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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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.”
