While most high-school students would be thrilled to score a 30 on the ACT, Aaron Praiss knew he had to do better if he wanted to get into the university that he preferred.
Praiss, a 2009 graduate of Clayton High School, credits test-preparation tutoring with boosting his performance on both certain sections and his overall scores on the ACT and MCAT (Medical College Admission Test)—gains that earned him entrance to his top college and med-school picks.
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“My reading-comprehension score was hurting me on the ACT, and I struggled with the logic sections on the MCAT,” he says.
This past June, Praiss graduated from Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., with dual degrees in biological sciences and violin performance. This fall, he entered the highly regarded Albert Einstein College of Medicine at Yeshiva University in New York City. Before he applied to each school, he received tutoring from Jackie Gross, president of One-on-One Tutoring in Rock Hill. The tutoring helped him bump up his ACT score by two points to 32 and his MCAT by three points to 35.
“It made a huge difference,” Praiss says. “If I had only gotten a 32 on the MCAT, I would have gotten only one entrance interview; instead, I got two.”
Praiss is one of an increasing number of U.S. students who are taking college-preparation courses in person, online, or via digital apps to boost their scores. In 2012, approximately 1.7 million students took the ACT, surpassing the number sitting for the SAT. The number of ACT takers has jumped 17 percent since 2007.
The main reasons that parents in the U.S. are ponying up $2.7 billion annually for test prep are simple: access and money. Add to that a sobering fact: Only 26 percent of the students who took ACT this year were able to meet the College Readiness Benchmark scores in all four of the subject areas it tests.
“The better you do on your standardized-test scores and GPA, the more likely you are to get in and get financial aid,” says Colin Gruenwald, director of SAT and ACT programs for Kaplan Test Prep.
That monetary incentive leads some students to take the ACT three or four times to improve their scores.
That was the case for Elie Hudson, who recently graduated seventh in her class at University City High School. During her junior year, she scored a 24 on her first ACT outing. Then she got math tutoring and worked on her test-taking skills. On her third try, Hudson earned her highest composite score, 29, but she took the test once more to add on the writing component that some colleges require.
Ultimately, she was accepted to five of the seven colleges to which she applied, and she was offered $20,000 per year to attend her top pick, Tulane University. But that was still less than half of the university’s annual tuition. In the end, she opted for the more affordable University of Missouri–Kansas City.
Did the tutoring and test prep help? “Definitely it did,” she says. “I wanted the highest score I could get, because I was applying to highly competitive colleges.”
Students can pay anywhere from $20 for a one-day prep seminar to $700 for a more in-depth class; individual tutoring in the St. Louis area varies widely in price, depending on the tutor’s experience and company pricing. A midpoint would be about $50 an hour, though test prep can easily top $100 an hour for as many hours as students will need—or their parents’ wallets will supply. The demand for these types of services, industry executives say, is only growing.
That sort of spending “has attracted 140 tutoring companies to ply their trade in the St. Louis region,” says Joe Morice. He and his wife, Kristine, own the Tutor Doctor location in Cahokia, Ill. The
competition is so fierce that the Morices decided to close their franchise this fall, after only two years in business.
“The St. Louis area is saturated with tutoring companies,” Morice says.
But does test prep produce the results that companies tout? Not necessarily.
According to a report released in 2009 by the National Association for College Admission Counseling, the average gains from commercial test preparation were about 30 points on the SAT (out of a possible 1600 at the time the data was gathered) and less than one point on the ACT’s 36-point scale.
That’s “substantially lower than gains marketed by test preparation companies,” the report states.
In fact, the industry as a whole has not submitted to outside examination of its effectiveness through controlled experiments, the NACAC report notes. In response, ACT, Inc. has said it is willing to submit to assessment, and The College Board is open to examining the validity of its tests.
The NACAC researcher was skeptical.
“There is no incentive for coaching companies to formally evaluate the effectiveness of their products,” wrote report author Derek Briggs, chair of the Research and Evaluation Methodology program and associate professor of education at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
His analysis found that some test-prep companies have fraudulently administered “diagnostic” pretest exams to students during tutoring courses that are harder than the actual exam, prompting those kids to seek costly tutoring or classes.
To complicate matters, the report notes that few colleges (just under 25 percent of those surveyed) use point cutoffs to determine admission. Slight gains could really be insignificant, particularly on the higher-point SAT, and could simply be a result of coaching or tutoring, rather than a student’s innate ability, the NACAC report says. It cautions schools against judging students on the basis of point gains or drops they get on retests of the ACT and SAT.
But Gruenwald says any decrease in test prep is unlikely, given the way college-admission practices have evolved. Many universities accept the same online application, The Common Application, which lets students apply to many more institutions at once than in years past. Therefore, universities have a much larger pool of applicants from which to choose, and they can be more selective. At the same time, the students receive a larger number of acceptances, giving them more choices.
Just raising your score by a handful of points can make the scholarship money rain down, Gross says.
“I’ve seen colleges tell students, ‘If you raise your ACT score four points, we will give you anywhere from a couple of thousand to $20,000,’” she says. “So if you spend $2,000 on tutoring and get $20,000 back, that’s a good investment.”
TIPS ON HOW TO ACE THE ACT
• When in doubt, the shortest answer is likely the correct one.
• On the ACT, answer the easy questions first, then the hard ones.
• Eliminate obviously wrong answers to narrow your choice.
• Wear a watch to help pace yourself, in case there’s no clock in the room.
• Make a mini outline for each writing question in order to make it easier to stay on point.
• On the ACT, make educated guesses on questions you aren’t sure about. On that test, wrong answers don’t count against you. (Don’t try this on the SAT.)
• Be sure you’re filling in the answer oval that corresponds to the question you’re answering.
NAMES & NUMBERS
The number of firms offering college test prep has exploded. Checking around with parents of college-bound kids, we heard these firms mentioned most frequently.
• Bob Johnson Tutoring: 314-646-9548, bobjohnsontutoring.com
• Mackler Associates:314-434-4431, mackleradvantage.com
• One-on-One Tutoring: 314-962-1231, oneononetutoringstl.com
• Special Solutions: 314-650-1203, specialsolutions.com
• Varsity Tutors:314-422-2007, varsitytutors.com/tutoring-st_louis
