“It is weird to hear so many parents my age say they did not study for their tests.”
No parent is going to admit they studied for any test, that’s just the way it is. In fact these parents know that if they were born in say 1900, would understand the universe like Einstein did, and would have figured out how mass, energy, matter, force were related, before Albert did. And of course their knowledge of switching theory and logic would have helped Allies win the war, like Alan Turing did, but much earlier, since of course they’re smarter than Turing and could beat him in any math test. Euler, Riemann, Pasteur, - overrated as they come, these parents will make their theories obsolete, just watch!
I took the SAT in 1988 and I had no idea it was possible to study or prep for it. In fact, I didn’t know about that until at the end of that school year a classmate’s mom offered me money to tutor her football-player son so he could qualify to play NCAA football! I said yes, of course, and went and found some prep books haha, and fortunately he didn’t need much of a score to qualify to play football, but in a way, I started my SAT prep career when I was 16
@marvin100 If students today applied to the same amount of schools we did, maybe admissions would be better. The extra 5 million kids in college today versus my period of time in college isn’t helping either. But the numbers of College students should continue to shrink (1 million less students today at 19.9 million total) than were in college in 2010.
@TheGreyKing You definitely went to a school and lived in an area ahead of the curve.
@bjkmom That is definitely not okay mocking his father, but I sometimes mock back (my son’s voice is much deeper than mine voice so I give him my best Barry White/James Earl Jones voice and talk about video games:)
Was it even possible to go to a “prep class” back in the mid-1980s for the SAT? I looked into it a bit on wiki, and I guess it was, but Kaplan only expanded beyond the New York area in the mid-1970s as far as I can tell so how widespread could it have been (before my time, and I was in the NYC area, but couldn’t have afforded to attend even if I had known about the classes)? Reports from parents out there would be welcome as to how widespread classes were.
I remember a single test prep book at the public library - blue and orange I think - that had two practice tests in it.
The founder of Princeton Review graduated college (Princeton, lol) in 1981, and so I don’t think anyone even saw those books until the late-1980s. I certainly didn’t.
@SatchelSF - I lived on Long Island and graduated from high school in 1987. My friends took SAT prep classes— one of my friends increased her score by over 100 points through her prep class. I purchased and used review books for the SAT and the Achievement Tests, which were the individual subject tests (I took Biology, American History, and English), as well as for the Regents exams we all took in New York.
My husband, a year ahead of me in high school, lived in another county of New York, neither on Long Island nor in the city, and the experience of his friend group was similar.
Both my husband’s family and mine were upper middle class. My parents were public school teachers. Both my husband and I went to public high schools and private small liberal arts colleges.
I do not remember the brand/company of the prep books or the courses my friends took (I don’t know if I ever knew the latter). It was very long ago! I am thinking the SAT prep book might have been Barron’s, but I am not sure. I remember it had long lists of vocabulary words, because of the very vivid memory of studying vocabulary flash cards I had made based on it by candlelight, as described in my post above. I know I saved only the history book, because I liked it, but I do not recall its company and I couldn’t find it in a quick scan of all the books in our house just now! Its cover was white with red and blue writing. I know the Regents review books were by Barron’s, because our teachers instructed us to buy “the Barron’s book,” as was the college guide I used to search for “most selective” colleges to which to apply (Barron’s tiered the colleges by selectivity).
@TheGreyKing - That is roughly my era. And I guess what you highlight was the difference between the Bronx, where I grew up, and the Island back then Probably still true today!
There were SAT prep classes, as well as SAT prep books (mainly Kaplan and Princeton Review, plus some book with some large number of SAT words, plus the old released tests from the ETS itself). Use of such was not that common then compared to now.
I graduated from high school on Long Island in 1976.
No one I knew took any sort of prep course, or did any sort of prep for our SATs. We walked in, read the directions, and took the test.
We studied for Regents, we studied for classroom tests. But at that time, the SAT was simply not something we considered studying for. It was an “aptitude” test back then, and was supposed to test your native ability, not the information you had mastered.
I also graduated in 1976. Never even heard of the idea of prepping for standardized tests. It’s not bragging or a bad memory, that’s just the way it was. Maybe some of you went to different kinds of schools that had this. I can’t even begin to know how I would have known about it. For that matter, I didn’t know about AP tests, either, though apparently they did exist then. We had no AP in our HS.
The rumor at our public school in the late 80s was that you COULD NOT prep for it - prep would do nothing. Because it was an aptitude test. I do remember English teachers giving us word Banks to review.
I remember hearing about a classmate who got in the upper 1500s on the SAT. He wasn’t one of the “smart kids” so everyone was surprised how smart he actually was, lol!
Mid 1980s, I vaguely recall a couple of classmates taking a prep class after school, but they were the exception, and I probably had some smug sense that I didn’t need that kind of extra help lol. I remember doing a practice test out of a book, in the backyard while slathered in baby oil and drinking Tab, and that was the extent of the prep. There were no lists of vocab words in English class. Makes one wonder what might have been, had I been a little more aware of the college process.
6-7 yrs later, I bumped up my prep to maybe two practice tests for the LSAT.
My senior has struggled with motivation to prep, feeling that the effort won’t yield results. Maybe I should dig up that College Board study about Khan practice and the New SAT.
“I remember doing a practice test out of a book, in the backyard while slathered in baby oil and drinking Tab, and that was the extent of the prep”
:)) =)) =))
I remember the “baby oil” part. Parents in the Bronx would send their kids up to the roofs of the apartment buildings in the summer, armed with baby oil as sun protection. “Tar Beach” was what it was called. With a running start, some kids could and did jump across buildings, which were often 5 to 8 stories high, vaulting the low 3 foot walls surrounding the beach and the gap between the buildings (maybe 8-10 feet?). Certain death if you missed. Times definitely have changed.
@ChangeTheGame
I guess? But here’s what I know: I was woefully one-sided. I had Calculus (but just AB) and no advanced science–in fact, no science at all after 10th grade Chem. I had seven good APs and a 3.75 unweighted, top quintile in my class but not quite top decile, at a respectable but not premium private high school in CA. Extremely high SAT (shocking, I know, since I’m an SAT-prep teacher now). Two varsity sports that I could play in college (but wasn’t an actual recruit–I could be varsity and contribute but wasn’t a star). No community service or volunteering at all, no significant awards or prizes. Oh, and I was an aspiring English major…dime a dozen. Nowadays, you can’t reasonably expect to get into my alma mater (Williams) with that kind if imbalance and those stats; it’s just super, super unlikely. (High school class of 1990, for context.)
@evergreen5 Never doubt the power of Tab to increase a standardized test score. Our kids may be smarter than us, but they have absolutely not had the same amount of fun.
@marvin100 We were just doing what was typical for our time. I do wish that this time period wasn’t so stressful on kids in comparison to our mostly carefree era, but the “good ole days” gets better with each passing year. I am sure our kids will see their youth through wine-colored glasses as well.
I don’t remember my exact SAT score, but I was a NMSF with only a 1400 on the PSAT in 1988. I had no idea what I was supposed to do to actually get some kind of scholarship out of it. I certainly didn’t prep for those tests - no one did. I did a little prep for the GRE and LSAT later on, but not much.
Though people remember the “good ole days” mainly in ways that are better than what they are now. For example, with respect to college, people remember the much lower cost and much lower admission competition. But they may not remember the limited access to information about colleges and the generally worse graduation rates. Or other societal issues such as the much higher crime rates a generation ago.
