With plenty of well-paying blue collar jobs available in the U.S., a college education was seen as an optional luxury, not at all a requirement to live a good middle-class life. I remember befriending a Golden Gate Bridge worker in the late-1980’s who was paid an annual salary of nearly $60,000 – $150,000 today – taking tolls!
Not many students used any kind of prep, though. I took the PSAT in high school, cold, no prep or pre-test studying at all, as a lark (and hit 98th percentile). But I never told the SAT (didn’t feel like wasting a Saturday morning). Most of my friends acted similarly. College just wasn’t a must-do, at the time.
Stanley Kaplan invented the modern test prep industry in 1939, and between 1940 and 1980 his company’s courses and books were essentially the only ones available to help interested students maximize scores on the standardized tests like the SAT.
Then along came the Princeton Review in the mid-1980’s, upending the entire educational testing scene. Despite protestations from the College Board and others, PR showed everyone just how easy it was to game these tests and quickly raise scores without doing much to improve nominal academic ability.
When I began tutoring professionally in the late 1970’s, test coaching wasn’t yet a thing. Following the huge success of PR, the test prep industry as we know it today was born.
The test prep universe is vast. Companies old and new seem infinite in number. With the advent of distance learning on a mass scale during the Covid epidemic, this number has grown further.
It’s not easy to make a choice, nowadays, given the multitude of options. To aid in your search, listed below are my current favorites, based on my own long experience and most recent research on the subject:
It’s not easy to make a choice, nowadays, given the multitude of options. To aid in your search, listed below are my current favorites, based on my own long experience and most recent research on the subject:
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