College test prep industry deals with cheaper options
WASHINGTON — Is there a price that a worried parent wouldn’t pay to help a child do well on college admissions tests? The good news is that test preparation doesn’t have to be expensive anymore.
The multimillion-dollar coaching industry is facing competition from free or low-cost alternatives in what their founders hope will make the process of applying to college more equitable. Such innovations are also raising questions about the relevance and the fairness of relying on standardized tests.
The online education platform Khan Academy has partnered with the College Board to provide free coaching for the SAT test. Top commercial programs cost around $1,000.
According to a study released Monday by the College Board, 20 hours of free online learning at Khan Academy led to an average gain of 55 points on the 1,600point test scale compared with students who didn’t engage in the program. The College Board, a nonprofit organization, owns the SAT.
“We need to start to level the playing field,” Khan Academy founder Salman Khan. “It is never OK that some students have access to some tools that other students do not.”
The study, shared with the AP ahead of publication, compared 250,000 students from the graduating class of 2017 who took the practice PSAT test, linked their Khan Academy and College Board accounts and participated in the free prep to some 840,000 students in the same class who did not spend any observable time on Khan Academy test prep or didn’t link the two accounts.
While students in the second group had an average gain of 60 points from their practice test to the SAT, students in the first group had an average gain of 115 points, or an additional gain of 55 points.
There are no rigorous, recent studies of test gains made by students who took test prep courses outside the College Board program. But a study of commercial test prep courses released by the National Association for College Admission Counseling in 2009 reported an average gain of some 30 points. That study analyzed prep programs for the pre- vious version of the SAT. The new streamlined exam launched last year removes penalties for guessing, eliminates arcane vocabulary and focuses more on what students are supposed to learn in high school.
Derek Brig gs, an education professor at Colorado University, Boulder, who authored the NACAC report, welcomed the Khan Academy results with cautious optimism. “That’s a real step in the right direction,” Briggs said. “It’s certainly larger than what I would have predicted.”
Briggs said the gains could be attributed to the students’ motivation rather than the learning tool.
But Khan said the fact that gains were consistent across all demographic groups showed that tutorials were a significant factor.