23-10-2014, 03:09 PM
Abstracts: Students who take a college admission test spend time preparing themselves for the exam. Some students do practice problems via the Internet, some work through exercises in practice books. Some students go so far as to pay for commercial forms of preparation that may involve a formal class or even one-on-one tutoring. The immediate goal of all such preparatory activities is to improve subsequent performance on an admission test over and above what would have been obtained otherwise. In turn, higher test scores should improve a student’s likelihood of college admission, if all other characteristics of a student’s application profile are held constant. The potential benefits of test preparation are clear, but they must be balanced by the associated costs in both money and time.