Test score is one of the most important numbers in the college application process
By: Amanda Bok
High school students are rising to the SAT challenge with the help of a review class and months, sometimes years, of studying.
With the number of new college students rising each year, college admission is becoming increasingly competitive. That’s why performing well on the Scholastic Assessment Test is very important.
According to Jonathan DeSimone, South Brunswick High School guidance counselor, the three most important numbers colleges look at are grade point average, SAT scores and strength of course load.
To help students prepare, the high school offers an SAT review class for students interested in improving their scores, said Doris Bacon, an English teacher who also teaches the SAT’s verbal review.
Each year, sophomores take the Preliminary Scholastic Assessment Test in the school to gauge how much they will have to prepare. Based on the results, students may decide to take either the math or verbal review classes, or both. The classes teach strategies on how to tackle both sections of the SAT and ingrain those strategies by testing them again and again, until they sink in.
"I believe very strongly that practicing the test in as close a testing condition as possible is the best way of learning," said Dan Caffrey who teaches the math review.
Students in both the math and verbal classes use a mixture of "Kaplan’s Home Study Book," "The College Board’s Ten Real SATs" and "Barron’s How to Prepare for the SAT I" to study the test’s general format, where questions are organized by level of difficulty, to plan how to use their allotted test time, keeping in mind that points are not discounted for blank answers, and to study specific strategies for both the math and verbal sections.
Students in both classes also take about five, real, previously administered SATs and three Kaplan tests to monitor their progress and get used to the test. Kaplan collects the tests, scores them and offers results a few days later.
Mr. Caffrey and Ms. Bacon said students steadily improve their scores as the semester progresses.
"This group has improved at least 100 points on their scores," said Mr. Caffrey of his present math review class.
"My juniors, who took the SAT in December, said they were thrilled with the improvement of their scores," said Ms. Bacon. "Most of them improved their scores well over about 120 points or more. They improve their scores as much as the kids who take courses like the Princeton Review."
The Princeton Review is a private company that offers test preparation classes for the SAT, as well as graduate tests such as the GRE, GMAT, LSAT and MCAT tests. According to Joel Ruben, director of Princeton Review, the company has been in business since 1981, serves about 70,000 students nationwide and charges $895 for a six-week, 56-hour SAT preparation course.
The district has offered the SAT Review classes as nongraded, pass or fail electives for the past six years. This semester there are about 60 students enrolled in two verbal review classes, and about 30 students enrolled in one math review class. The classes hold about 25-30 students each year.
Students take either the math or verbal review per semester and may switch into the second review class the following semester. Next semester there will be two math review classes. The classes fill quickly and give preference to juniors and seniors, though also accept sophomores.
The district also offers two, two-hour, night SAT review classes each week to students at a price of about $150. The course fee includes the books: "The College Board’s Ten Real SATs" and "Barron’s How to Prepare for the SAT I," which students may keep.
The district also makes scholarships available to students who were unable to join the daytime review classes and need financial help to join the evening ones.
Students in Ms. Bacon’s day verbal review class took a vocabulary test Tuesday. They memorize about 30 words every two weeks and accumulating the words over time, they carried thick bundles of index cards into class and skimmed them before the test. They were expected to define such words as "eulogy," "irony" and "polemic."
In addition to such biweekly quizzes, they also play games like vocabulary bingo and charades, and they write crosswords for each other. In one exercise, students were expected to teach friends or family members vocabulary words and Ms. Bacon would then test those people to see if her students had been good teachers.
Students also practice strategies on how to approach analogies, sentence completion and reading comprehension problems, focusing on finding clue words such as "although" or "because" to help them identify the mood of a sentence.
Students said Tuesday that the focus on vocabulary helps them improve their verbal scores.
"If you don’t know the vocabulary, you can’t do the analogies or sentence completions," said junior Kim Herbst. "It’s a circle."
They also said the routine tests make them feel comfortable with what lies ahead.
"If you’re nervous coming to the test, you’re not going to do as well as you want to, not like if you take the test with an open mind," said junior Caroline Alvarez.
In the math review class students also practice the tricks of the test-taking trade.
"We review tried and true strategies taught by Princeton Review, Kaplan and from other literature," said Mr. Caffrey. "And we practice, practice, practice."
These strategies include backsolving, where students plug in numbers for variables such as "x" T-shirts or "y" pairs of pants. In such a question the same variables would be in the answer choices. So students would plug in a number for each, solve the question according to those numbers and then plug in the same numbers in the answer choices to match the results, said Mr. Caffrey. "That’s the type of question kids don’t do well on, it’s too abstract in some cases," he said. "But this makes it easy."
In addition to teaching testing strategies, the math review class also covers tricky math concepts from algebra I, geometry and general reasoning, he said.
Mr. Caffrey teaches his students to manage their time wisely, spending more time on easy and medium questions rather than hurrying to answer everything.
"This is not a test in which you answer every question," said Mr. Caffrey. "The students design a study program to know how many questions they can afford to leave out. I try to individualize the review for them depending on what they think they need."
The math review class begins with a test for which no student has prepared, said Mr. Caffrey. A week later another test is administered where students are encouraged to spend more time on easier questions rather than hurrying through the test and guessing on more questions.
"This helps them recognize if guessing helps or hurts their score," said Mr. Caffrey.
Both Mr. Caffrey and Ms. Bacon said the course improves their students’ scores, which they monitor from day one.
The benefits of the high school’s day and night programs are not only in the results, but in the price as well, said both teachers. While the daytime classes are free, the night classes cost several hundred dollars less than such review courses as the Princeton Review but promise similar results, they said.
"Parents save money and the students who put the time into this really reap the benefits," said Mr. Caffrey.