Sophomore PSAT 215

NotVerySmart
Sun, 18 Oct 2015 09:40:25 +0000

Look at it this way: NM scholarships are a $2500 one-time grant. The top 1% of each state’s scorers will be semifinalists, and only 2500 of 16000 semifinalists will end up getting national merit money (plus a few thousand who will get money from corporation- or school-funded scholarships). The expected value of spending $1800 to hopefully have just under a 1-in-6 shot at a $2500 scholarship is negative. This kid’s mom is right: self-prep is the way to go, especially when all he’s looking for is a 3-point increase. If the kid’s parents are going to invest in prep (and I wouldn’t - all I used was a second-hand copy of the Colllege Board’s blue book), it should be SAT prep with a local company. A PSAT course is barely worth the hours of his life the kid will spend on the work, to say nothing of $1800.

Once you’re at the upper end of the score range (which I view as 200+ or 210+), PSAT scores are essentially random, as 2-3 wrong answers can mean a 20-point difference in some cases. The same is true of the SAT, although the larger number of questions reduces the randomness some (while doing nothing to make the test less arbitrary). From there onwards, what matters most isn’t so much whether you invest in a $1800 prep course as whether you get enough sleep in the days before the test, hopefully avoid catching the flu or something similar, eat a proper breakfast on test day, and get questions that happen to work for you.

Two students of identical ability may well end up with a 30-point (or, for the SAT, 300-point) difference in score due to such external variables - especially the last, which I think is rather understated. I myself got a 67 in math on my junior-year PSAT, then scored an 800 on the real test with almost no prep in the intervening period. I didn’t forget how to do basic math during the PSAT and then improve my math skills (or even SAT-taking skills) significantly before the SAT, so the above considerations (and statistical noise) account for the difference.