Test Prep
How Well Does It Work?
- Only Asians are helped, but by 50 points, a New York Times article citing a study:
Black students are also more likely to use test prep than white students. Low-scoring Black students are more likely to have taken commercial test prep than low-scoring white students. High-scoring Black students are less likely to use commercial test prep than their high-scoring white counterparts but are more likely to use public test resources, buy prep books and study on their own. These studies have been around for years.
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Two studies found that when you disaggregate for ethnicity, Americans of East Asian descent benefit far more from test prep than any other group, including white and other Asian American students. (There’s an interesting if somewhat unrelated distinction to make here: One-on-one tutoring seems to help nobody. Commercial test prep, which ranges from cram schools in East Asian enclaves to the Princeton Review, has some effects.)
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“East Asian Americans were the only group where a form of test prep predicted a higher SAT score (about 50 points).” For everyone else, SAT prep has no significant effect or even, in some cases, a negative one. A previous study found that the majority of this improvement took place in East Asian immigrant enclaves like Flushing, in Queens, which has dozens of cram schools that serve ethnic communities.
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Korean students benefit from test prep in a way that falls outside the usual socioeconomic logic. Poor Korean students are more likely than wealthy Chinese students to enroll in private test prep and to stay in these programs for longer periods. (This might be an Old World carry-over: Private, for-profit schools, called hagwons, are ubiquitous in South Korea and span a wide range of topics — math, science, art, dance and even e-sports. They are certainly not relegated to the upper classes. Middle-class and poor Koreans send their children to hagwons both in South Korea and here in the United States.)
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I believe what distinguishes these schools is sheer classroom time. Students in hagwons study not only for the SAT and ACT. If they live in New York City, there’s a decent chance they also took a Specialized High School Admission Test (the exam that determines admission to the city’s elite magnet schools) prep course in the eighth grade. If they struggled in any subject, it’s likely they signed up for a hagwon course to improve. If you’ve spent much of your academic life employing what experts call a shadow education, ...
In his book on elite colleges, “The Price of Admission,” Daniel Golden writes about a time when Berkeley and U.C.L.A. “considered replacing race-based affirmative action” — banned by Prop 209, an anti-affirmative-action law that passed in 1996 and was reaffirmed in 2020 — “with a preference for low-income applicants.” The idea was quickly shut down, however, when officials “realized that it would mostly elevate Asian Americans.”
