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Spotlight on the SAT and the ACT

The ACT is on the rise. Attending the National Association for College Admission Counseling annual meeting in Maryland, I could clearly see that the SAT is continuing to lose ground to its longstanding rival. During a well attended session, SAT Test Prep: Sharing What Works, as soon as one college counselor mentioned the success his students were having prepping for the ACT, heads began nodding in agreement throughout the auditorium. More and more schools, college counselors, educational consultants and tutors are shifting their energies toward this alternative to the SAT.

People love to attack the SAT, which has become a magnet for controversy. Over the years, the SAT has been blamed for many of the ills, shortcomings and inequities of the US educational system. In my research I have found dozens of critiques and analyses of the SAT, exploring its biases, lack of predictive strength and various other failings, whereas critiques of the ACT are conspicuously rare. Most educational researchers have chosen to overlook the ACT, which in turn has benefitted from the relative lack of public scrutiny.  The few researchers who have examined the ACT in the same light as the SAT have discovered that the ACT is not a corrective for the SAT; the ACT shares many of its flaws, privileging the same groups and creating the same social, racial and economic divisions as the SAT.

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The Chinese are Coming! This emphatic title lured me and dozens of fellow NACAC (National Association of College Admissions Counselors) conference attendees into a session exploring the expanding impact of Chinese nationals on college admissions in America. It turns out this title was only a setup for a punch line: The Chinese are Coming? The Chinese are here. And this is not news. The presence of China is now firmly established on the world stage. Anyone who happened to watch the opening ceremonies at the Beijing Olympics, anyone who has stepped foot into a Walmart in the last decade, anyone who has taken a peek at the US trade balance or our list of national creditors knows unequivocally that the Chinese are here.

And it’s no surprise that Chinese nationals are entering our universities in record numbers. Our institutions of higher learning have always been the crown jewels of the US educational system. For decades highly talented and ambitious Chinese nationals have made their way to our shores to attend our graduate schools, and now they are coming with increasing numbers to our undergraduate schools.

Perhaps we should be flattered that our institutions of higher learning are so esteemed. Perhaps we should be a bit nervous, as the title of this session insinuated. Perhaps we simply need to adapt to the new reality. Other sessions at NACAC advocated this course of action, boasting titles such as: How to Recruit Chinese Nationals.

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Notes from NACAC

During the 3-day national conference of the National Association of College Admission Counselors (NACAC), I had the opportunity to meet with college admission counselors, high school counselors and educational researchers from across the country. More than 5,000 individuals attended the conference to gain insight into the many changes underway in the world of college admissions: changes in admission criteria, technological developments, new financial realities and the increasing internationalization of American education. Naturally, I gravitated towards all break-out sessions involving the collegiate assessments and their role in the admissions process. Over the course of several short installments, I will impart to you the main lessons I took away from the conference.

Part 1: Technology on the rise in the admissions process

I will never forget the painstaking process of typing up my official application to Penn in the fall of 1993; that was the last time I used a typewriter. A year later I was learning how to navigate the Mosaic browser, surf the web, and send an e-mail. A short year after that, I was logging in to virtual classrooms to chat with my teachers and classmates.

The technologies that were in their infancy when I applied to college have matured to the point of now transforming the face of college admissions. Paper applications are historical artifacts; communications are now taking place by e-mail, Skype and YouTube; colleges are promoting themselves via student blogs, virtual college fairs and podcasts. Vast social networks have transformed the manner in which people learn about schools and communicate with one another.

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After three years of waiting for a clear response from the world of higher education, we are getting increasingly consistent signals that the Writing component of the SAT will count towards college admissions for the majority of our students. Since the initial administration of the Writing section of the SAT in March of 2005, schools have been compiling data on the correlation between performance on the Writing section and performance in college. The data set has grown large enough for robust statistical analysis, and the results are fairly clear: Writing is a significant predictor of collegiate performance. The evidence has been strong enough to move schools from the “let’s wait and see” phase to the unequivocal “Writing counts!” phase.

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Did Barack Obama serve time in a Basque prison? Did Abraham Lincoln ever live in Ontario? Did Jack Kennedy go against his advisers and invade the country of Lilliput? If you answered yes to any of these questions, you are on your way to achieving a perfect score on the SAT essay.

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As the May 1st deadline has come and gone, college deposits have been mailed and the majority of our senior students have happily secured their places in the incoming college class of 2013. Other students have tentatively sent in money to enroll for a spot in the freshman class but are riding the waitlist at preferred schools, hoping for the kind of positive admissions outcomes we saw in 2008. Still other students and families have sent in deposits but are looking for creative ways to finance the next four years of school.

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To forget is human.  In many ways, the brain was designed to forget, thus allowing us to continue to function in this world brimming with incessant flows of new information.  But some things we want to remember, even if they don’t automatically stick in our long term memory banks.  At times, specific memory strategies are appropriate to help us overcome our forgetting instinct.

What can we do to help our students remember the rules, the strategies, and the content that will serve them on standardized tests and help them achieve success in the domain of high school academics? For some students, a single exposure to a new concept will be enough to firmly implant it into their memory banks. For example, if you teach these students how to “pick numbers” for an algebra problem, they will employ that strategy every time they are exposed to algebra problems in the future. Other students need multiple exposures to new material before they begin to integrate and apply it. At a superficial level, these students may “know” what to do, and if you cue their memory, they may be able to retrieve the concept; but on their own, without your input or retrieval cues, they will not independently use the concept.

All students, and all humans for that matter, have idiosyncratic memories.  Certain individuals have a “bear-trap” memory for pictures or images, but a weaker memory for numbers or names. Others have a gift for figures, data, or statistics, but struggle to recall sequential information, narratives or story lines. Everyone has a unique level of ability for recalling certain content, based on how one’s brain is designed, ones’ interest level, and the importance assigned to remembering particular content. If a student is lacking the will to learn the material, a tutor can address that through motivational channels, but if a student is trying in earnest to learn the content and is not succeeding, other strategies exist to help the student improve retention and study “smarter” rather than harder.

There are two specific strategies I want to offer that you can use to help students who are struggling with retaining concepts covered in your sessions.

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Note: This post was originally written as a memo to ATS tutors.

I’m doing some research for my Memory and Cognition class, and I found some information that has relevance to our work. I wanted to pass on some info about the mind and how we can better serve our students.

Some of our students have anxiety around high-stakes tests. They envision the worst, they get nervous, they anticipate freaking out, and their fears can become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

We have several pathways to address student anxiety.  I will briefly mention two and then dive deeper into the third: the power of the imagination.

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The college admissions essay is the single most important essay most students will write during their high school careers. For a student on the admissions margin, in particular, it can be a deciding factor in the admissions equation. While schedule strength, grades, and scores all need to be within the acceptable range for admission to a given school, the essay offers the student a chance to come alive as a human being and present an aspect of himself beyond the data points and quantitative metrics of the application. A well-crafted essay can turn an admissions reader into a vocal advocate in the event that a student’s application makes it to the admissions committee.
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As summer comes to a close and the collegiate admission process beckons, many parents and students must make the important decision whether to use the next few months to prepare for the SAT, the ACT or to simultaneously prepare for both tests. Extremely familiar with the SAT, the majority of parents who seek out our services assume that the SAT will be the best assessment for their children. Most parents personally endured the rite of sitting for the SAT during high school. Additionally, they know how their children fared on the 7th grade TIP assessment, and the 10th and 11th grade PSAT assessments. But for many, the ACT remains a mystery. A growing number of Atlanta students sit for the “pre-ACT”, the PLAN assessment in 10th grade: the vast majority of our students have no academic exposure to the ACT. Many parents have heard of the ACT as an alternative to the SAT but don’t know if it’s worthwhile to make the investment into ACT preparation or simply stick it out with the SAT. In this article I will explain the topical and structural differences between these two assessments in hopes of better informing this decision.
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Parents often come to us and ask when would be the ideal time for their children to sit for the major collegiate assessments such as the SAT and ACT. Parents are daunted by the sheer quantity of assessments and the variety of available administration dates. We subject our children to so many tests during their junior and senior years: PSATs, SAT 1s, ACTs, SAT 2s, APs and/or IBs. Poor planning can compound the stress that our students face, especially come spring. Good planning, however, can lower the stress levels for parents and students alike and really take the edge off of the testing and admissions processes.
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Without question, the most successful tutors are the most adept at motivating their students. Academic coaches, test-prep coaches, we are essentially brokers in motivation. Our job is to find a way to convince teenagers to log out of Facebook, minimize their four open chat windows, turn off their cell phones, and do SAT and ACT drills. To be effective, we must convince our students to come home early the night of Homecoming in order to be rested for a Saturday morning mock test. We must convince our students to drill vocabulary flashcards on the plane ride home from Spring Break. We must convince them that on top of the three and a half hours of homework their school teachers have assigned them, our homework is equally, if not more, important.
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With the October SAT behind us, the majority of seniors are shifting their focus away from preparing for the collegiate assessment tests toward fine-tuning and completing their college applications. A significant portion of our students are taking advantage of some form of early admissions. Some are participating in colleges’ non-binding Early Action programs; others, hoping to improve their chances of admission, are applying through binding Early Decision programs. Many students have already secured admission to schools by capitalizing on rolling admissions policies.
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To fully prepare for standardized tests, it’s necessary to navigate three distinct phases:

1. Understand the structure of the test.
   This involves learning the layout and format of the test, understanding the different types of questions, and finally understanding the scoring and grading process.
2. Master the content within the structure.
   Review the material: algebra, geometry, vocabulary, sentence completions, and reading comprehension. At ATS, we create strategies for each problem type and know how to approach every problem on the test.
3. Practice the test-taking skills to thrive in four hours (or longer if you qualify for extended-time) of pressured testing conditions.
   This is often the most neglected phase of test preparation and one of the essentials of our proven, successful method. To succeed, there are structural qualities of the tests which require particular skills and strategies if students are to maintain focus throughout hours of mental exercising. To build endurance, test day must be practiced.

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Every year the College Board and ACT Inc. receive tens of thousands of requests from parents seeking extended time for their children’s standardized tests. These organizations have a tremendous amount of power and responsibility. They must answer the difficult questions: who truly deserves extended time? How does one create fair and consistent standards to evaluate these myriad requests?
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Tomorrow morning hundreds of thousands of students will sit for the April 1st SAT.

These students will put their faith in a test and a testing process that have come under intense scrutiny in the last few weeks.

By now many of you know the specific details of the College Board’s scoring snafu on the October 8th SAT. According to Pearson Educational Measurement, the company responsible for processing the tests, excessive moisture content compromised the scoring process. Intensive rain increased the moisture content and thickness of the answer sheets, causing the tests to improperly align, and resulting in erroneously low SAT scores for 4,600 high school students, roughly 1% of the 495,000 students who sat for the October test. Not only did this tarnish the reputation of the College Board and damage its credibility, but it also brought into question the very integrity and fairness of the SAT test.
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Almost everyone recognizes that this generation of high school students is working harder than any other in American history. These students have more challenging schedules, more AP and IB classes, more activities, and a greater awareness of the heightened academic stakes. Just try scheduling a tutoring session with some of these students! “I’ll fit you in at 9:00 PM on Tuesday after school, tutorial, lacrosse practice, and your group project meeting.” These young people have tighter schedules than some corporate executives, and many have to work on all burners just to stay on top of it all. Increased academic competition is fundamentally changing the high school experience for many students.
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Although the first SAT test was administered in 1926, if you are looking for the roots of the test, you have to look all the way back to the beginning of the 20th Century to the development of the first standardized intelligence tests. Alfred Binet, a French psychologist, teamed up with French physician Theodore Simon to develop an instrument that would give psychologists and educators the ability to assess mental retardation among French School children. Between 1905 and 1908 Binet and Simon worked in concert to develop an assessment that would allow them to quickly and effectively compare the different levels of psychological and cognitive functioning between people. Using a series of increasingly difficult questions, the Binet-Simon tests were used to measure attention, memory and verbal skills. In 1916, Stanford University psychologist Lewis Terman integrated the findings of the Binet-Simon research and released the “Stanford Revision of the Binet-Simon Scale” AKA the “Stanford-Binet” IQ test which today is on its 5th revision and remains a popular assessment in the field of Intelligence Testing.
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