Three tips to stack the odds
BOSTON — High school protesters in New Jersey some time ago came up with
one of the most sensible ideas I ever remember hearing from that type of
demonstration.
I forget the details of the incident; it probably responded to some remark
by school bureaucrats about minority abilities. But what sticks in the mind
is that the protesters wanted the school system to help pay tuition for
students to take a private prep course for the Scholastic Aptitude Tests.
The logic was brilliantly simple. Minority students average significantly
lower scores — by 100 points or so — on the SATs, one of the main
criteria for admission to a good college. The private companies that offer
cram courses for the SATs boast that they can raise a student’s score by at
least 100 points.
Most middle-class families will insist their high school children take
these courses, and willingly pay the exorbitant fees. Many poor, minority
families can’t afford them or wouldn’t think of them. This economic and
cultural divergence on the cram courses alone goes a fair way toward
explaining ethnic differences in the test results.
Some wealthy tribes have started to pay for supplemental education
programs, but the fact remains that the $1,000 or more in tuition puts
these courses out of reach for most Indian children, on or off (especially
off) the reservation. Like a college degree itself, the cram course is what
economists call a “barrier to entry,” a sometimes artificial restriction
that limits access to the goodies of a market or society to the “haves” and
keeps out the “have-nots.”
But someone with will and energy can still leap the cram-course barrier.
The principles they teach are simple, and with hard work and concentration
you can reap much of their benefit without laying out a lot of money.
(Since we are trying to reveal their secrets, we won’t name specific
courses: but any high school counselor can provide their information.) Here
is what we have gleaned from former instructors and from published manuals.
The cram courses essentially teach three things: practice in test taking,
vocabulary and ways to game the system.
(A) PRACTICE, PRACTICE AND MORE PRACTICE
As in sports and music, you get better results in test taking by constant
training. It’s a common criticism of the Bush administration’s “No Child
Left Behind” program, and American education in general, that it diverts
inordinate energy into test preparation. (Of course other societies, such
as England and Japan, and Imperial China, the model for both, have been
even more extreme in pinning the future social and economic status of their
adolescents on one big make-or-break exam.)
The point of practicing is not primarily to learn content. It is to learn
how to stay cool and concentrated in a test setting. By getting used to the
time pressure and the pacing to fill in the bubbles on the answer sheets,
you will find it easier to cope with the real thing. It’s the same as with
a basketball court or a guitar solo; you perform best when you’re in the
“zone.” Hours of practice make the right moves come by second nature, and
everything is smooth.
How to practice? Stores are littered with SAT test books; and you can get
sample tests from the horse’s mouth, the Educational Testing Service. (The
ETS is a nonprofit corporation that writes and administers the SAT and the
PSAT — the preliminary SAT given to high school juniors. It is
commissioned by the College Entrance Examination Board, a consortium of
thousands of educational institutions trying to simplify how they select
their students.) The “official SAT” Web site,
www.collegeboard.com/student/testing/sat/prep_one/prep_one.html, offers a
free practice test with scoring. It also has a menu of helpful prep advice.
Don’t spurn older test books, however. They can be a big help, even with
content. The fact is that it’s hard to write test questions, and the people
who do it will sometimes recycle old favorites.
(B) WORD POWER
Learning content is crucial for one important part of the test, however.
That is the series of multiple-choice questions that test analogies,
opposites, sentence completion and, above all, vocabulary. The review
courses place great emphasis on word lists, setting their students to learn
20 or so a night. The Barron’s Educational Series prep book used a computer
to generate a “high frequency word list” of the 388 words that show up most
frequently on the SATs. It also offers a list of 3,500 “basic words,”
broken into 50 practice sessions (from “abase — adroit” to “volatile —
zephyr”).
Words can be highly rewarding for their own sake, by the way. Reader’s
Digest used to have a vocabulary feature called “Increasing your Word
Power” but traditional societies go it one further, understanding that
words are power. When Malcolm X was in prison making the transition from
street criminal to religious leader, he decided to improve himself by
reading through the dictionary. Years later he was visiting the Bronx Zoo
with associates and startled them by insisting with delight that they go to
see the aardvark, one of the first entries he had memorized.
Word power will set you well for the verbal score, but what about math?
Obviously, a quick review of basic geometry and algebra is essential. Test
books will give you the bare bones, but here’s some personal advice. If you
really understand the Pythagorean Theorem — that’s the right triangle
thing about the square of the hypotenuse equaling the sum of the squares of
the two sides — then you have cracked the mystery of high school math
through trigonometry. There’s a neat trick in Plato: try drawing a square
on each of those lines and see what you can do with them. Geometry might
seem boring in class, but Pythagoras made a thriving religion out of it.
The equivalent for algebra is the power of the equal sign. Take some time
to meditate on the meaning of an equation, and you might be surprised when
the test comes at how much you really do know.
(C) GAMING THE SYSTEM
There’s one area where the cram courses claim to do more than practicing
tests and learning words and formulae. That’s where they say they can beat
the test by figuring out its weakness. One review course used to deride the
ordinary test taker as “Joe Blog,” before the Internet gave that last name
an entirely different meaning. The idea was that if you plod through the
test answer by answer, you will be out-pointed by someone who knows how to
analyze the structure of the multiple-choice questions.
The argument has instant appeal to a gambler playing the odds. The standard
multiple-choice has five possible answers. If they were all equally
weighted and randomized, in the words of one instructor, a monkey who drew
a straight line down the answer sheet would get 20 percent of them right
(assuming he hit the bubbles), for an overall score of 650. To correct for
random guessing, the SAT scoring deducts for wrong answers.
For each multiple choice set of five, you get one point for the correct
answer and a deduction of a quarter point for a wrong one. But as a further
check, one or two of the wrong answers are totally wrong to the point of
absurdity. Here’s where the gamesmanship comes in. If you can identify the
clearly wrong answers and throw them out, then even if you still don’t know
the right answer, mathematically it makes sense to guess. As a
horse-gambler would put it, you are getting a 5-to-1 payoff for a 4- or
3-to-1 bet. Sometimes the “process of elimination” will get you to the one
right answer.
The cram courses spin this out with an elaborate series of tips. In
grammar, for instance, the shortest answer is usually the best. Restate a
reading passage in your own words. Work backward from the questions, and so
on. But the main point is not to be intimidated and above all, not to space
out. Approach the test as a mind game, and realize that the game maker has
his own blind spots.
One of the best lessons from all this preparation is that the tests are not
infallible. They are a necessary convenience for admissions officers
swamped with thousands of applicants; but what they ultimately measure, as
the better prep books keep repeating, is your ability to take a test on one
specific day — not your intrinsic worth. Even at the best schools, it is
very possible to overcome a mediocre score with a strong personal
interview. Tests are barriers, but a strong spirit sees barriers as
something to conquer.