The Monday Excerpt: Test Prep and the Stat Game

Every Monday I will post a brief excerpt from my upcoming book, Choose Wisely: the SAT, the ACT, and You.  This is good for you because you get to read, for free, what other people will have to pay for later.  This is good for me because it means I have to actually write the book if I'm going to have anything to post!  So, win-win.

Since I wrote a few posts about the U.S. News rankings last week, I decided to pull today's excerpt from an early chapter in which I write about the onerous effect those rankings have on schools and students.  Enjoy!

Test Prep and the Stat Game

Stroll down the Test Prep aisle at your local bookstore and you'll see shelf after shelf of books about the SAT and ACT. Up your score! Crush the test! Get into your dream school! Each book promises better results than the one next to it; each claims to be your best shot at a more impressive number, a more impressive college, and a more impressive life.

Those books are all part of what I call the Stat Game: the vicious circle of rising test scores and sinking acceptance numbers at America's elite (and, in recent years, semi-elite) colleges. Here's how the Game works, in a nutshell:

1. U.S. News ranks colleges based (in part) on how high the SAT and ACT scores of their incoming freshmen are and how low the percentage of applicants they accept is...
2. Colleges try to get as many students to apply as possible, so that they can accept a handful of high scorers and reject the rest, thereby juking their stats and rising in the rankings.
3. Students freak out en masse, apply to dozens of colleges, spend thousands of dollars on test prep, and buy millions of copies of the U.S. News Best Colleges guide...
4. Repeat steps 1-3.

Once you're hooked on Stats, it's almost impossible to kick the habit. There is tremendous pressure on schools and students to keep up with the pack. The lonely college that tries to buck the trend sees its test scores drop, is punished in the rankings, and as a result gets fewer high-quality applicants the next year. The applicant who dares to submit less-than-stellar SAT or ACT scores is fighting an uphill battle against his or her prepped-up peers.

And that brings us back to those test prep books.

Those books encourage you to take part in the Stat Game unthinkingly. They want you to be as fixated on the SAT and ACT as the college guides are. They want you to feel insecure about your test results, so you'll buy more test prep books and sign up for expensive classes. They want you to play the Game so that they can play you.

Don't do it!  Don't play the game by their rules -- play it by your own rules.