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Most of the time, her lies were not caught. The same is true for other college applicants, and most probably lie less than Chandra did.

It goes without saying that students should not lie on their applications, but it is perhaps understandable why they do. Unenforced rules do not feel much like real rules. If the police gave tickets to everyone who went 1 mile over the speed limit, we would understand that the speed limit was true to its name. That doesn’t happen, so most people go a bit over: the enforcement is where the real limit exists.

A student’s extracurricular activities are not fact-checked. No one is checking whether their application essays are accurate, highly edited by someone else, or written by artificial intelligence.

If you think people aren’t lying – especially when there are few limits on them doing so and the rewards for doing so can be very high – then you’re lying to yourself.

Even grades lack authenticity because they are now so inflated. For instance, the University of California, San Diego found that a quarter of its students who could not do even middle school math had perfect 4.0 high school GPAs in math. Some high schools have many valedictorians, such as San Juan Hills High School, which had 242 valedictorians in 2025. Even though 12th-grade students currently have the lowest reading and math proficiency on record, 84% of students at 4-year universities report that they had A-averages in high school. Consequently, grades have become poor signals of academic preparedness. 

Between the inflated grades, potentially AI-written essays, and invented activities, colleges don’t have much else to go on except teacher recommendations, which apparently some students still fake.

Colleges need objective assessments like the SAT and ACT to provide them with a standardized measure of basic academic preparedness. But, since Covid, most colleges have not returned to requiring these test scores. In so doing, they choose fiction over fact.

Imagine you apply to a job and an employer says to you, “There is relevant information that helps us predict your success at this job – and the most recent research shows it’s 390% as predictive as any other information – but it’s optional to send it to us. If you don’t send it, that’s fine – we won’t penalize you.”

First, you would wonder what was wrong with this employer. Every employer should want the most relevant information possible to assess whether a new hire will succeed at the job. Second, you would probably not believe them that they won’t penalize you for not submitting it: only those with low scores would not submit their scores, so it would not make sense to hire those who don’t submit that information. Third, if they were telling the truth that they won’t penalize you, then you would assume that they don’t care about the quality of the work or the success of the worker.

In college admissions, it’s a combination of all three.

Test-optional colleges would rather make decisions in the absence of useful information than with it. At top colleges, where the average SAT score is typically around a 1540 out of 1600, research shows that the GPA of students who did not submit test scores matched that of students with about a 1310 on the SAT.

It seems illogical to admit students with significantly lower unreported test scores, unless you realize that test-optional colleges don’t prioritize academic achievement: they want to attract as many applicants as possible so that they look more selective and admit whomever they want (legacies, recruited athletes, full-pay students, etc) without lowering the college’s reported average SAT/ACT score

Now it starts to make sense: colleges, especially test-optional ones, have larger concerns than authenticating the information in a student’s application, even their academic preparedness.

Colleges could require a proctored essay. For instance, the ACT offers one that students can complete. Zero colleges require it.

They could try to verify even one item on each student’s extracurricular list. They don’t.

They could require a standardized entrance exam measuring academic achievement to validate that the students’ grades accurately indicate their academic preparedness. Most don’t.

Kids might have the lowest math and reading proficiency in modern history, but they aren’t stupid. Kids can read between the lines: the truth doesn’t matter; looking good does.

College admissions will remain broken as long as the priorities of colleges remain broken. If and when they decide to value the truth, you’ll know. They’ll require it. Until then, many applicants and colleges will prioritize a false facade over true excellence.

About the Author: David Blobaum is a nationally recognized expert in the entrance exam and college admissions industry. He is the CEO of Summit Prep and the Director of Outreach for the National Test Prep Association, a non-profit that works to support the appropriate use of testing in admissions. 

Last Updated on April 7, 2026 by NTPA Admin

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For the March Tutor Round table, Kate Fisher led the discussion about Homework Expectations vs. Reality: What should we assign and expect to have completed? There was a Showcase Spotlight with Dr. Ben Bernstein.

Last Updated on March 24, 2026 by NTPA Admin

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For many students, AI has become an everyday study tool, and its full integration into SAT/ACT preparation has been long discussed. AI can generate practice problems, write a study plan, and use analytics of your performance to identify weaker areas. So now that Gemini offers unlimited practice tests and questions, the test prep industry faces a pressing question: will this resource break the business model, or is it just more “AI slop”?

Let’s examine the question and consider what best serves student needs.

Where AI genuinely delivers value

Given very specific directions, AI can be an incredible source of targeted practice questions. If you ask ChatGPT to “create ten quadratic equations where students must use the discriminant to determine the number of solutions, with explanations,” for example, you’ll get usable practice material in seconds. If you request variations of a certain problem at different difficulty levels, AI delivers. 

AI may not be able to create complete, precisely worded standardized test questions, but for foundational skill-building, AI-powered tools genuinely help, and for students who cannot afford private tutoring, these tools provide meaningful support for building baseline competency. In addition, they’re available 24/7 and affordable. As a result, these tools do have a place in the test prep world.

The AI problem we’ve all encountered

If you use ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini, however, you’ve likely encountered this issue—confident answers that turn out to be incorrect or even fictitious.

AI tools share a common weakness: prompting, or the ability give instructions that are specific enough to generate the correct type of answers. Prompting has become its own skill, and students often overestimate AI’s ability to understand their requests. As a result, students may attempt to create assessments or practice sets for themselves but end up with unusable outputs. 

While students are usually good at telling when something is unusable, they have more trouble detecting subtle errors – often the exact errors that the students themselves would make. For the SAT, on complex questions—the ones that separate a 1400 from a 1550—AI sometimes generates tempting but incorrect answers with the same confident tone that it presents correct answers. Students cannot distinguish between reliable explanations and plausible-sounding errors without the expertise to verify the content themselves. 

The Google Gemini situation

Google’s January 2026 launch made headlines by offering free, Princeton Review-vetted SAT practice tests inside Gemini. The pitch sounds compelling: unlimited practice, instant feedback, personalized study plans, and no cost barrier. The combination of AI’s computing power and Princeton Review’s long-established reputation appears to be the best of both worlds.

But early testing by professional tutors reveals significant problems. Private Prep’s analysis found that the platform lacks test-day tools (I.e., calculator, highlighters, or testing interface), clear and easy to follow feedback, and accurate question styles. Furthermore, the tests have mediocre to poor content matching with the real test that students will encounter on test day, and question types appear in random order rather than in the consistent sequence of the real exam. Students practicing on a platform with different interface tools, different question ordering, and different passage characteristics may develop habits that don’t transfer—or worse, these students might receive inflated feedback that creates false confidence. As Jason Robinovitz, a founding board member of National Test Prep Association, put it: “What Google is really doing is scaling an already flawed model, then placing a highly confident but imperfect AI on top of it. The result risks being a convincing simulation of preparation rather than the real thing.”

What human tutors provide that AI cannot replicate

Content knowledge and domain expertise is essential to test prep, but one cannot neglect the impact that soft-skills and personal connection have on student learning. Skilled human tutors excel at managing psychological readiness, building the accountability that drives sustained effort, and recognizing when a student needs content knowledge versus test-taking strategy. On the other hand, AI has a significant deficit in recognizing when students are:

• Experiencing frustration or confusion
• Losing motivation
• Hiding comprehension gaps due to embarrassment
• Dealing with test anxiety
• Using inappropriate resources to generate correct answers

These aspects of behavior and learning are just as much a part of the learning and test preparation process as the content knowledge. 

The optimal model

Right now, the most compelling application of AI for tutors is a thoughtful integration. Beyond managing the learning process, a good tutor serves as a curator of study materials, a difficult task for a student both learning something new and still learning how to prompt. 

Consider this format: AI handles micro-adaptivity—generating practice problems and delivering immediate feedback on foundational skills outside of lessons—while human tutors provide personalized education, address motivation, build student confidence, and provide accountability.

The question isn’t whether AI will replace human tutors—the evidence shows that as of now, it cannot. Instead, the question is “how can we thoughtfully integrate AI and the human tutor element to provide a learning experience better than either approach provides alone?”

Ultimately, AI is in the test prep world to stay. As such, professional tutors must be prepared to answer questions about it and use it where it excels. But professional tutors will also keep their jobs for some time yet.

Last Updated on March 2, 2026 by NTPA Admin

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