USA SAT preparation Courses - Mixed Opinions & tips and tricks !

The summer time many high school students, means painful long days attending the SAT test preparation classes. For long students and parents, have placed much importance on such courses and do expect  miracles to happen.  A typical SAT coaching course costs anywhere between 800- $1,000.

In a recent article in Seattle times, Jennifer Kim, a former SAT instructor at one of the many test-prep schools, shared her views and SAT prep tips. She dispelled many commonly held myths and beliefs - the common one being that the SAT coaching students had an unfair advantage over students who could not afford such courses.

In many cases, standard SAT prep books such as Princeton Review’s Cracking the SAT, The Official SAT Study Guide and McGraw-Hill’s SAT 1, serve as the course material.

Jennifer believes that a motivated student – even one without the money for prep classes - could easily do well on SATs. Some of Jennifer's useful tips were:

- Sign up on Number2.com, a site created by two Harvard University graduate students and a physics professor. It offers free, comprehensive prep courses online for the SAT, ACT and GRE.

- CollegeBoard.com which administers the SAT, offers free practice questions, tips, a full-length SAT test and, for a $69.95 fee, an online course.

- If students want human contact, ePrep.com offers free videos with test-taking trips, featuring a veteran SAT tutor who is a Princeton University graduate

- TutorVista.com outsources test prep to India, giving students 24-hours-  a-day access to tutors at the fraction of the cost of a course.

She also advises that as the SAT is a more of rote test, endless drilling by a computer might be the most effective method of practice. She also references, Derek Briggs, an assistant education professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder, who wrote his dissertation on the effects of SAT coaching. He basically found that on average, “after controlling statistically for factors such as socioeconomic status and academic achievement”, SAT-coached kids scored just a little higher, one or two correct answers higher, than uncoached kids.

Sources: SAT prep books, Jennifer Kim-Seattle times-USA, Economic Times, India.