Why Most Test Prep Courses Barely Move the Needle
On paper, test prep courses should work. The SAT and ACT reward academic knowledge, familiarity with the exams, and mastery of test-taking strategies. Teach students those skills, and scores should improve.
There’s just one problem: the research tells a different story.
Decades of research have found that SAT and ACT prep courses produce surprisingly modest average gains—often estimated at just 20–30 points on the SAT and roughly one point on the ACT. Those improvements are hardly transformative, especially considering that students often improve simply by retaking the exam.
Does that mean test prep courses don’t work? Not exactly.
The averages conceal a more interesting story.
Score improvements aren’t necessarily distributed evenly across students. Some research suggests that gains are positively skewed: most students improve relatively little, while a smaller group achieves substantially larger increases. These high-performing students pull up the average, making the typical student’s experience look more impressive than it actually is.
The obvious question, then, isn’t simply whether test prep courses work. It’s who benefits from them—and why?
Meet the Grinders
At Ivy Tutor, we have a name for the students who seem particularly well-suited to traditional test prep: the grinders.
Grinders aren’t just motivated. Plenty of students complete homework, take practice tests, and put in the hours. Grinders do something more important: they make sure that effort translates into actual learning.
When they miss a question, they don’t just memorize the correct answer. They investigate what went wrong, identify the underlying concept, and keep working until they understand it.
Spend a few minutes on the SAT or ACT communities on Reddit, and you’ll see grinders in action. Students post difficult problems, debate solutions, and seek detailed explanations. They’re not simply studying harder. They’re actively teaching themselves.
But what about everyone else?
Most students haven’t developed that degree of independent learning. They benefit from external structure, accountability, and the individualized feedback that a skilled tutor provides naturally.
Does that make group courses a poor investment for these students? Not necessarily.
Courses offer something valuable: an affordable introduction to the exam’s structure, underlying concepts, and common strategies. Students can build a foundation in a group setting, reserving more expensive one-on-one instruction for the challenges that genuinely require individual attention.
For some students, that foundation may be enough. For others, it’s the beginning of a more comprehensive preparation plan.
The mistake isn’t enrolling students in test prep courses. It’s assuming that exposure to instruction is the same thing as learning.
Designing Better Test Prep Courses
At Ivy Tutor, these findings have fundamentally shaped how we approach group instruction.
Our one-on-one tutoring students improve their SAT scores by approximately 200 points, on average, relative to their initial diagnostic scores. Those results reflect sustained, individualized instruction, deliberate practice, and continuous feedback—not a handful of test-taking tricks.
We don’t expect a group course to replicate those gains. Nor should we.
Instead, we ask a more useful question: What makes individualized tutoring effective, and how much of that can we bring into a classroom?
One answer is engagement.
Let’s face it: much of the material covered in test prep is painfully dry. Students can sit through an entire lesson, dutifully take notes, and retain remarkably little.
In one-on-one tutoring, a skilled instructor makes learning personal. A tutor can identify exactly what a student is missing, connect that weakness to a score goal, and immediately adjust the lesson. That constant feedback gives the material relevance.
A classroom instructor can’t provide that same degree of individual attention. But there are other ways to make students care.
Consider trigonometry. An instructor could introduce the sine and cosine functions, work through a few examples, and hope students stay engaged.
Or the instructor could open with a warning:
“If you don’t understand trigonometry, you’re not surviving the zombie apocalypse.”
Suddenly, students are navigating an absurd survival scenario in which understanding trigonometry becomes the difference between escaping a zombie horde and becoming lunch.
Will students ever need trigonometry to survive a zombie apocalypse? Probably not. That’s beside the point.
The scenario captures their imagination, gives an abstract concept an immediate purpose, and makes the lesson memorable.
We’re not suggesting that entertainment substitutes for rigorous instruction. Quite the opposite. Engagement is what makes rigorous instruction possible. When students are genuinely invested in a lesson, they’re more likely to wrestle with difficult concepts rather than passively absorb explanations.
That’s the challenge in designing effective group courses: finding ways to create the attention, relevance, and active learning that exceptional tutors cultivate naturally.
A Better Measure of Success
Our ambition is to develop test prep courses that deliver meaningful results on their own—not merely serve as an introduction to private tutoring.
That doesn’t mean promising every student a 200-point SAT increase. The intensive, individualized instruction behind our tutoring results is fundamentally different from what a group course can provide.
And frankly, not every student needs a 200-point improvement.
Some students need to master a few foundational concepts. Others need better pacing, greater confidence, or a clearer understanding of how the exam works. Still others need the sustained, individualized attention that no group course can realistically deliver.
A successful course should recognize these differences rather than pretend that one format works equally well for everyone.
The goal isn’t to maximize every student’s score at any cost. It’s to make meaningful improvement accessible—and give students the level of support they actually need.
That, we believe, is how test prep courses can move beyond their historically disappointing track record.
Sources
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Briggs, D. C. (2009). Preparation for college admission exams. In R. J. Crisp (Ed.), Handbook of college admission counseling (pp. 201–220). National Association for College Admission Counseling.
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