand the question. I don’t love giving this piece of advice, but it’s part of the ecosystem, so pay attention to it.
8. If possible, have some colleges in mind when you take the test. You’ll have the opportunity to send your scores for free to a limited number of colleges at the time you take the test. Afterwards, you have to pay a fee for each college to which you send scores. Colleges won’t use them unless you apply and sending them isn’t a commitment to apply. But it’s a small convenience.
9. Prepare for a barrage of mail, email, and other marketing material. Colleges can buy lists of students they want to target by score range, race and ethnicity and other information you supply when you fill out the personal information on the test form. Enjoy the attention but remind yourself that this is marketing, not an offer of admission or even a good indicator of the possibility of admission.
10. Approach the tests as an interesting challenge, not a measure of your worth. Hard to put into practice, but if you can put some psychological distance between yourself and the test you can be more clearheaded.
11. Don’t share your results with anyone except those who need to know. Consider your scores a private matter; you’ll avoid a lot of headaches that way. Don’t ask about peers’ scores, either. In a few months, no one will care anyway.

Keeping testing in perspective helps keep everything else in balance as well. Consider scores icing on the cake, gravy on the roast beef, or the tail on the donkey. You’ll do fine.