What Type of Budget Should You Set on Your Test Prep?

[MWolf]

@roethlisburger

Another thing to consider is that “an average increase of 50 points” says little, since an increase from 1050 to 1100 is not the same as from 1400 to 1450, and the difficulty in raising an SAT from 1400 to 1450 is much higher than from 1050 to 1100.

I somewhat disagree with this. The SAT tests are by design on a normal distribution. Getting an average ability kid to score at the +1 standard deviation level is as impressive as raising a +1 standard deviation kid to +2 standard deviations.

But the questions are not all of the same difficulty, so usually for every additional question one answers, they have to work harder. So the difficulty of the least difficult question remaining tends to increase, the fewer questions one has left to answer.

Of course, this assumes that a person answers the questions in the reverse order of their difficulty, rather than get stuck on the first real difficult question they encounter (since the questions are not in any particular order on the test).

Another point is that, as one gets gets closer to the end of the right tail, there is an increased likelihood that the limiting factor is the time that it takes the person to solve the most difficult questions, while closer to the middle, the issue is mastery of the material. It is easier to gain mastery over new material than it is to speed up ones mental processes.