The Critical Reader on MarketWatch test prep on a budget ( more tutoring isnt always better)

A couple of weeks ago, MarketWatch reporter Charles Passy contacted me about the process of doing SAT/ACT prep  on a budget, and we had an impromptu and delightful  conversation about the test-prep process and the changes its undergone over the last couple of decades. While Im thrilled to see this site  mentioned in his article as a source of free test prep, I also realize there wasnt room for him to include much of what we discussed. Hence this post. (For the record, I know Ive been away for a while, but I finally got started on trying to revise my SAT grammar book for the new test in 2016, and, well, lets just say its been eating up a lot of my time†¦) Anyway, my  conversation with Mr. Passy certainly wasnt the first one  Ive had about low-budge test prep, but during and after our conversation, a couple of things occurred to me. An awful lot of fuss gets made about the correlation between test scores and socio-economic status, and while I am in absolutely no way denying  the very real and stark macro-level educational disparities that correlation reflects, I also think there are some nuances that often get missed. (I know,  nuances get missed in the sound-bite/twitter-ized popular media   how difficult to imagine!) The usual media story goes something like this:  you hire a high-priced tutor, pay them some ungodly sum, the tutor teaches the kid some tricks, and wham! the kids score goes up a couple of hundred points. That makes for a convenient narrative, but the truth is a little more complicated. Now, to be fair, tutoring does occasionally  work like that, but usually only for kids who were scoring pretty well in the first place. They just needed to hear someone say  one or two things that would make it all click into place. They didnt need help learning to identify prepositional phrases  or main ideas, and they certainly didnt stumble over the pronunciation of  common words. Some of them could have  ultimately have figured things out even without a tutor. For all those kids who improve by huge amounts, there are others who dutifully go to tutoring week in and week out,  sometimes for months on end, and come out barely better (or worse) than they were at the start even with a very competent tutor, a category that I would like to think includes moi. More tutoring is always better, right? a parent wrote to me in an email recently, nervous about what she could afford. Well, no actually. Sometimes more is not better. Sometimes more is worse. Sometimes more backfires, and the kid just wants to be left alone. Sometimes the kid doesnt really  make that much of an effort. Sometimes the kid has so many holes in their foundational knowledge that they cant get to a point where they can integrate and apply new knowledge under pressure, on the fly. It all depends on where the student is starting from, where they want to get to, and how much theyre willing to put in. And so on. When  it comes to standardized test scores  and income, people tend to assume that  the correlation is  invariably linear, up to the highest levels: that is, a student from a family earning $250,000/year will automatically score better than a student from a family scoring $100,000/year, who will in turn always score better than a student from a family earning $75,000/year, and so on. Reasonably, they therefore assume that a student from a family earning, say $5 million/year is pretty much guaranteed to  reach the highest echelons of SAT or ACT score-dom, and one from a family at the tip-top of the 1% is pretty much guaranteed a perfect score. Interestingly, this is the exact opposite of  my personal experience. Almost all of  my  weakest students have come from the most well-off families. And by well off, I mean Upper East Side townhouse/penthouse/house in the Hamptons wealthy. Some of them had been tutored in every subject, for years.  Not coincidentally,  they tended to have a lot of gadgets but not many books. Often their vocabularies were staggeringly weak. Staggeringly. As in, you would probably not believe me if I told you the words they didnt know.  They were so used to being spoon-fed that they simply did not know how to figure things out on their own, and there were no real stakes for them. Theyd continue to be equally privileged whether they attended Muhlenberg or NYU. My relatively strong students have tended  to be from  well-off but not extraordinarily wealthy families. They had houses and nice things and vacations, but they  also had some exposure to the world of ideas. Often they were  willing to put in a moderate amount of work, but  they lacked a realistic conception of effort relative to payoff. My strongest students have been from  from families that truly valued  learning.  Regardless of how much money they had, they were  willing to spend on education (though granted none of them could be called poor). A number of them were from immigrant families, and some did not learn English until relatively late. But they were  willing to accept that they didnt know everything already, and they worked  hard. Then there are the kids who cant afford tutoring at all or who dont want their parents to shell out for  tutors   who simply buy my books, sit down with them diligently for a couple of months, and get perfect or near-perfect scores. I know they exist because they sometimes send me emails thanking me. Those emails make my day. These kids are the ones that  gets overlooked in all the discussions about scores and socio-economic status. Some of them  do spend hours combing this site and PWN the SAT and Erik the Red and College Confidential tracking down the answer to every last Blue Book question and pull their scores into the stratosphere. Yes, they are comparatively few, but they exist, and sometimes they actually learn a lot in the process. Dont their accomplishments deserve some  recognition too?