By: Alex Edquist
My name is Alex Edquist, and I’m part of the problem.
I’m part of the legion of expensive SAT tutors widely blamed for the achievement gap between low-income and high-income students. I’m cited as one of the reasons the College Board is changing the SAT.
According to my fellow staff writer Eli Scott in his article “High School Never Ends,” we SAT tutors cause “most of the disparity” between poorer and richer students taking the SAT. I didn’t know we were that effective! Maybe I need to raise my rates.
But as much as I hate to admit it, we’re just not that good. The average test-prep program raises SAT scores by only 80 points. Looking at the angry messages I’ve gotten when a student posts an increase of only that size, I’m guessing that it’s not just the media who’s under the impression that SAT tutors are magical fairies who can wave a wand over a student and raise their scores by 300 points.
I obviously have a strong interest in changes to the SAT (not least of all because I’ll have to take it again to keep myself updated) and have read many an article about the College Board’s proposed changes. There are two major ideas circulating in the media that I’m not buying. The first is that we test-prep providers are the major culprits in the income gap. The second is that the income gap can be closed by making the SAT more like the ACT.
Tutors are effective at raising scores to a point (otherwise we would be out of a job), and we aren’t cheap. However, to assign “most of the disparity” to our work is inaccurate The research cited by Eli Scott actually suggests that coaching improves scores by an average of 27.5 points per section, about 20 percent of the income disparity between the poorest and richest students of 130 points per section – and that’s in the unlikely scenario that every rich student had a tutor and not one poor student did. Other research shows that the income gap in tutor-users is not as large as it is portrayed, and black students are actually more likely than white students to use test prep.
(To those who have made it this far still believing that test prep providers are magic fairies, please do keep believing that – especially if you have a high school student. Can I interest you in any tutoring?)
Between the two tests in their current forms, the ACT is more tied to what students learn in school than the SAT. The ACT is more content-based; the SAT tests less content. The SAT will try to trick students in ways that the ACT won’t. The SAT has a definite income gap, and no one has ever accused the ACT of having one (although that’s because, unlike the SAT, no one has ever researched whether it does). All of these seem like good reasons to make the SAT more like the ACT and to, as College Board President David Coleman said, “[make] it clear that the road to success is not last-minute tricks or cramming but the challenging learning students do every day.”
And yet I can teach a student to game the ACT way faster than I can the SAT.
Last semester, I had several students who wanted four sessions worth of tutoring before they retook their tests. Some were taking the SAT. The others were taking the ACT. The SAT students had only tiny increases from their previous scores. The ACT students increased their scores by about four times as much. Of course, this is far from a rigorous study, and by no means should my statistics be taken as facts. However, because of the different foci of each test, their results did not surprise me.
Take, for example, the ACT and SAT reading sections. The ACT reading section is more like a treasure hunt than reading comprehension. For every question, somewhere in the (very long) passage is buried a sentence or a phrase that gives away the answer quite clearly. The only trick is being able to find all the answers in enough time. I have told students multiple times to turn their brains off during this section – the type of critical analysis they do in their English classes will make them pick the wrong answer. Thinking is not the way to score well here.
The SAT reading section has its own problems, but it actually does ask higher-level, analytical questions. I can’t send students out like chickens pecking for worms in the yard on the SAT and expect them to find the correct answers as easily.
The ACT science section, also touted as a reason for the ACT’s superiority, as the SAT does not have a science section, is actually rather like the reading section, and just as easy to teach. The ACT’s math and writing sections are more straightforward, but also more difficult, content-wise, than the SAT math and writing. When teaching those, I find myself teaching my ACT students the content they should have learned in school and teaching my SAT students more problem solving and less content—and the content is much easier to teach. I have had many SAT students post huge increases in their scores, but those students generally take much more time to improve because they have to learn how to think.
That’s not to say that the ACT isn’t a cognitively difficult test or that the SAT doesn’t test any skills taught in school. The differences between the two are more subtle than I’ve made it sound so far. However, I can’t see the SAT’s income-gap ills being solved by making it even more like the ACT, not unless the College Board is also going to change the country’s education system so that poorer students reach their senior year at the same levels as their richer peers.
I can’t pretend that I’m a tutor for any selfless reason. However, I often give students the first one-on-one attention they have had in a while, and many students sorely need that. In instructing them for the essay section, I oftentimes teach them how to write well. In prepping them for the math section, I frequently find and patch holes in their math education. Test prep is real, applicable learning, and not just memorizing tricks and “arcane” vocabulary words. I’ve seen my students apply the skills they learned prepping for the SAT writing their college essays and studying statistics.
We tutors are not “predators who prey on the anxieties of parents and children and provide no real education benefit,” as David Coleman called us. I’m not claiming to be better than a trained, professional teacher, but budget crunches and big class sizes mean that teachers simply can’t spend as much one-on-one time with students as they need. Most of my students are not rich, and several have had learning disorders. For them, I was cheaper than a private school.
The SAT deserves most of the criticism served upon it. It is overly stressful to students and overly stressed in college applications. However, the SAT’s income gap seems to be a result of inequality in education, not a cause of it. If schools aren’t equally good around the country, it’s difficult to see how an SAT based more on schoolwork can be more equal. Pinning the blame on the test prep industry detracts from the woes of our underfunded public schools. We may be a problem, but we’re a much smaller problem than we seem.
