Should test prep programs try to teach academic content?

When I read statements like the following, I become distraught about trying to teach students to score better on a test by putting in the hours to learn the content and practice the skills being tested.

According to the $2 billion test-prep industry, performance on the SAT and ACT can be improved with tips and tricks. "We don't pretend to teach students a lot academically," says Ed Carroll, an executive director at The Princeton Review. "Taking tests is a skill that can be developed, like playing a guitar or tennis."

Source: 10 Things College Admissions Tests Don't Do

Test day tip for heterosexual males: avoid beautiful women

Psychologusts at Radboud University in The Netherlands carried out a study on how men perform after being the presence of an attractive woman. The results are published in the Journal of Experimental and Social Psychology. The research shows men who spend a couple of minutes with an attractive woman perform poorly in tests designed to measure brain function.

For more, read the Telegraph's article here.

Stanley H. Kaplan

On August 23, 2009, Stanley H. Kaplan left behind a changed world.

As the founder of the nation's first test preparation company, he built a new global marketplace in standardized test preparation. He started his company from his parents' Brooklyn home in 1938, and it became a chain of more than 100 centers nationally. After selling his business to the Washington Post in 1984, the education business grew to a global giant in the paid-education market. He remained working there until 1994.

He challenged the College Board's position that tutoring won't help prepare students standardized tests. “To say you can’t improve scores is to say you can’t improve students, and I disagree with that,” he told The New York Times in 1979. He convinced the Federal Trade Commission that students could be helped through test prep, and by doing so launched a multi-billion dollar test prep industry.

Mr. Kaplan was rejected from medical school, and yet later tutored thousands of students on the MCAT. In Manhattan the Rita and Stanley H. Kaplan Cancer Center at the New York University Medical Center is a reminder of his impact of this world.

He loved his work. Kaplan spent long nights devising practice SAT questions and finding entertaining ways to teach the Pythagorean theorem.

Mr. Kaplan believed that students should have access to higher education based on their capabilities, not financial backgrounds or connections. Ironically, many students in a recent survey conducted by Logical Steps at Arizona State University found that students perceived Kaplan's courses to be very expensive, but safe. Newsweek wrote the following.

Today SAT prep courses are often viewed as a pricey tool that gives an advantage to upper-middle-class kids in the admissions arms race, but for decades Kaplan's clientele was striving ethnic New Yorkers who hoped higher scores might put them on par with WASPy prep-schoolers and Ivy League legacies. "He challenged society with the notion of meritocracy," said Andy Rosen, Kaplan's current CEO, in his eulogy.

I'm not sure if his company is continuing his belief or just cashing out, but Mr. & Mrs. Kaplan became big philanthropists, and I raise my glass to his legacy.

Standardized exams under attack in UK

According to the Guardian, Peter Hyman, who was in Tony Blair's inner circle for almost a decade as a speechwriter and strategist before he left to become a teacher, says that the exam system don't teach children to think. The article quotes what Hyman wrote in the Observer, "There is almost an unspoken deal: we'll spoon-feed you the required information to pass your exams, if you play by the rules and do your homework on time."

This is the recurring criticism of systems that use standardized exams, that students can simply be taught to what is needed to pass the exam, and nothing else. I'll be very interested to see if the UK works out a better system...