Focusing on areas you struggle with and using proven test-taking techniques can raise scores.

A recent article in the New York Times advocated that students from low-income backgrounds should prepare for the SAT (Scholastic Achievement Test) “like a rich kid” by spending hundreds of hours studying test prep books, visiting tutors, and taking online cram courses.

This is very poor advice, whether you are rich or not.

Most studies find that test preparation for the SAT produces very small effects on average – a few dozen points, at best. Claims that you can boost your score by hundreds of points have never been confirmed in experimental studies.

Becker (1990), for example, analyzed several dozen studies and found that the average point gain in carefully controlled studies was somewhere between nine and 20 points. These are tiny gains that are of no practical importance in college admission decisions. Other reviews have come to similar conclusions (see a brief summary in Liu (2014)).

In addition to being useless, SAT test prep can also be very expensive. The prices for two well-known test prep courses as of April, 2017, were $1,599 (Kaplan) and $1,099 (Princeton Review). Private tutoring would easily cost much more.

A much better strategy for students, one that costs $0.00, is the following:

Go to the public or school library.
Check out books on topics you are interested in and enjoy.
Read those books for as many hours a day as you can.

Unlike test prep courses, extensive self-selected (pleasure) reading is associated with higher literacy levels and higher test scores (Acheson, Wells, & MacDonald, 2008). Both correlational and experimental studies have found that reading improves not only vocabulary and reading comprehension, but also writing, spelling, grammar, and knowledge of the world (Krashen, 2004) – all things that will have a significant impact on SAT scores.

What’s more, the newly revised SAT is even more “reading-dependent” than the previous versions, making a strategy of voluminous reading a better option than ever.

Instead of spending four hours a day, five days a week in a 10-week summer test prep program, high school students would be better advised to dedicate that time to reading.* Such a plan would allow students to read about 2.5 million words, which is probably enough to raise even a good high school reader’s vocabulary by a 1,000 words or more (Nation, 2014; McQuillan, 2016).

For struggling adolescent readers, including those from low-income families without the benefits typically provided “rich kids,” the impact would likely be even more dramatic.

Our advice to students should be simple: Read more, prep less.

References

Acheson, D., Wells, J., & MacDonald, M. (2008). New and updated tests of print exposure and reading abilities in college students. Behavioral Research Methods, 40(1): 278–289.

Becker, B.J. (1990). Coaching for the Scholastic Aptitude Test: Further Synthesis and Appraisal. Review of Educational Research, 60(3), 373-417.

Krashen, S. (2004). The Power of Reading, 2nd ed. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Liu, O. L. (2014), Investigating the Relationship Between Test Preparation and TOEFL iBT®Performance. ETS Research Report Series, 2014(2), 1–13.

McQuillan, J. (1996). SAT Verbal scores and the library: Predicting high school reading achievement in the United States. Indiana Media Journal, 18(3), 66-70.

Note: It’s not surprising that states that have the best school and public library systems also tend to have the better SAT scores, controlling for other types of school spending (McQuillan, 1996).