Students believe in the SAT

By Seema Mehta

March 1, 2008 12 AM PT

Times Staff Writer

Alex Schwertfeger doesn’t know what college she wants to attend. But the Notre Dame High School junior is convinced that the key to entry at her dream school is the SAT.

To boost her score, she attended a pricey private prep class and spent countless hours at home studying drills and completing practice tests. Before she went to bed many nights, she flipped through flashcards of the 200 most popular vocabulary words to appear on the test.

The Granada Hills teenager is taking the three-part, nearly four-hour exam for the first time today. But this is only the beginning; she plans to take another private prep class this spring and to take the exam at least once more later this year, maybe twice.

“It’s really important. It gets you in the door” at selective universities, said Schwertfeger, who hopes to score a 2050 out of 2400 this time and 2200 next time. Such a high score “makes you stand out.”

The wiry 17-year-old is among hundreds of thousands of students who, clutching graphing calculators and sharpened No. 2 pencils, are taking the SAT, a prerequisite for admission to most four-year colleges, today. More students than ever are taking the test: Nearly 1.5 million in the class of 2007 sat for it, 33% more than a decade earlier, according to the College Board, which administers the exam.

One beneficiary of this increase is the booming $527-million test-prep industry, which offers study aids ranging from $4.95 iPod downloads and $20 shower curtains that feature the top 500 SAT words to $29.99 practice books and one-on-one tutoring that can cost thousands of dollars.

Though test-prep companies refuse to disclose numbers, they acknowledge that more students than ever are taking classes, which they attribute to the population swell of the echo boom and millennial generations and to the growing emphasis on the exam.

“A generation or two ago, test prep was essentially a good night’s sleep and a good breakfast,” said Carina Wong, spokeswoman for Kaplan Test Prep and Admissions, based in New York City. “Today, it really has become ubiquitous. Students have become much more aware of how effective and how important it is. College admissions has become so much more competitive over the past several years that students’ parents are looking at every edge they possibly can get.”

Encino mother Sonia Feldman enrolled her son 16-year-old Marc in a Kaplan course for that very reason.

“It’s a big piece, especially for the UC schools” that don’t conduct in-person interviews, she said. “Everything that you are is on paper.”

At a Kaplan class Thursday evening in Encino, six high school juniors spent 2 1/2 hours preparing for today’s exam, which includes reading, math and writing sections each worth 800 points. The third section, which requires students to write a timed essay, was added in March 2005.

On multiple-choice questions, instructor Debbie Campbell reminded them, they will be penalized for wrong answers, so they should guess only if they can narrow the field of potential answers.

“If we can make an elimination, what can we do? What have we earned the right to do?” she asked. “Guess!”

A new study scheduled to be published later this year shows that the classes are effective in boosting scores -- somewhat. Private classes increased scores an average of 60 points, while less specialized high school courses added 30 points, said Claudia Buchmann, coauthor of the study and associate professor of sociology at Ohio State University.

She said the results lead her to question the value of the SAT in college admissions.

“We believe the SAT is coachable and that if you can have $1,000 and can go buy a private class . . . your SAT score says less about the likelihood you’ll do well in college and much more about your family background,” she said.

College Board officials dispute this claim, saying that the test is a measure of what students have learned in high school and their ability to apply it. Their research shows a prep class leads to an average 26-point gain, while taking the SAT a second time results in an average 30-point gain.

“Simply by taking the SAT again, you’re going to do, on average, better,” said Laurence Bunin, general manager of the SAT.

Bunin said the SAT does what it was created to do -- level the playing field among students from myriad school settings -- but he acknowledged that students’ backgrounds can affect their access to classes and the test result.

“Unfortunately, there is the fact that our education access in this country is not fair for everybody, that students in underserved areas don’t get same kind of education that other kinds of students get,” he said. “That is a problem. That problem shows up on all measures of educational success, including tests, including grades.”

Such concerns are among the factors that have led a growing number of four-year institutions, including some state universities and small liberal-arts colleges, to stop requiring standardized test scores for admission. According to FairTest, an organization critical of the SAT, more than 755 colleges do not use the SAT or the similar ACT to admit substantial numbers of students. Some of these universities will not require the scores from applicants in the top 10% of their graduating class.

Questions of unequal access have also led public schools and private test-prep companies to offer reduced-price classes to students.

The Garden Grove Unified School District will for the first time offer subsidized private prep classes at its seven high school campuses starting in March. The 49,000-student district partnered with Princeton Review and Revolution Prep and negotiated a rate of $200 per student for a 30-hour course. The district pays $150; the student is responsible for $50.

“It’s so expensive, and the majority of our parents, the majority of our kids, are not able to afford an $800 class or something like that,” said Gabriela Mafi, the district’s director of seventh- to 12th-grade instruction.

It’s not just the students who are getting caught up in the college admissions frenzy, counselors say. Melissa Figge, a counselor at Woodbridge High School in Irvine, held a workshop for 150 anxious parents of juniors earlier this week.

“The hysteria about SAT testing or college admissions testing has grown,” she said. “My goal in the workshop is to bring down their level of concern. I want them to see the gestalt, the whole situation.” She said the test “is only one piece of information colleges use, and it’s not the only thing.”

Among her competitive school body, it’s not uncommon for students to take a five-days-a-week test-prep “boot camp” the summer before their junior year, and then take the exam four times.

She urges students to focus on their overall high school career, including community service and extracurricular activities.

“What have you accomplished within your arena? Have you challenged yourself?” she said.

“I’d rather have them take a demanding academic load and be involved in the world around them then spend hours and hours and hours in prep courses.”

s eema.mehta@latimes.com

For more on schools, from inside and outside the classroom, go to www.latimes.com/thehomeroom

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

Higher turnout

Nearly 1.5 million high school students who graduated in 2007 took the SAT nationwide, almost 33% more than a decade ago.

Students taking the SAT, by year of graduation

In millions

1997: 1.13

2002: 1.33