The SAT, America’s infamous requirement for getting into college, costs only $41.50 for three hours and 45 minutes of headaches. For many wealthier American families, however, the cost of the test is usually much more as they spend thousands of dollars on specialized tutors and prep courses to raise their children’s scores by hundreds of points. This intense preparation, coupled with the general discrepancy in education in the United States, has left a yawning gap between the scores of poorer students, especially blacks and Hispanics, and those of the wealthy. Despite the new revision of the test, not enough is being done to address the inequality in education in our country.
Partly as an effort to correct this gap, the College Examination Entrance Board, which administers the SAT, created a new version of the test to expand the curricula included. In this new variation, which was first administered last Saturday, students were asked to write a 25-minute essay and answer questions about English grammar and Algebra II material. All of that was included with the traditional mishmash of reading comprehension, mathematical logic problems and sentence completions. The notorious quantitative comparison and analogy sections were stricken altogether.
Supporters of the changes hoped that they would lead to a fairer SAT that would be harder to prepare for. It seems, however, that the tricks and advantages known to those who can afford extensive preparation will not be dying anytime soon.
“We’ve always found that the writing is one of the most coachable parts of the test,” said Phil Pine, founder and director of Capital Educators, a local test prep firm. “There’s no doubt in my mind that preparation will go a long way towards higher scores.”
Students in the program are taught a formula for writing strong and specific essays, and have the opportunity to have at least four essays reviewed and scored by instructors.
Capital Educators, after 40 to 60 hours of preparation, guarantees its students a gain of at least 150 points on the new composite, which is out of a total 2,400. That guarantee comes at a cost of $1,295, however. And that amount is nearly identical to tuitions charged by famous test coaches like Kaplan and Princeton Review.
The exorbitant costs of such programs promise to maintain an advantage to the wealthy in SAT scores and thus in entrance to elite colleges and universities. While the College Board should be lauded for having taken a stab at this problem, the changes are sure to do little to promote equal opportunity.
In the short term, private test educators should be encouraged to support low-cost scholarship programs for high-achieving, less affluent students. In the long term, however, the SAT, as a standardized test, reveals a striking gap not just in the inequality between those who can afford to buy enough training to beat the test, but in the quality of education afforded to the rich and poor in America caused by a troubled public education system. Changing a couple of questions will not help this larger problem. Until it is solved, Georgetown and big-name institutions like it will remain the bastion of the cookie-cutter elite of American society.
