To use an analogy:
If preparation for the SAT is the educational equivalent of a nuclear arms race, the students in Ron Corcillo's Princeton Review SAT prep course in Pasadena are naval officers aboard a nuclear sub, hoping to blow their competitors out of the water. Most come from well-to-do backgrounds where no expense has been spared for education. By the end of this course, they will have drilled this baby until it is second nature. They know who the enemy is (the Educational Testing Service, which creates the SAT), and, by the time they take the test next month, their heads will be swimming with the strategies it takes to win.
About 1.3 million students took the SAT last year, 12% of them in California. In February, UC President Richard C. Atkinson proposed nuking the test as an admissions requirement to the university's eight undergraduate campuses. The proposal comes, paradoxically, at a time when standardized testing is touted by some, including President Bush, as the answer to what ails American education.
Atkinson challenged test-makers to come up with a new test that would be directly tied to college preparatory courses rather than to what he considers "an ill-defined measure of aptitude or intelligence" like the SAT. The SAT, he says, is unfair to many students and fails to measure what they have learned in high school. He, like many critics, says the SAT measures only how well a student can take a test and is no predictor of college success.
A recent visit with a group of students taking a private SAT course did little to dispel that point of view.
"After the test is over, I will probably forget everything I learned in this SAT course and not care," says Ashley Jacobsen, 17, a junior at Flintridge Sacred Heart Academy, a private Catholic school for girls. "And if I don't get at least a 1,300, it wasn't worth the money."
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It's a lazy Sunday afternoon in spring, but dozens of high school juniors are squirreled away in small classrooms at Holliston Church in Pasadena getting ready to strain their brains for four intense hours. They have paid $899 to spend 42 hours over six weeks in an intensive prep course offered by Princeton Review, a multimillion-dollar business that prepares students to take standardized tests. The company has offices in 43 of 50 states as well as Taiwan, China, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, India, Mexico and Canada.
