Defensive Learning

To use an analogy:

If preparation for the SAT is the educational equivalent of a nuclear arms race, the students in Ron Corcillo’s Princeton Review SAT prep course in Pasadena are naval officers aboard a nuclear sub, hoping to blow their competitors out of the water. Most come from well-to-do backgrounds where no expense has been spared for education. By the end of this course, they will have drilled this baby until it is second nature. They know who the enemy is (the Educational Testing Service, which creates the SAT), and, by the time they take the test next month, their heads will be swimming with the strategies it takes to win.

About 1.3 million students took the SAT last year, 12% of them in California. In February, UC President Richard C. Atkinson proposed nuking the test as an admissions requirement to the university’s eight undergraduate campuses. The proposal comes, paradoxically, at a time when standardized testing is touted by some, including President Bush, as the answer to what ails American education.

Atkinson challenged test-makers to come up with a new test that would be directly tied to college preparatory courses rather than to what he considers “an ill-defined measure of aptitude or intelligence” like the SAT. The SAT, he says, is unfair to many students and fails to measure what they have learned in high school. He, like many critics, says the SAT measures only how well a student can take a test and is no predictor of college success.

A recent visit with a group of students taking a private SAT course did little to dispel that point of view.

“After the test is over, I will probably forget everything I learned in this SAT course and not care,” says Ashley Jacobsen, 17, a junior at Flintridge Sacred Heart Academy, a private Catholic school for girls. “And if I don’t get at least a 1,300, it wasn’t worth the money.”

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It’s a lazy Sunday afternoon in spring, but dozens of high school juniors are squirreled away in small classrooms at Holliston Church in Pasadena getting ready to strain their brains for four intense hours. They have paid $899 to spend 42 hours over six weeks in an intensive prep course offered by Princeton Review, a multimillion-dollar business that prepares students to take standardized tests. The company has offices in 43 of 50 states as well as Taiwan, China, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, India, Mexico and Canada.

The classrooms here at Holliston Church have a collegiate feel; leafy trees and Gothic architecture reminiscent of an elite New England college campus are visible through the windows.

In Corcillo’s classroom, the students’ backpacks are loaded with heavy books, their calculators are on the tables. Corcillo is perched on a stool at the front of the class, coffee in hand. He has bushy eyebrows and the deep, resonant voice of a radio announcer. He is funny, with the ease of a comedian; serious, with the earnestness of a preacher; and accessible, with the chumminess of an older brother.

There are five kids in this class. Three boys and two girls. These students are here to cram for the SAT, and they are focused, intent. There is no talking back, no joking, no spitballs and no flirting going on.

Here, teacher and student are engaged in a kind of intellectual combat, not against each other but against the enemy: the SAT and the people who devise it.

This is a mood Princeton Review strives to create. The defiance starts with its brochures, which state, “These tests are by their very nature, imperfect and unjust. . . .”

Becoming a Princeton Review teacher is no easy feat. Teachers must undergo at least 64 hours of paid training. Only 17% make it through. Teachers themselves must score at least 1400 (though this can be after coaching). A veteran prep teacher can potentially make as much money--or more--as a teacher for the Los Angeles Unified School District, without the long hours and the stress of dealing with a sprawling bureaucracy.

“Everything in my business rests on my teachers,” says Shawn Domzalski, managing director of course operations at Princeton Review of Los Angeles. “If I don’t have great teachers, I have nothing. They have to love teaching and love beating the SAT.”

He gets worked up just talking about it. There is a subversive (if slightly cultivated) feel to his spiel. “They are just jazzed about beating the SAT because it is such a stupid test.”

In the coming weeks, teachers will impart the tricks and techniques to help students work fast and not make mistakes. Students will take four full-length practice tests, complete homework for each class and study stacks of vocabulary words on their own. Princeton Review claims that the amount of time and work the students do is equivalent to what they would do in a three-credit college course.

Students will learn which questions are the easy ones, which are medium-hard and which are the most difficult on each section. They will learn to methodically eliminate bad answer choices and flag the common tricks ETS (or Evil Testing Society, as the teachers like to say) will throw their way. They will learn when to guess, how to guess and how often they will be correct if they do guess. And they will be drilled on it all, over and over and over.

The students do not have to understand why they are doing what they are doing. They just need to apply the knowledge that has been gleaned by experts at Princeton Review, which spends a million dollars a year developing SAT materials and keeping them current.

Every year, a couple of SATs are released to the public. One section, which is not released publicly, is considered experimental and is used to help the ETS develop future questions. But the Princeton Review has between seven and 15 people on staff who take the three-hour, six-minute test every time it is offered. By comparing notes, the professional test-takers deduce which section was experimental. Princeton Review pays special attention to those. “Because the test does shift over time, we analyze the experimental section and use what we learn from there to adjust our materials,” explains Domzalski.

For example, one year items about mean and mode started popping up on the experimental math section. “We figured, next fall, they are going to start rolling out those questions,” Domzalski says. Princeton Review immediately integrated mean and mode into drills.

“In October, there it was,” he says. “Princeton Review students knew it was coming and they were ready.”

There is a great deal of debate about whether it is possible to raise SAT scores through prep courses such as the Princeton Review, Stanley Kaplan, Ivy West or any of the smaller operations competing in the multimillion-dollar test prep industry.

Last month, the results of a study by an independent researcher indicated that the average gain from coaching was no more than 20 points on the SAT test, which is divided into verbal and math sections, worth a possible 800 points each. The findings support the decades-old contention of the College Board, which sponsors the SAT, that coaching has little effect. But critics say the study did not differentiate between intensive and expensive preparation courses that may last for months and short, even one-day courses.

Although Princeton Review boasts that, based on its surveys, half of students entering American colleges this fall have used some form of its prep materials, 50,000 took this particular review course. In 1994, an independent consultant hired by Princeton Review found that students who took the intensive course raised scores an average of 147 points.

In the Los Angeles area, thousands are signed up for the full-fee intensive courses, which are clustered in affluent pockets such as Palos Verdes, Pasadena, the Westside and Thousand Oaks. As a result of state legislation aimed at making test prep courses available to those who can’t afford them, Princeton Review also offers abbreviated courses for little or nothing to about 1,800 students, mostly in economically depressed areas of the region.

Students Grouped Based on a Sample Test

The four-hour Sunday class starts at noon. After two hours, the kids get a 20-minute break. They return with sodas, fries, water. Students are grouped based on how they performed on a sample test before their first class. Any who fall behind are pulled out and tutored privately during breaks.

“What I want to teach you now is the most awesome technique ever,” Corcillo tells the students. “You guys are going to go home and say, ‘I am so glad I did not miss class today.’ ”

“How many of you hate algebra?” Corcillo asks. Almost all the hands go up.

“Who likes algebra more than arithmetic?” he asks.

A tall boy in the back raises his hand.

“Ah,” says Corcillo. “We always have one psychotic in the class.”

The technique is called “plugging in.” By plugging numbers into certain kinds of problems, they can turn algebra problems into arithmetic problems. All they need to do, he tells them, is look for problems with variables and the words “in terms of.”

“When you see ‘in terms of’ cross it out and plug in values to get the answers.”

Everyone but the stubborn algebra lover does it. Musheg Muradyan, 17, says he prefers using algebra. And he’s good.

Soon, a little competition starts.

“He’s fast, isn’t he?” Corcillo says, teasing. “Ohhhh. His book is heating up.”

“Even if you love algebra,” he tells the class, “Plugging in is easier and more foolproof on the SAT.”

It’s not that the problems are hard. Every student in this class could solve them with algebra. But plugging in, while less intellectually rigorous, is faster.

“Laziness is the key,” he exhorts them. “Less time. Less mistakes.”

The kids dutifully plug in. But Musheg keeps solving the problems with algebra, and he keeps getting them right.

Corcillo throws him more difficult problems. It’s a showdown. Musheg keeps up. He uses algebra every time. Finally, Corcillo throws him one in which the numbers are so big that even though Musheg knows what to do and Corcillo uses half the blackboard to state the problem--solving it is going to be close to impossible.

“OK, so what’s the answer?” Corcillo says.

“I’m terrible at numbers,” Musheg says, defeated.

“Stop trying to do algebra,” Corcillo told him. “Why are you trying to hurt yourself? Just plug in. Be lazy.”

“I’m too diligent,” Musheg says sheepishly.

“Don’t be diligent,” Corcillo tells him. “That will haunt you on the SATs.”

Later, Musheg will admit he’s converted. Even though he scored 740 on the math section of the PSAT--or Preliminary SAT--which is administered to high school juniors and is used to award national merit scholarships, he will be plugging in come test day. He hasn’t learned anything from the course, he says, except how to take tests. But he also knows that’s what matters. An Armenian immigrant, he came to this country to get into a good university--Stanford or Berkeley--and he’s not going to let a stupid test get in his way.

These Students Are Already Big Achievers

These students are not slackers. Most have high grade averages and busy extracurricular lives. This group is economically diverse. Ashley swims on the varsity swim team and does volunteer work. Musheg came to the United States two years ago. He studies vocabulary on his own to improve his English. A junior at Hoover High School in Glendale, he is enrolled in three advanced placement courses; next year, he’ll take five. He spent the last six months attending a contractor licensing class with his father, acting as translator. Claire Lin came to the United States a year and a half ago from Taiwan. She works part time in a Chinese restaurant to pay for the course. They know what they have to do to get ahead.

Some of the Princeton Review students believe the SAT does fulfill its intended purpose--to measure intellectual potential and predict college success.

“All the smart people in my class do better than all the dumb people, so it does show something,” concedes John Lawrence, 17, who attends a private Catholic school in La Can~ada Flintridge and hopes to attend USC or Loyola Marymount.

But others say the test is an accurate predictor only of how well you learn the tricks, which they intend to do.

“The SAT is a stupid test,” says Musheg. “I don’t find anything on it that would help me do well in college. The math questions are really simple. In English, those words are knowledge you will never use again. Why do you need it?”

He believes that universities came up with the SAT simply as a way to sort people and that it ignores important qualities such as hard work and determination.

“I have a lot of friends who didn’t do well on the SATs who are geniuses,” he says. “I had one friend who was accepted at Caltech who got 1300 on his SATs. Another friend had 1600. But he doesn’t want to study.”

Ashley Jacobsen, the Flintridge Sacred Heart Academy junior, agrees.

“I think the test is a joke,” she says. “It doesn’t test your knowledge. It tests your ability to take the test.”