
How I Learned to Take the SAT Like a Rich Kid - georgecmu
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/10/opinion/how-i-learned-to-take-the-sat-like-a-rich-kid.html?&moduleDetail=section-news-5&action=click&contentCollection=Opinion&region=Footer&module=MoreInSection&version=WhatsNext&contentID=WhatsNext&pgtype=article
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dysoco
And here I am in Argentina; getting into a public university, without having
to pay, take exams or even have a good GPA in High School.

How expensive and competitive education is in the USA seems so alien to me; I
wonder if it's really worth it. The only apparent benefit is networking and
I'd dare say that only matters in Finance/Law. Am I really that screwed if I
want to work at Google/Amazon/Whatever and I haven't graduated from MIT or
Stanford?

~~~
GuiA
_> Am I really that screwed if I want to work at Google/Amazon/Whatever and I
haven't graduated from MIT or Stanford?_

The vast majority of Google/Facebook/etc. employees aren't from
MIT/Stanford/Harvard/Berkeley/etc.

It's definitely much harder to get a job at these companies straight out of
college if you didn't attend a big name university. 10 years later, it doesn't
matter.

I got my undergrad from an unknown French university, and went to grad school
at a large US state university with no brand name recognition (as is the case
for many, many immigrants). Recruiters from top tier companies ignored me out
of grad school, but after a few startups/talks at major conferences/open
source projects/etc., I now work at such a company (and now recruiters are
very eager to get some of my time).

~~~
artursapek
> 10 years later, it doesn't matter.

Even a few years later, impressive work experience and open source projects
should far outweigh what university you went to.

~~~
problems
But getting you in the door for that work experience is key. Co-op programs
and such can really help with that, especially if you don't have a lot of job-
finding experience.

~~~
Mandatum
You can bite the bullet and work-for-almost-free (intern) and have a side job
to pay your rent for 6 months, after which you should be able to score a full-
time junior role.

------
ftlio
I took my SAT scores from 90th percentile to 98th percentile by buying a book,
doing a few sample problems every night for a couple of weeks, and reading the
test taking tips in the back. Probably the most helpful tip was that all the
math diagrams were drawn to scale.

The bigger benefit of all of this to me was the SATs as another example of how
truly arbitrary the world seems to be, and how little extra effort is actually
required to curb that arbitrariness towards your goals.

~~~
diminoten
Even taking it twice is a huge boost, I don't think most folks even realize
you can/should.

It's _so_ arbitrary, I bet the majority of folks would improve on their second
test, but the only people who try are the ones who know about it.

~~~
sokoloff
I'm not even sure how many times I took the SAT (I think it was 4: at age 11,
12, and then twice in high school). I know I took the PSAT twice.

Granted my parents were both in public education and so were more in tune with
what was possible, but we were by no means rich (see also: both parents were
in public education).

I took it twice before age 13 in conjunction with
[https://my.vanderbilt.edu/smpy/](https://my.vanderbilt.edu/smpy/)

------
basseq
The "formula for success" appears to be: study. Is that concept so alien if
you're not a "rich kid"?

Now, don't get me wrong: there's a clear disconnect in ability and means to
prep. Even though there are cheap or free prep courses or materials, many
won't be able to dedicate—for example—the time to cram or take Sunday classes
an hour away due to jobs or family commitments.

~~~
qntty
Studying with that kind of intensity certainly is. For most kids "studying for
the SAT" means doing 1 or 2 practice tests on a lazy Saturday.

~~~
BeetleB
I must echo the same sentiment as the GP.

It really all comes down to effective studying, and is _very_ accessible to
all income levels. Just buy one or two good prep books, and get access to
practice tests (I used only the ones in the books, BTW). I didn't enter into
any SAT prep program, and always felt they were for people who did not know
how to study well.

It doesn't even require much intensity if you do it right. For both the SAT
and the GRE, I began studying 9-12 months before I expected to take the exam.
I spent only a small amount of time a week on it (1-2 hours). The trick was to
be regular and consistent. Towards the end, start taking practice tests. I got
a pretty good score on the SAT and a fantastic score in the GRE (easily in the
99 percentile range).

No tutors. No prep programs. Just a bunch of books, and 1-2 hours a week.
That's all it takes.

~~~
qntty
I would agree that it's accessible, but this doesn't make it any less alien.
Most people I knew in high school (at a non-elite school) were barely even
conscious of the fact that they would be taking the SATs 9 months before they
did (they knew that it was something they would have to do, but it wasn't
concrete enough to cause them to do anything about it). For most, studying _at
all_ was something that only the more ambitious kids did. I'm not sure if
there was a single student in my graduating class who spent as much time
studying as you did, including some students who went to competitive colleges
(there might have been but they didn't talk about it, the fact that people do
this wasn't part of the collective consciousness).

Again, I'm just saying that for many students, reading this article would
expose them to something that they haven't really been exposed to so far.

~~~
BeetleB
>For most, studying at all was something that only the more ambitious kids
did.

So now we know the secret of poorly performing kids. Well, of course, if you
want an ambitious score, you study. If you don't, you do not get a good score.

I think my other point was that it does not require a lot of study! I studied
more for my usual classes in school than I did for the SAT/GRE. But if you try
to cram it all in 3 months before the SAT, you're setting yourself up for
trouble.

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11thEarlOfMar
The lesson here is that one element to career success (for it's own sake) is
understanding how your performance will be measured, and then working
specifically to 'score well' by those metrics.

Companies that understand this can craft incentives within their culture so
that employee goals are aligned with company goals and both employees and the
company succeed.

Companies that have serious problems, like an Uber or Theranos, are likely
suffering from inappropriate reward structure, whether explicitly or
implicitly defined.

The students who avail themselves of professional test prep are getting a life
lesson in climbing the corporate ladder. This is one method by which wealth
breeds wealth.

------
santoriv
Another thing that is only tangentially mentioned is that more affluent
children can afford to take the achievement tests multiple times. When I took
the ACT the second time in high school, my composite score went up 4 points
without any extra study. I doubt many lower income kids have the opportunity
to keep taking it until they get a good score....

~~~
BeetleB
Is it that expensive? It wasn't when I took it.

~~~
khedoros1
About $50 this year, looks like. For a couple of my friends, the money came
out of their food budget.

~~~
BeetleB
Compared to college application costs, this is cheap.

~~~
khedoros1
Can't argue with that, of course. At my alma mater this year: $55 application
fee, $150 enrollment confirmation fee (applies to tuition and fees for the
first term, though), $185 fee for mandatory 3-day freshman orientation.

Of course, if you're rejected, you're only out $55 from that school, but last
fall they had 50,000 applications and admitted 4,500 students, so you'd better
do well on that $50 test.

------
rhino369
The real solution is to design a test that you can't study for effectively.

However, I suspect the study-ability for the SAT enhances it's predictive
ability. Someone who does whatever it takes to learn some words for vocab
testing will do whatever it takes to learn about sociology.

The truth is that standardized tests aren't less predictive for poor students.
Whatever causes the score gap also causes an achievement gap once they arrive
at school.

~~~
noxToken
How do you design a test for which you can't study? Even if everything is laid
out in the test with complete hypothetical knowledge (e.g. redefine addition
for all real numbers from x + y = z to something else like x + y + (x/2) = z),
you can still study for it by honing in on basic arithmetic and algebra.

This isn't meant as snark. I really don't understand.

~~~
rhino369
The point of the tests are to test aptitude not knowledge. So if someone can
spend 10 hours learning basic algebra and massively raise their score the test
is failing at being an aptitude test, it's now a knowledge test. If the
college wants to know how much alegrba knowledge a person has they can just
look at their math grades. They want to know aptitude.

Some standardized tests have fairly narrow topics or have patterns in their
problems that are learnable. Beyond just testing knowledge, these only
specifically reward studying for the test.

The SAT used to have a set of "SAT words" that you could memorize for the
verbal section. That somewhat helps your vocab, but only to the words used on
teh SAT.

The ACT used to have a trick where the short answer of the grammar section was
the right answer like 70% of the time.

The LSAT has logic game problems that can be categorized and then solved with
specific techniques. If you learn the techniques you'll never get more than a
few questions wrong. This is purely rewarding studying for the test. If a new
type of test is used the techniques fail until someone creates new techniques.

If you just learn the five most common equations for SAT algebra your score
jumps up but your math ability isn't much better.

------
strictnein
> "I realized that they didn’t just want to score exceptionally well on the
> SAT. They were gunning for a score on the Preliminary SAT exams that would
> put them in the top percentile of students in the United States and make
> them National Merit Scholars in the fall"

Huh. I took the PSAT ~20 years ago without even knowing what it really was. I
didn't even know that was how I ended up a National Merit Scholar until I read
this.

------
L_Rahman
I grew up in Bangladesh.

I had a 12kbps internet connection and access to used bookstores a 1.5hr
rickshaw ride away from where I lived.

My parents can barely speak English and my dad was a cab (now Uber) driver in
New York City.

I had no tutors. I didn't know anyone else prepping for the test. I studied
alone, with test prep books I bought at $2 a pop and a $40 course from the
college board I subscribed to only for the answer explanations to the
questions in my pirated book. My test prep strategy came from googling "how to
study for the SAT" and reading the multiple hundred page thread on
CollegeConfidential about the "Xiggi method"

I scored a 2120 on my first SAT and a 2360 on my second.

People from disadvantaged communities suffer many challenges and there is real
inequality. But standardized testing is too often bashed at the expense of the
real systemic problems - that education outcomes are a holistic problem that
require us to have better schools, better home environments, better food
safety, better primary education, better internet access. The government
should actively play a role in providing many of those things.

But test prep is not even close to being the problem.

------
kome
When Americans talks about SAT or standardized test in general, I cannot stop
thinking about The Rise of Meritocracy:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_of_the_Meritocracy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_of_the_Meritocracy)
it was a dystopia, but it became daily reality in the USA.

Those tests are not meritocracy, they are a farce of meritocracy.

~~~
rayvd
... cuz standardized testing isn't commonplace everywhere.

~~~
kome
Not in continental Europe for sure.

------
tabeth
The SAT is a pretty silly test. When it was out of 2400 I took it for the
first time and got a 1800. I studied for literally a week and increased my
score to 2100, which isn't really that good, but a testament to how
"studyable" the test is.

If education in this country was worth anything the SATs would be unnecessary.

~~~
bhandziuk
Did they change the score again? I thought they just changed it to being out
of 2400 but it's not anymore?

~~~
velodrome
Yes, it is back to 1600.

[http://www.cnn.com/2014/03/05/living/sat-test-changes-
school...](http://www.cnn.com/2014/03/05/living/sat-test-changes-schools/)

 _The test will shift from its current score scale of 2400 back to 1600, with
a separate score for the essay. No longer will test takers be penalized for
choosing incorrect answers._

~~~
tbihl
Is it the writer being confused, or did they add a penalty for incorrect
guesses for a few years? I took it in 2010 and am quite confident that AP
tests were the only thing doing that at the time.

~~~
sokoloff
When I took the SAT in 1982, 1983, and twice in the late 1980s, there was a
(statistically fair) penalty for wrong answers.

It was set such that if you could eliminate even one answer as "surely
incorrect", it became advantageous to guess among the rest of the choices.

------
Balgair
My SO is a teacher and is proctoring the SAT tomorrow. Our state mandates that
all students take it free of charge in their junior year as a general aptitude
test used for funding decisions and lots of other stuff. So there are a lot of
students taking it together on a single day during class time. The school also
provides the PSAT and requires all juniors to take it (paid by the school
district only). Students are assigned to rooms based on their last name,
alphabetical order and all that. When they gave the PSAT in the fall, it was
... eye opening. I never considered the possibility of a fight breaking out
_during_ the test, let alone the 3 that broke out in my SO's proctoring
session. How do you control for desks being thrown about during the math
section? (Yes really). The reason was that the boys were bored after just
writing their names and doing nothing for 4 hours (no phones or books are
allowed) and then they started fighting as boys do. The loudness of the room
in general is also a factor to control for, as the students that are sitting-
for but not taking the test tend to chit-chat and try to hit on each other, as
bored teenagers are want to do.

Richer areas don't just have studying to help them out, they also have a ...
cultural... sense that one should not draw blood or try for a date during
these tests.

------
mcone
> I only wish that more lower- and middle-income peers knew how to pursue such
> aggressive strategies.

But isn't exclusion one of the goals of these standardized tests? To "weed
out" those who can't afford to and/or don't know how to get such high scores?
If anyone could attain a high score on the SAT, SAT II, and ACT tests, ivy
league schools might need to come up with another way to determine whether or
not applicants come from wealthy homes.

~~~
Bartweiss
Eh, not especially fair. The SAT is harder to study than most of the claims
here suggest, and they already have your zip code and extracurricular list.
Those are a much better proxy for wealth than the SAT.

------
siliconc0w
I grew up in a SuperZIP and I resent this article revealing our precious
secrets.

------
guyzero
Ah, the PSAT. Because one high-pressure standardized test isn't enough.

~~~
sbov
Not necessarily. My circle of friends took the PSAT, but skipped the SAT.

~~~
guyzero
Sure, but why? Why isn't there just one test? Why are merit scholarships
handed out for PSAT results and not SAT results? I can't see any compelling
reason other than making more work for the College Board.

------
Kenji
>I couldn’t afford a $3,000 40-hour prep course or tutor.

If you aim for an elite college, you should be an autodidact anyway. You
should be able to teach literally everything you want yourself, using only
resources like the internet and books. Because trust me, nobody will help you
with that integral that spans one page and you just can't resolve. Or help you
find that annoying bug in your program. You're all alone. But you can resolve
it all if you invest enough time. And at the end of the day, at your
workplace, you will never have trouble with the challenges they throw at you.

~~~
throwaway9475
How is it down there in Galt's Gulch?

~~~
Kenji
I also enjoy my stay in sarcasm town.

------
SamReidHughes
Note that research shows SAT prep only increases scores by about 30 points,
according to an old yummyfajitas comment that I searched for which links to
this paywalled article.

[http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124278685697537839.html](http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124278685697537839.html)

My suspicion is that a lot of beliefs about the efficacy of SAT prep are from
customers that also observe age-related improvements.

~~~
dragonwriter
> Note that research shows SAT prep only increases scores by about 30 points

Simply retaking the test increases scores by 15 to 29 points.

[https://psychsocialissues.com/2011/07/20/sat-the-validity-
an...](https://psychsocialissues.com/2011/07/20/sat-the-validity-and-
reliability-and-its-effect-on-cultural-and-racial-minorities/)

~~~
aswanson
Increased mine by 120 points.

------
vecter
> Most took the SAT cold.

This really bothers me. Obviously most people can't afford expensive prep
classes, but it doesn't cost much to buy your children a few practice books.
Back when I took the SAT, the Barron's book was great, and I got most of my
value from that. This is just poor parenting.

~~~
dragonwriter
Waiting till your senior year is poor parenting. Taking it cold before that,
assessing the results, and deciding if further investment is necessary before
retesting is intelligent.

~~~
vecter
Why not just take some practice tests and assess then, as opposed to waiting
for the real thing? You'll get a very good idea of where you stand and save
yourself the pain of having to retake it again in the future when you get a
first score that's certainly suboptimal relative to your potential.

~~~
sokoloff
Testing under the real conditions for practice will make the next testing
session be familiar; you'll know exactly what to expect, etc.

Taking a practice test at home or on the computer is different from taking a
real test at the test site. IMO, it's not that much pain.

------
nyolfen
with 'rich kid' levels of prep, how much can one reasonably expect scores to
increase vs baseline?

