<p>official report from college board
<a href="http://www.collegeboard.com/prod_downloads/highered/ra/sat/coaching.pdf%5B/url%5D">http://www.collegeboard.com/prod_downloads/highered/ra/sat/coaching.pdf</a></p>
<p>data is from 1995</p>
<p>^your point? =]
have people gotten smarter within the last 14 years?</p>
<p>So true… I had a friend who took an expensive prep course and put a ton of work into it, and ended up with just a 60 point increase from her original practice test. Some of her sections even went down. I started with a much higher score and just took some BB tests and increased more than her.</p>
<p>From the College Board survey you posted: “For purposes of this study, coaching is considered to include any and all activities conducted in special preparation programs offered to students outside their schools.” That’s a little like saying, “For purposes of this study, medical care is considered to include any and all activities in medical programs offered to students.” In other words, the College Board cast a very wide net. Remember that it’s in their best interest to prove that tutoring <em>doesn’t</em> work.</p>
<p>SAT tutoring is like any other profession: some of us are awesome, some of us suck, and most of us are in-between. Your milage may vary. And sure, you can usually get huge score increases if you’re a disciplined kid and you study on your own. But I would probably take that particular survey with a grain of salt. My guess is that if the College Board did a test of the increases produced by one-on-one tutors with more than two years’ experience, instead of just “any and all activities conducted in special preparation programs,” they would have gotten very different numbers.</p>