There’s test prep, and then there’s test prep:
The owner of the SAT and PSAT exams sued a Dallas-area test-preparation company Wednesday, accusing it of trying to give its customers an unfair edge on the tests by illegally obtaining “live” copies to help students practice.
The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Dallas, alleges that the Karen Dillard College Prep company got a copy of the PSAT administered last October from a Plano, Texas, high school principal whose brother works at the company.
The lawsuit brought by the New York-based College Board, alleging copyright infringement, could bring attention to the burgeoning test-prep industry, which some critics contend gives well-off students an unfair advantage on entrance exams.
“Could bring attention?” “Burgeoning?” The kerfuffle over test prep companies and the debate over whether they help kids, unfairly benefit rich kids, or just plain encourage unethical behavior has been going on for years. Allegedly the Karen Dillard College Prep was charging almost $2300 for SAT prep. A book of eight official practice tests is $19.95, free at your local library.
Many years ago, an episode of the MacNeill-Lehrer News Hour had a guy from the test-prep industry who claimed that the tests didn’t really test anything, because he could raise students’ scores by 200 points, simply by training them for 4-6 weeks in simple math, simple vocabulary, and simple test taking skills.
I nearly screamed at the TV screen. He just proved that the tests *do* test something — simple math, simple vocabulary, and simple test-taking skills.
Anyone want to claim that those skills are not highly correlated with how well someone will do in college?
What I want to know is, why is College Board going out of their way to make all these highly damaging accusations against Karen Dillard? It seems like they are hell-bent on trying this case in the court of public opinion to destroy her business before this case is ever heard by a judge. Gee, kinda gives a lot of credibility to Dillard’s claims College Board is trying to get rid of the competition.
The College Board is really doing a smear campaign which is totally disgusting. They are a greedy money making machine. Can something be done about them? Take them out of business? I really hope Karen Dillard and her case will expose the truth about the College Board.
When I prepared for the GRE, I bought a computer program that had a bank of questions set up as tests and repeatedly took them over the course of 5 weeks. I was in the 95th percentile for logic and reasoning and 80th percentile for language (75th for math). Could I have done this without it? I don’t know, but I like to think that it helped.
It cost me $40 ten years ago. $2,300 for this is a rip off.
Perhaps the $2300 is for training on the test that they will actually be taking?
David Owen (formerly of The Atlantic and The New Yorker, and now of Golf Digest — how’s that for a career change? He started playing golf again as an adult and got so hooked he quit these “prestigious” magazines to work someplace so that he could play a lot of golf) wrote an entertaining book called “None of the Above”, about test prep and the College Board. The book is out of date, and was out of print for a long time, but it’s quite interesting.
My wife is a whiz at taking these standardized tests. She got 800’s on all the sections of her SAT’s and GRE’s and 5’s on all of the AP tests that she took. Apparently you can tell, often enough, which is the correct answer just looking at the answers to do very well on the test. At least she can. But she’s extraordinarily smart, so perhaps this isn’t feasible for most of us.
I took the GRE at the beginning of senior year in college without any preparation. As an engineering major, I did well on the math (>90th percentile), but my language arts dropped to the 6oth percentile range. In high school, I always tested about the same for both, but after 4 years of engineering and not reading many books, my language arts skills had suffered. I didn’t actually need the GRE results until 5 years later when the original scores expired, so I bought a GRE test prep book and took a bunch of the prep tests over a couple of weekends. This time, both my math and language arts scores were greater than the 90th percentile. The vocabulary words in the test prep questions actually showed up on the real test. So a little prep work and brushing on on your grammar and vocabulary before waltzing into a test does help!
I attend KD, and while I do believe that $2300 is quite a bit of money, what Karen Dillard offers is different, and in my opinion effective. Don’t think I’m biased because I go there – believe you me I hate going there. But once I enter the building, there’s no leaving until I’ve done something productive. It forces me to work on my vocabulary and even though I am bitter and all the students there say obscene things about Karen, there is no denying the improvement in our scores.
I’m not going to lie, I think Karen cares a lot about making money-aspect of the business, and sometimes puts the students’ regards below it, but the CollegeBoard has no excuse for this – after all, they already receive around 50$ per test administered. Considering how many college-bound people there are, I doubt that they have anything to worry about financially. You can even see it as Karen creating business for the CollegeBoard.
Besides, the test in question was not given to Karen until after the PSAT exam, and even then she didn’t use it in any of the workshops.
You all are talking about the GRE, which is a whole different ballgame.
” was in the 95th percentile for logic and reasoning and 80th percentile for language (75th for math). ”
That means you got about a 750 on analytical, 550 for reading, and around 700 on math. Your prep probably helped you in everything but the reading, which is very difficult to do well on.
Only 2% of the testing population gets above a 700 on verbal, and 6% gets an 800 in quant (math). In contrast, about 1% of SAT testers gets 780 or above in reading, and 2% gets an 800 on math.
So no comparison–and prep in GRE helps only in math (logic was dropped from the test).
As for this story, it’s stupid. All the smaller test prep companies obtain tests from students and use them in prep.
I think this is all crazy! It doesn’t seem that Karen Dillard has done anything wrong, yet the college board is doing all it can to ruin her. Her business is doing what it is supposed to do – educate her students. If she had a copy of the PSAT test and used that test to form questions to quiz students, no crime has been committed. It looks like the college board is upset that they are making ALL the money!