SAT Tutors Claim Big Success but Advocate Abolishing the Test

The Princeton Review, an organization that coaches high school students for their Scholastic Aptitude Tests, made more than $15 million last year, tutored thousands of youngsters and reported startling improvements in its pupils’ test scores.

And yet, despite the company’s booming prosperity, top Review officers harbor an unusual corporate ambition: They want to lobby away the SAT itself, a move that could effectively strangle the Review’s golden goose.

Why would a company wage such a single-minded attack on its own livelihood?

“We spend most of our time looking at these tests,” answers John S. Katzman, the Review’s president and founder. “And they suck.”

Since it opened in 1981, the Princeton Review has needled educators nationwide with comments like that one. The company bluntly has challenged the notion that the SAT accurately measures student aptitude or predicts college success. Moreover, company officials have reiterated longstanding allegations that the test discriminates against women and blacks, who consistently get lower scores than white males.

The Review tutors students with those criticisms firmly in mind, arming its test-takers with a controversial mixture of basic skills and a bushel of tricks to undermine the SAT. Students learn, for instance, that the test gets harder as it goes along, and trick answers abound in the final questions of each section. That knowledge helps test-takers eliminate obviously wrong answers and makes it easier for them to guess the right one.

The company says its average student increases his or her score by 100 points on the 1,600-point test.

Such techniques have brought the brash young company into continual combat with scions of the education world. The College Board, which administers the SAT, portrays the Review as a collection of irresponsible mavericks, and the Educational Testing Service, which drafts the test, has sued the Review and locked horns with the company in a spiraling war of public relations.

High school and college educators also have warily watched the Review, worried that its program does little to educate students and much to skew SAT scores, which offer colleges one of their few tools for comparing students from different backgrounds. Usually the educators have watched from a distance, but on Thursday they got an opportunity to hear from Katzman himself.

In a rare appearance before educators, Katzman, a 30-year-old Princeton alumnus who can work himself into lather discussing the flaws in the SAT, made his pitch to a convention of high school principals. California’s principals are meeting in Anaheim for their annual three-day conference to discuss issues in education.

“We are actively corrupting our educational system,” Katzman told the principals. He encouraged them to lobby the Educational Testing Service to make sweeping changes in the SAT. Katzman suggested that the educators give the Testing Service a deadline of 1992 to develop a test that accurately measures aptitude and is not biased against women and minorities.

Although Katzman’s criticisms of the SAT were received warmly by conference participants, some remained skeptical of the Princeton Review’s coaching methods.

“I think life would go on admirably if no one had access to any of these coaching services,” said Gordon Gawelti, executive director of the Assn. for Supervision and Curriculum Development, of Alexandria, Va.

While the appearance before the principals marks a breakthrough of sorts for the Review, the company still remains relegated to the periphery of the education establishment. It has powerful enemies, and its effectiveness is the subject of one of the education world’s longest running arguments.

For every study that one side produces to suggest that coaching youngsters on the SAT helps their grades, the other side carts out one that says it doesn’t. After years of debate, the jury is still out.

“What the data suggest is that you shouldn’t waste your time on testing courses,” said Richard Noeth, the Educational Testing Service’s executive director for admissions and guidance programs. “It troubles me that children and parents are spending a lot of time and money preparing for the test when there’s just not that much return.”

ETS maintains that the best way for a student to prepare for the SAT is, simply, to be a good student. Test scores will reflect thorough study habits developed with years of practice, not a few months of cramming, ETS officials say.

Although it concedes that students will likely see their scores increase marginally if they take a coaching course after their first try at the test, ETS says those second scores would probably have increased anyway. Students taking the test a second time enter with the benefit of having already taken what amounts to a practice test.

Convinced as it is that the SAT is relatively impervious to coaching, ETS has little use for companies that specialize in SAT tutoring. But while all such companies get a brush-off, the Testing Service reserves its real rancor for the Princeton Review.

“It hasn’t been a warm relationship,” Noeth said.

In 1985, the service sued the Review, charging that it had stolen several SATs and helped its students prepare by giving them the answers. The Review settled the case out of court, paying $50,000 and agreeing that Katzman himself would not take an SAT test for two years, a period that ends next month.

When it does, Katzman, who says he scored an impressive 1,500 on the SAT when he took it in high school, says he will be back taking the test and scouring it for clues to help his students.

“No one monitors the SAT as close as we do,” he said. “We ride them as close as humanly possible.”