In US-based postsecondary education, first-year students commonly have their compositional ability consequentially assessed on the basis of standardized tests. As a result, students who score above certain thresholds on ACT, SAT, or AP exams often are placed into honors or remedial courses; receive credit remissions; and/or test out of general…

An administrative rule allowed students who failed an exam to retake it shortly after, triggering strong `teach to the test' incentives to raise these students' test scores for the retake. We develop a model that accounts for truncation and find that these students score 0.14 standard deviations higher on the retest. Using a regression…

Attaining successful outcomes on the SAT can have profound educational and financial consequences for college-bound students. Using archival data from a private tutoring centre, we investigated variables we hypothesised to contribute to SAT score increases. Our analyses revealed significant effects of time on task and rate of SAT homework…

The purpose of this document is to identify and dispel rumors that are frequently cited about the SAT. The following is a compilation of nine popular rumors organized into three areas: "Student Demographics," "Test Preparation/Test Prediction," and "Test Utilization."

The authors describe the four stages of the closing the loop process undertaken by a college of business (COB) over a 6-year period. The COB developed and offered an online, noncredit review course to help students prepare for the Major Field Test in Business (MFT). Early results demonstrated the efficacy of the course as student scores rose from…

One of the most important questions in education research is whether the gains from interventions for which perceived short-term success can be sustained. The possibility of short-lived impacts is especially relevant for research on charter schools, where charter operators who face high-stakes assessments have an incentive to "teach to the…

Cross-national research finds that "shadow education"--educational activities outside of formal schooling--tends to confer advantages on already privileged students. Shadow education in the United States, such as test prep for college entrance exams, has received considerably less attention. Drawing on the National Education Longitudinal…

Claudia Buchmann, Dennis Condron and Vincent Roscigno's study, titled "Shadow Education, American Style: Test Preparation, the SAT and College Enrollment," demonstrates that vigorous use of expensive test preparation tools, such as private classes and tutors, significantly boosts scores on standardized exams such as the SAT or ACT. This…

This discussion paper represents one of the National Association for College Admission Counseling's (NACAC's) first post-Testing Commission steps in advancing the knowledge base and dialogue about test preparation. It describes various types of test preparation programs and summarizes the existing academic research on the effects of test…

THE FOLLOWING IS THE FULL TEXT OF THIS DOCUMENT: A new study by a pair of Harvard University researchers discounts earlier findings that coaching can substantially improve student performance on the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT). "There is simply insufficient evidence that large score increases are a result of a coaching program," write…

This quiz and its explanations are designed to help teachers and counselors assist students in deciding the meaning of their scores on the Scholastic Aptitude Test and the American College Test. (BW)

This quantitative analysis of published results on the effect of coaching on Scholastic Aptitude Test scores differs from previous studies by separating out the within-study sampling error from the variation in coaching effectiveness. The authors conclude that the size of the positive effect seems too small to be practically important. (Author/SK)

Whether coaching for standardized admission tests such as the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) is effective was investigated. The Bureau of Consumer Protection of the Federal Trade Commission evaluated the effectiveness of two commercial coaching schools that offered preparation courses for the SAT. The researchers concluded that one of the two…

Three computer software packages from Krell, Borg-Warner, and Edu-ware are reviewed in terms of their improving users' vocabulary, verbal analogy, and mathematical skills in preparation for the SATs. Students benefitting most are those who know the subject but do poorly on tests. (MBR)

It was during the early 1990s that the author began to suspect that teenagers were reading less--and less deeply--than they had been 10 and certainly 20 years ago. He found this paradoxical, because it was during the 1990s that SAT scores seemed to soar along with the economy. Students talked about them constantly, like securities traders in a…