And for us, more information is always better. If students choose [to submit either a SAT or ACT score], that’s fine, because both tests have value. But if they submit both, that generally gives us a little more information.^[1]

And yet, 10 years later, most colleges no longer even require either a SAT or ACT score for admission consideration. The exams still test students on the same fundamental knowledge and skills, so what changed?

The Shift Towards Test-Optional Policies

Consider a recent statement from Sam Prouty, the Executive Director of Admissions at Middlebury College, which emphasizes the contextual nature of standardized test scores:

If the average [ACT score] at your school is a 17, then a 31 is still kickin it in your context… The [student’s test score] is never just a raw number. It exists in these very important contexts.

According to Middlebury College’s Common Data Set, the middle 50% of students in their freshman cohort achieved ACT scores ranging from 33 to 35.^[2] Conventional guidance provided by college experts advises that applicants should only share their SAT/ACT scores if these scores fall within or surpass the middle 50% range of scores for a particular institution.^[3]

Applying this principle to Middlebury implies that submitting a score of 32 or lower would not be recommended. Consequently, this policy could result in the omission of a 31 ACT score from an outstanding student. Those with scores lower than Middlebury’s average yet unique qualities that could make them stand out in their respective contexts might be advised not to submit their scores. This approach could potentially put them at a disadvantage during the admissions evaluation.

The Hidden Impact of Test-Optional Admissions

And therein lies the lie in university admissions. According to Middlebury’s admissions website, we read the following:

Your decision to submit scores, or not, will in no way impact your candidacy for admission.^[4]

This is demonstrably false.

The vast majority of students attending four-year colleges and universities had A+, A, or A- averages in high school.^[5] So, the student with perfect grades from a disadvantaged high school will not automatically shine brightly with perfect grades alone. That student’s admission chances could absolutely be impacted by their decision to submit or not submit their 31.

However, my intention isn’t to single out Middlebury. (I hold Mr. Prouty in high regard, recognizing him as a genuinely kind, well-meaning, and forthright individual I genuinely respect.) The reality is that all institutions with test-optional policies seem to stretch the truth when they assure that the decision to submit or withhold test scores won’t influence an applicant’s admission prospects.

Clearly, it has the potential to do so. The contradiction is evident—if this weren’t the case, institutions would adopt a test-blind approach, disregarding test scores entirely. Given that submitting a strong score can indeed enhance an applicant’s chances of acceptance, it logically follows that abstaining from sharing a strong score disadvantages students relative to those who do present impressive scores.

This is common sense.

The Benefits of Standardized Testing In Admissions

MIT, to its credit, is one of the few colleges that has stopped gaslighting students and parents. It has stood by its holistic admissions of comprehensively evaluating each applicant with their contexts by a return to requiring test scores stating the following:

Our research shows standardized tests help us better assess the academic preparedness of all applicants, and also help us identify socioeconomically disadvantaged students who lack access to advanced coursework or other enrichment opportunities that would otherwise demonstrate their readiness for MIT.^[6]

Admissions need to walk the talk and assess the complete student. Doing so is more critical now than ever before. This is especially true given that, as a recent study definitively showed, subjective admissions criteria (application essays, teacher recommendations, extracurricular activities) favor the wealthy far more than standardized test scores do.^[7]

Why Standardized Testing is Good for Students

Standardized tests, which require students to demonstrate knowledge of foundational grammar, math, reading, and data analysis, are a barrier that all students, rich and poor, must overcome. Colleges that rely on these measures give less preference to the wealthy, who must demonstrate that knowledge to colleges.

Economically disadvantaged students can take the tests for free,^[8] and free test prep^[9] is available online. Even though not perfect, SAT/ACT scores are a crucial part of holistic admissions and are the only admissions criteria that are authenticated, standardized, and available to all students.

MIT put it well:

We believe [an SAT/ACT] requirement is more equitable and transparent than a test-optional policy.^[10]

My hope is that other colleges will follow suit and return to genuine holistic admissions.

About the Authors: David Blobaum

BIO: David Blobaum is a nationally recognized expert in the entrance exam and college admissions industry and is the Director of Outreach for the National Test Prep Association, which works to support the appropriate use of testing in admissions. He has devoted himself to helping students reach their potential through education and, more broadly, to help empower them to succeed in life. To do so, he co-founded the education company Summit Prep in 2013 with a classmate from college, Eva Addae.

Editor: Marc Gray

Marc Gray, owner of Odyssey College Prep and CEO of Powerful Prep, streamlines college admissions with advanced aptitude testing. An active blogger, he writes on college admissions, test prep, and aptitude testing. As Chair of the NTPA’s Blog Committee, he updates members on the latest in college admissions and community news.

References

^[1] Lewin, T. (2013, August 2). More Students Are Taking Both the ACT and SAT. The New York Times. Retrieved November 6, 2024, from https://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/04/education/edlife/more-students-are-taking-both-the-act-and-sat.html

^[2] Common Data Set Initiative. (n.d.). A. General Information. Middlebury College. Retrieved November 6, 2024, from https://www.middlebury.edu/sites/www.middlebury.edu/files/2023-03/CDS_2022-2023_3.pdf

^[3] Epps, T. (2023, March 23). Sending SAT/ACT Scores to Test-Optional Schools. BestColleges.com. Retrieved November 6, 2024, from https://www.bestcolleges.com/blog/send-scores-test-optional-colleges/

^[4] Middlebury College. (n.d.). Standardized Tests. Middlebury College. Retrieved November 6, 2024, from https://www.middlebury.edu/college/admissions/apply/standardized-tests

^[5]

^[6] Schmill, S. (2022, March 28). We are reinstating our SAT/ACT requirement for future admissions cycles. MIT Admissions. Retrieved November 6, 2024, from https://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/we-are-reinstating-our-sat-act-requirement-for-future-admissions-cycles/

^[7] Opportunity Insights. (n.d.). Diversifying Society’s Leaders? The Determinants and Causal Effects of Admission to Highly Selective Private Colleges. Opportunity Insights. Retrieved November 6, 2024, from https://opportunityinsights.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/CollegeAdmissions_Paper.pdf

^[8] ACT. (n.d.). What is Included in the ACT Fee Waiver Program? ACT. Retrieved November 6, 2024, from https://www.act.org/content/act/en/products-and-services/the-act/registration/fees/fee-waivers.html

^[9] Sandoval, W. (2023, March 21). Top 10 Resources for Free ACT Prep. BestColleges.com. Retrieved November 1, 2024, from https://www.bestcolleges.com/blog/free-act-prep-resources/

^[10] Esaki-Smith, Anna. “How The Digital SAT Could Change Standardized Testing In College Admissions.” Forbes, 18 January 2024, https://www.forbes.com/sites/annaesakismith/2024/01/18/how-the-digital-sat-could-change-standardized-testing-in-college-admissions/. Accessed 6 November 2024.

The post The Fiction of Test-Optional: A Call for Genuine Holistic Admissions appeared first on National Test Prep Association.

Edison Prep: A Spotlight on Excellence in Test Preparation

The NTPA proudly features Brian and Silvia Eufinger as this week’s member spotlight. As the founders of Edison Prep, Brian and Silvia have become renowned experts in test preparation. Headquartered in Atlanta, GA, Edison Prep serves students worldwide, primarily focusing on SAT and ACT tutoring. The company also offers highly popular AP History boot camps and subject tutoring in all levels of Math and STEM.

Member Details

• Member: Brian and Silvia Eufinger
• Business: Edison Prep
• Website: edisonprep.com
• Started: 2010

How Did You Become a Test Prep Tutor?

Edison Prep’s co-founders began tutoring in 2007 alongside their corporate jobs. We had both paid our way through college via merit aid from high test scores we earned self-studying during high school; we began tutoring 12 hours a week. Things went well, with many of our initial clients telling us we should ponder doing it full-time (‘you can always go back to corporate’). We finally listened, and in 2010, Edison Prep was born. We wrote our books and curriculum. For the first 12 years, it was just the two founders; since then, we’ve grown to a team of 16 as demand has exploded. The irony that test-optional caused our business to explode is not lost on us (or our clients, who often vocalize it on phone calls!). We are excited to have just had our 23,000th student! We can help many students because 90%+ of students begin with or only do one of our popular group classes.”

How Do You Incorporate Feedback From Students to Enhance the Learning Experience?

We revise our SAT and ACT books yearly and incorporate student feedback in numerous ways. We solicit feedback sometimes in sessions when appropriate, and we also do anonymous surveys of past students asking for constructive criticism, which has helped unearth blind spots and improve materials over time. A collective of 15 of the 255 pages in our ACT book were probably directly inspired by that anonymous survey feedback!

What Key Factors Should Students and Parents Consider When Choosing a Test Prep Service?

We always tell potential clients that we are in one of the least scalable industries on earth if maintaining quality is paramount. Not impossible, but very difficult. Most NTPA members know this intuitively, having inherited many students from big-box agencies who have economies of scale yet don’t pay their staff well enough to avoid employee turnover, attract top tutors, or have nimble curricula that evolve as the test content continues to evolve. We proudly pay our staff 200-400%+, which is what most other firms in town pay since we don’t think quality tutors can be retained in the long term without paying them like professionals. When parents are skeptical, we are fond of sharing our famous Our Industry Is Broken article that illustrates the reality of our business via raw truth from GlassDoor.com. Parents should seek out testimonials, text mom “Class of 20XX” group threads at their high school for referrals, and rely on real client feedback rather than flashy ads. Tutor experience, communication skills, past score improvement results, and soft skills are paramount in our industry, and parents should ask questions to determine how potential tutors stack up on those variables!

What Strategies Do You Employ to Continually Assess and Improve the Effectiveness of Your Tutoring Methods?

The flagship services at our company are our ACT and SAT group classes, which 90%+ of students do as either the first step of their prep or their entire prep. These classes provide a natural environment to do lots of A/B testing with our students to see which ways of teaching content stick better and produce better results, rapidly iterating and incorporating what works best into our curriculum. We take notes on what works best and incorporate it into each new edition of our book. Version 14 of our ACT book is about to arrive and our Digital SAT book will be on Version 3 by New Year’s!

Do You Have a Standout Story of a Student’s Breakthrough Moment That Encapsulates the Impact of Your Tutoring Approach?

One of our students was about to be the first student in his family in four generations not to be able to make it to the Naval Academy after notching an ACT that was a literal slot machine score: 21/21/21/21. Dejected, he and his parents were about to give up and not even pursue tutoring, so we asked him to trust us and give us three weeks to show that this test is not magic nor an IQ test, but coachable content—’commas, rectangles, and putting in the reps.’ We focused exclusively on grammar for the first three sessions (the easiest section to improve), and he did his part, completing eight 45-minute grammar sections those first three weeks, pulling his English score up 10 points to a 31 in the process. Once he saw that initial proof of concept, he was pumped and locked in; he maturely paused his 10-hour-a-week job at Zaxby’s (his idea, not ours) and reallocated those 10 hours to three practice tests a week. He got his service academy nomination, got his score up to a 32, and enrolled in the Naval Academy.

We always tell potential clients that we craft our tutoring style as part teacher, part standup comic (to make material memorable and make it stick), and part Tony Robbins-style motivation, which improves tutoring efficacy and makes it more fun to boot! A slightly different spin on Roosevelt’s people don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.”

How Has Your Tutoring Enhanced the Community?

Our tutoring has enhanced the community in three main ways: increasing odds of admissions to more selective schools, saving families $50M+ in earned merit aid, and enhancing college readiness for students, including those whose math, reading, analysis, and grammar gaps were impacted by COVID learning loss (or just had not been adequately covered at their home schools).

We also like to do meaningful pro bono work. Our two founders came from humble backgrounds and used these tests as a way to transform our college process and avoid student debt, so we pay it forward in our tutoring. We don’t go out of our way to publicize it, but always endeavor to have at least one scholarship student in each of our classes. We have cultivated a network of high school counselors and youth pastors that we let designate students for those spots who they know would really make use of the prep, and have had the pleasure of meeting some amazing kids as a result!

Tell Us About a Time a Student Really Surprised You With Their Boldness.

When our company was in its infancy (3 months old) and didn’t have a brick-and-mortar yet, we drove to clients’ houses. One particularly entitled student did not do homework for our co-founder Brian three weeks in a row, despite us asking for parents to help enforce homework completion, and Brian had to be stern with him. He said, ‘What makes you think it’s acceptable to not do homework three weeks in a row?’ and the student shot back, ‘Um…cause I’m the client?’ with the most smug face in history.

This remains to this day the rudest moment in company history. That was the end of the abbreviated session, and Brian followed up with the mother the next day. Brian had to, unfortunately, breathe while talking with his mom, bifurcating one sentence at the most inopportune time. ‘Ma’am, with all due respect, we work with winners when he’s ready to be one. Please call us back, and we can always reschedule.’ It did not go over well. Over the following three weeks, nine of that mother’s book club members quietly called me and signed up for tutoring because she had told them what happened, saying, ‘But please don’t tell her.’ If we could map our referral chains backward to those nine OG clients, probably 10% of them came from those nine clients and their subsequent referrals.

The post Edison Prep: A Spotlight on Excellence in Test Preparation appeared first on National Test Prep Association.

Member: Marc Gray

Business: Odyssey College Prep

Website: odysseycollegeprep.com

Started: Spring 2019

About Marc Gray

Marc Gray is the Founder and Director of Education for Odyssey College Prep. Marc uses advanced aptitude testing to simplify the college admissions process for students and parents. He also guides students to create targeted passion projects to differentiate their college applications. As a test prep educator, Marc helped write the Achievable ACT Prep Course, an online ACT course that uses machine learning and memory science to help students increase their test scores. Marc also serves as the Chair of the NTPA’s blog committee.

What techniques do you employ to assess and improve the effectiveness of your tutoring methods continually?

Recently, I joined an NTPA mastermind group. It’s run by NTPA Board Member Jim Wisemer of Ivy Experience. While the meetings are conversational and not overly formal, they’re incredibly instructive. Most of our discussions center around best managerial practices. Sometimes, we explore pedagogical techniques. Hearing how my colleagues handle teaching challenges often surprises me. It’s not that their approaches are superior to mine (though plenty are); it’s how different they are. Not better or worse, just different. By exposing my staff and myself to other approaches, we put more arrows in our quivers and have more options to help our clients.

What inspired you to start a test prep business?

Parents enjoy working with people they trust. And there’s no greater sign of trust than allowing an educator to teach their children. Before I founded Odyssey College Prep, I noticed there needed to be a comprehensive college prep business in Central Arkansas. There were college counseling practices, test prep firms, and some career counseling coaches locally. In that scenario, parents had to trust several organizations to give their kids a comprehensive college readiness program. No one-stop shop existed. Thus, Odyssey College Prep was born.

In what ways has your tutoring enhanced your community?

Recently, my team and I worked with over 100 Mamas Unidas students. Mamas Unidas is a nonprofit devoted to empowering Central Arkansas Hispanic students with cutting-edge education resources. Mayca Alverez and Sandra Carmona Jobe, who serve on the organization’s board, contacted us to facilitate this collaboration. Working with them was one of my greatest moments as an educator and entrepreneur. It also presented an immense but rewarding challenge. All of our tutors work exclusively with one-on-one students, not in groups. However, many of my tutors are teachers, so we’re fortunate to have a great pool of teaching talent.

I chose two of our best educators with teaching experience to prepare 65 students for the ACT. Since Mamas Unidas is a community-funded nonprofit, we wanted to give them as many discounts as possible. So, we reached out to Justin Pincar and Tyler York, our partners from Achievable, an NTPA Affiliate company. Tyler and Justin consented to give each Mamas Unidas student an Achievable ACT Course FOR FREE. This cut down the program’s overall cost immensely, allowing everyone to stay under budget while empowering each student in the class with some of the most advanced test prep curricula on the market.

Overseeing the program was a blast, but hearing the results two weeks later was encouraging. In just two 3-hour classes, the average student scored 2 points higher. Some even went up more than 5. On the last day of class, each student’s parents, siblings, and extended family gathered to celebrate their hard work. I’ve never seen the education of a group of students be so supported by their community, teachers, mentors, and family in all my days as an educator.

What strategies do you employ to build confidence and reduce anxiety in your students facing high-stakes tests?

One recent pivot we’ve made is to incorporate more technology into our tutoring. This technology comes in the form of online platforms that house our curriculum. We use Achievable’s ACT for ACT Prep and MentoMind for SAT Prep. This reduces administrative tasks (like grading practice tests) for our tutors and students. However, using online platforms does more than just cut down on clerical work.

For example, I assigned too many practice tests early in my tutoring career. Don’t get me wrong: practice tests are vital, as they approximate how a student will score on test day. However, I eventually learned that more precision learning is needed in addition to practice tests. Students who struggle with punctuation won’t learn punctuation if they take a 75-question ACT English Practice Test with eight punctuation questions. They need targeted exposure at high frequency.

Thus, using the online curriculum that we created with Achievable fixes this. If students need help with semicolons, we spend half an hour exclusively doing punctuation exercises centered on semicolons. If they need help with functions, we have an infinite number of ACT-based math questions revolving around functions. Incorporating this technology into my team’s pedagogical practices has streamlined our lessons, increased test scores, and better personalized our teaching to our students.

What are the most common misconceptions about test prep that you’d like to address with new clients?

Standardized tests could be more fun. If anyone argues that point, I’ll agree with them. However, I strongly disagree with others who say that standardized tests don’t prepare students for college. Test Prep DOES prepare students for college and their careers. There are measurable benefits of standardized testing that are hard to ignore.  I use the same grammar mechanics I teach my students in every email, article, or social media post I write. The statistics we teach in the SAT and ACT Math section are vital in running my business. The language, reading, and verbal sections of test prep, at least to me, are the most apparent transferences into the real world. So much of the corporate world is reading, scanning, or synthesizing major slabs of text into digestible information. Preparing for the Reading ACT helps students do that in spades.

While we try to make our sessions as lively as possible, Test Prep isn’t the most amusing activity on a student’s schedule. It’s no pizza party. I have no delusions about this. However, just because something isn’t fun doesn’t mean it’s not valuable or useful. If such were the case, I’d have a much easier time exercising. Yet, it’s nearly irrefutable that If more students had the hard skills required to score higher on the ACT and SAT, you’d have more literate and scientifically fluent students. That, to me, is a win. Thus, I daresay it’s appropriate to generalize the perks of test prep by saying that studying for standardized tests benefits society. It’s a bold claim, but it’s one I stick by.

Do you have a story of a student’s breakthrough moment that encapsulates the impact of your tutoring approach?

I worked with one student named Jonathan, who struggled with the English Section of the ACT. English is my favorite subject to teach students, especially for low-scoring students. It’s hands down the most straightforward score to raise, in my experience. At least with how I teach it, the trick is to turn the fuzziness often associated with language and writing into something more concrete.

Jonathan was a wiz at math. So, turning grammar mechanics into mechanics was the secret for Jonathan to master that part of the exam. We started with punctuation. I like beginning there usually because punctuation rules best illustrate the formulaic nature of grammar. Take teaching colons as an example. To use a colon correctly, you have to have an independent clause on one side and a phrase that specifies that independent clause on the other side.

In sessions, I often break down those rules like this:

Left Side: Independent Clause

Right Side: Specification.

Incorrect example: My favorite colors are: red, green, and turquoise.

Correct Example: I have three favorite colors: red, green, and turquoise.

When Jonathan learned that, he answered every colon question correctly. After completing his tutoring, he scored 34 on the English Section of the ACT.

He was happy, his parents were delighted, and I was thrilled beyond belief. Since then, I’ve taught punctuation like that to my students, and it works wonders for providing them with a solid foundation of grammar mechanics. It also helps them feel smarter, which is always refreshing to see.

Imagine that your tutoring business becomes huge in 5 years. What does your main office look like?

If Odyssey College Prep “goes viral” over the next five years, my office would be an exaggerated version of what it is now. A smattering of the obligatory college readiness books would still line my bookshelf; only I’d have more shelves. I also have sizable swathes of Greek Mythology figurines and books scattered on the tables and countertops (a quirky obsession of mine – hence the name “Odyssey” College Prep). Essentially, more books, bookshelves, and ostentatious Greek Mythology merch adorning said shelves. Lastly, there would be a picture of my wife Nikki and me on a cruise in Greece.

The post NTPA Member Feature – Marc Gray of Odyssey College Prep appeared first on National Test Prep Association.

An academic study released last summer by the group Opportunity Insights, covering the so-called Ivy Plus colleges (the eight in the Ivy League, along with Duke, M.I.T., Stanford and the University of Chicago), showed little relationship between high school grade point average and success in college. The researchers found a strong relationship between test scores and later success.

 

Likewise, a faculty committee at the University of California system — led by Dr. Henry Sánchez, a pathologist, and Eddie Comeaux, a professor of education — concluded in 2020 that test scores were better than high school grades at predicting student success in the system’s nine colleges, where more than 230,000 undergraduates are enrolled. The relative advantage of test scores has grown over time, the committee found.

 

“Test scores have vastly more predictive power than is commonly understood in the popular debate,” said John Friedman, an economics professor at Brown and one of the authors of the Ivy Plus admissions study.

…

 

Without test scores, Schmill, [the dean of admissions at M.I.T., one of the few schools to have reinstated its test requirement], explained, admissions officers were left with two unappealing options. They would have to guess which students were likely to do well at M.I.T. — and almost certainly guess wrong sometimes, rejecting qualified applicants while admitting weaker ones. Or M.I.T. would need to reject more students from less advantaged high schools and admit more from the private schools and advantaged public schools that have a strong record of producing well-qualified students.

 

“When you don’t have test scores, the students who suffer most are those with high grades at relatively unknown high schools, the kind that rarely send kids to the Ivy League,” Deming, a Harvard economist, said. “The SAT is their lifeline.”

The data demonstrate that standardized tests are effective at identifying ability. However, the National Test Prep Association (NTPA) likes to highlight that these tests also uncover an underdiscussed but equally important quality: students’ willingness to invest in their abilities. Every test prep professional can attest to the effect of hard work and dedication on test improvement. Conversely, students who don’t take studying for these tests seriously show only marginal improvement. However, the usefulness of standardized tests in measuring hard work and dedication becomes limited in a test-optional environment. When students are told that withholding their test scores won’t adversely affect their admissions chances, they make the logical decision to disengage when faced with challenges or setbacks while preparing for the tests. It is for this reason the NTPA encourages educators and admissions professionals to emphasize that standardized tests can instead reveal a trait of equal value to natural ability: one’s ability to achieve results through their hard work and determination.

The post The NTPA Weighs In: An Overlooked Reason Why Standardized Tests Predict College Success appeared first on National Test Prep Association.

What can be more important than any test score or certification are the less tangible lessons students learn about the value of planning, focused practice, and goal setting. Test preparation not only requires students to master content, but it also demands they craft and execute a plan to acquire that mastery. Doing so helps students more fully develop executive functions such as time management, organization, persistence, and – ultimately – metacognition. Test preparation forces students to think about their thinking, to learn how to better learn. Whether testers are destined for college or to work in our rapidly evolving knowledge economy, the ability to effectively manage one’s own learning is perhaps the only sustainable advantage one can have. Learning to work in an efficient and measurable way against a deadline is exactly the behavior one wishes to cultivate in young people heading to college or professionals embarking upon a new career.

As students prepare for standardized tests, they are engaging in a task that is difficult, a task in which they will have to confront their own challenges and work to overcome them. This demands patience, perseverance, and a belief that, through hard work, change is possible and we can be the agents of our own destiny. The process of preparing for standardized tests helps students to not only develop and hone academic skills, but it also facilitates the durable self-discipline and emotional resiliency that will serve students in meaningful ways long past Test Day and well beyond college. When a student embraces the challenge of testing and achieves an outcome that they are proud of, they come to see themselves in a new light. This reward is not limited to those who are receiving 90th+ percentile scores and is instead most pronounced for the students who previously harbored a belief that they were ‘bad testers’ or that they were passive actors in their own educational journey. Through smart, conscientious test prep, these students learn that hard work pays off, that a strategic commitment to growth will bear fruit, and that they themselves are capable.

Standardized tests are an opportunity for students of all ages to learn and practice skills that are essential to long-term academic and professional success. With great test prep, a student leverages their testing process to strengthen their academic foundation, to set and achieve smart goals, and to develop their own sense of agency and challenge their perceptions of the static nature of their abilities. No test result can (or should) define a student, but the independence, resilience, confidence, and discipline students develop in preparing for a test can help them to better define themselves and prepare them to rise to the challenges that lay ahead.

The post The Value of Test Preparation appeared first on National Test Prep Association.

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We tutors live with these tests on a daily basis. We’ve drilled down the questions to the granular level with our students. In addition, we have formed a national network of test prep professionals who share ideas, best practices, strategies, and tools and, not surprisingly, discuss and dissect the tests. Based on our collective experience with thousands of students over the years, we’d like to share some thoughts about what we think works and what doesn’t.

THE SAT
The College Board should maintain reasonable and consistent levels of difficulty with curves that appropriately reflect them. A student shouldn’t have to take the SAT multiple times just because of bad scaling, which can be particularly punishing. On the Math sections, three errors can yield a score as high as 790 on one test, but as low as 750 on another. On some Verbal sections (Reading and Writing and Language Tests combined), a score of 750 can be attained by making only three errors on one test but up to eleven errors on another. These are not insignificant disparities, particularly for students who have prepared for months.

The back-to-back Verbal sections at the beginning of the SAT feature two heavy doses of reading. Gone are the sentence completions, short passages, sentence errors, and improving sentences questions that measured mastery of vocabulary and grammar proficiency as well as reading skills. In their place is a series of nine passages for students to slog through: five for Reading and four for Writing and Language. Why not break up the monotony and bring back some of these other types of questions? And since the two Verbal sections are so different, why not make superscoring an option for the SAT Reading Test and Writing and Language Test just as the ACT does? Doing so would benefit students by providing additional pathways for them to improve their scores.

THE ACT
On the ACT, it seems like the goal in the Reading section is speed rather than comprehension. Five more minutes in the Reading and Science sections each would be greatly appreciated by most current ACT test-takers – particularly now that graphs, figures, and tables are going to be incorporated into the Reading section – and would likely attract even more. Many students who would be well-suited for the ACT opt for the SAT instead solely because they simply cannot finish these sections. If the goal of the ACT is to test reading comprehension, the test should permit students who are careful, thorough, and thoughtful readers enough time to demonstrate their proficiency, especially given that they are unlikely to have to do a lot of time-restricted reading in college and beyond.

THE SAT AND ACT
With respect to both tests, hiring better proctors and training them appropriately should be a top priority. Proctors should know how to time sections accurately, consistently give five or ten minute warnings, and be familiar with each test’s calculator policy. Students should not have to self-advocate about not having to clear their calculators. Highlighters are not permitted on the paper tests, but the digital tests planned for the near future will offer a highlight-text option. Why not align the paper test with the digital version now and distribute free highlighters on the day of the test? Surely, there are plenty of companies that would jump at such a sponsorship opportunity.

Numerous studies have demonstrated that high school students need more sleep. [1] Accordingly, some school districts around the country have adjusted school start times, allowing high school students to start their school day later. [2] Since early morning isn’t most students’ optimal test-taking time, why not move the tests to late morning or early afternoon when students will perform better?

Lastly, we need better lines of communication with the testing companies. Already existing difficulties in contacting the SAT and ACT have been greatly exacerbated by the pandemic. We have now endured more than a year – and counting – of parents sitting on hold for hours, students unceremoniously “downsized” out of their tests, or finding out that their test centers have been canceled. We’ve heard far too many accounts from students who arrived at their centers on test day – registrations in hand – only to discover locked doors.

Students, parents, and test prep professionals alike look forward to improved IT, better customer service, and greater accessibility for all with respect to testing in the near future.

[1]Nick Morrison, “More Sleep Means Better Grades for Students, Forbes, “Feb 11, 2019.
[2]David Figlil, “Start High Schools later for better academic outcomes,” Brookings, May 25, 2017.

Claudia Chesler, an attorney, former presidential appointee, and marathoner, has been helping students achieve their highest scores, cultivate meaningful college essays, and build lasting confidence with the Potomac Education Center since 2006. Claudia is a founding member of the NTPA.

The post If We Could Change a Few Things About the SAT and ACT appeared first on National Test Prep Association.

It’s been another busy month in test preparation and higher education! Below are some of the news articles that got the NTPA members talking. We hope you’ll join the conversation in the comments.

A Test for the Test Makers (Education Next):

“This state of affairs follows years of complaints that the exams favor the affluent. And, in fact, both of the notoriously secretive testing companies face significant problems, including some not widely understood. Reports of their demise, however, may be premature.”

Taking the SAT with the Breakout Expert from Operation Varsity Blues (Educational Endeavors):

“I find that the entire formatting of the Writing Test requires getting used to, from questions that have no actual question (just choices) to questions that ask users to do a really specific random thing. This is one of the reasons that preparation for these tests is crucial in order to maximize your performance. “

Can College Predictive Models Survive the Pandemic? (EdSurge):

“As we develop new predictive models and update the existing ones with data collected in the last year, we will need to analyze its effects and decide how heavily to weigh that data when trying to predict what comes next.”

The Endless Sensation of Application Inflation (The Chronicle of Higher Education):

“But what do such metrics really tell us? What, if anything, does the annual OMG-ing over these statistics add to up to?”

Bring back standardized tests — for fairness (The Hill):

“With the elimination of standardized tests, admissions policies have become more subjective and less transparent — in short, less fair.”

Opinion: COVID has made getting into a top U.S. college even more competitive and this new normal looks here to stay (MarketWatch):

“Clearly the effect on the applicant pool was fantastic — really, really exciting. But how well were we able to identify academic talent and measure academic preparation? How well are students going to do once they enroll at Emory? That is unknown.”

From admissions to teaching to grading, AI is infiltrating higher education (Hechinger Report):

“Baylor, Boston and Wake Forest universities are among those that have used the Canadian company Kira Talent, which offers a review system that can score an applicant’s ‘personality traits and soft skills’ based on a recorded, AI-reviewed video the student submits. A company presentation shows students being scored on a five-point scale in areas such as openness, motivation, agreeableness and ‘neuroticism.'”

The post In the News (April 2021) appeared first on National Test Prep Association.

Grading is difficult to begin with, and conventions vary not only from school to school but often from classroom to classroom. Regardless of the conventions, though, grades have utility that ranges from rewarding hard work to identifying students who are at risk to incentivizing participation. And, of course, grades help colleges decide which students to admit. In fact, students’ transcripts are frequently cited as the most important factor that colleges consider when making admissions decisions. While this fact may warrant its own debate, the immediate challenge facing grades is that grading conventions in the United States have been upended by COVID-19, and many schools have had to adopt alternative forms of instruction.

Many schools softened their grading policies during both the 2019-2020 and 2020-2021 school years, rightly acknowledging that ‘business as usual’ was neither compassionate nor wise. It was not reasonable to expect teachers to grade students as they would any other year while teachers and students alike endured the most frightening and uncertain event in recent history. Furthermore, some students were able to attend school in-person all the time, other students some of the time, and still other students none of the time. How can alternative grading policies employed across uneven modes of school delivery be compared? Reliability is lost. The ripple effects of this anomalous year are difficult to predict, but one consequence is surely this wrench of incomparable grading systems thrown into the previously predictable machinery of college admissions.

The dearth of reliable spring semester grades is certainly not among the most consequential outcomes of COVID-19, but that shortage of grading reliability – in many cases all courses just went pass/fail – caused lost opportunities for students who were just hitting their stride, poised for a strong semester that could have demonstrated their potential and ambition. The common story of a student who got off to a rocky start and then learned how to be academically successful part way through high school instead becomes the story of a student who struggled as a Freshman or Sophomore and then never had the opportunity to demonstrate their newfound academic maturity. Colleges face a daunting task in making admissions decisions about students whose extracurricular activities, work experience, athletics, and – most importantly – transcripts have all been undercut by the pandemic.

In the medium and long-term, as covid subsides, grades will almost certainly retain their mantle as the most important factor in college admissions. And justifiably so – their predictive power for academic success in college has been confirmed in multiple studies. But it merits asking, can grades maintain the same predictive power if test scores are not used to corroborate their rigor?

The predictive power that grades have historically achieved has – in the recent past anyway – always occurred with testing in the background. Those grades given were always given with the prospect of corroboration, standardized testing, in mind. Thus, for example, a teacher can’t give unearned As to students with weak fundamental skills in hopes of broadening their college options because testing will reveal the students’ skill deficits, and, consequently, the integrity of the grades becomes dubious. So, to some degree at least, test scores have acted as a check on grades, restraining inflation both within and across high schools. It is in this context that grades have maintained their strong predictive capacity.

What if, however, testing were largely or entirely removed from the admissions equation? Now it is expressly in the best of interest of both teachers and students for the teachers to give as many A’s as possible, especially in the crucial Sophomore and Junior years of high school. Without the anchor of test scores, grades will no longer undergo the degree of scrutiny that has helped to ensure their legitimacy. What’s more, with no test scores, grades become so important in the college admissions process that teachers could literally hold students’ prospects in their hands with their grading decisions. On top of all this, school districts and administrators will want the best grades possible for their student bodies because those results will improve college outcomes, raise the reputation of the schools, and thus raise the reputation (and property values) of the town as a whole. It becomes explicitly in everyone’s best interest to give mostly or only As, a trend that problematically has already been accelerating anyway, particularly in wealthy towns. But paradoxically, if everyone gets mostly or only As, grades lose their predictive capacity, and objective standards for academic readiness become nearly absent. Grades cannot retain their predictive capacity without test scores providing a meaningful check on runaway grade inflation.

Grades have never had to fly on their own as an indicator of academic readiness and integrity. We can examine test-optional colleges and the success that test-optional students have, but those results have been achieved in smaller pockets, within a much larger ecosystem of test scores and grading systems that have not been forced to rapidly adapt to mass upheaval. A college may claim they can judge the strength of grades based on the “reputation of the school,” but how do you think the college made that judgment about the school’s reputation in the first place? Likely test scores played a part. Additionally, how does this reliance on a soft measure such as reputation further advantage the wealthy while undermining students who attend public schools in less well-funded districts? A test-free ecosystem could lead grading systems to experience a bubble and then collapse, at the expense of students who need college access most.

From the Dean of Admission: We’re excited to announce the outcome of the 2021-2022 first-year application process

By Ben Sexton & Travis Minor

Ben Sexton, an eighteen-year test preparation veteran and lifelong Massachusetts resident, runs Sexton Test Prep and Tutoring out of his home in MetroWest Boston. With a team of sixteen tutors, STP helps more than 400 students each year meet their academic and test preparation goals through classroom and one-on-one programs. Ben has written complete curriculums for the ACT and each of the last three versions of the SAT, having worked through hundreds of official tests over nearly 15000 hours spent tutoring with students. He resides in Dover, MA. Ben enjoys all Boston sports, entrepreneurship, collectibles, oysters, and working with the NTPA Advocacy committee.

Travis Minor, owner of Open Door Education in Acton and Concord, MA, has helped thousands of students succeed on standardized tests of all shapes and sizes. Travis earned his BS in Secondary Education at the University of Vermont and his M.Ed. at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, where he continues to work as the Teaching Fellow for Education Entrepreneurship and Managing Financial Resources for Nonprofit Organizations. Travis has served as a City Heroes Team Leader, a trustee of The Scholarship Fund of Concord and Carlisle, and as a volunteer firefighter, and Travis currently serves on the board of the National Test Prep Association as the Vice President of Ethics and Professional Practices.

The post What to do About Grades? appeared first on National Test Prep Association.

Using Market Research to Shape the Assessment Landscape: What We Know About COVID-19’s Effect on Test Optional (ACT.org):

“The research suggests that rapid test blind expansion is quite unlikely. Schools regard test score data as too useful to abandon altogether, and they report that they feel students should be allowed to submit test scores if they wish to do so.”

Not Submitting Scores (Inside Higher Ed):

“While I believe that the über-selective colleges that became test optional in response to COVID will return to requiring the tests, most colleges will remain test optional,” Massa said.

NPR/Ipsos Poll: Nearly One-Third Of Parents May Stick With Remote Learning (NPR):

“On the other hand, fully 29% of parents told us they were likely to stick with remote learning indefinitely. That included about half of the parents who are currently enrolled in remote learning.”

Don’t Blame the Tests: Getting Rid of Standardized Testing Means Punishing Poor Students (USA Today Op Ed):

“No, a student’s SAT or GPA is not the only thing that matters. Character, leadership and kindness matter far more in life. But just because a test doesn’t tell us everything about a person doesn’t mean it is useless.”

  This American Life podcast: “The College Tour has been Cancelled”:

“They’re not applying to schools, falling through the cracks, ghosting their counselors who can’t just grab them in the hallway or pull them from class this year.”

The post In the News (March 2021) appeared first on National Test Prep Association.