Coaching Daze

The FTC vs. Kaplan

Six times a year, high school students converge on test centers nationwide for a fearsome academic ritual: the Scholastic Aptitude Test, which helps determine where tens of thousands of students will go to college. In theory, there is little that students can do to prepare for the dread day, since the S.A.T. supposedly measures innate ability, not learned skills. In practice, however, more students each year desperately cram for the S.A.T.s. A third of public and private schools in the Northeast now offer some sort of S.A.T. preparation course. Elsewhere around the country, thousands of nervous scholars flock to commercial coaching schools, which drill and review them--and woo them with promises of striking results.

The College Entrance Examination Board, which sponsors the S.A.T., has steadfastly tried to discredit cram schools, thus defending the S.A.T.'s objective infallibility. But the coaching schools, which also prepare students for the Law School Admissions Test (L.S.A.T.) and Graduate Record Examinations, have become more than a $10 million annual business. So much so, in fact, that the Federal Trade Commission's Bureau of Consumer Protection decided to investigate them. The immediate target was the Stanley H. Kaplan Educational Center, a chain of 88 schools founded by Stanley Kaplan, 60, the son of a Brooklyn plumbing contractor who has been tutoring all his professional life. Kaplan, rather brashly, had at one time advertised the ability of his review course, which now costs $275, to raise S.A.T. scores as much as 100 points. The FTC thought such claims "were not only unsubstantiated but false," says Albert Kramer, head of the Bureau of Consumer Protection.

When the FTC last week released the findings of its four-year study, however, the entrepreneur from Brooklyn looked pretty good. The report was full of qualifications, and the results were still incomplete. But it clearly indicated that "underachieving students"--defined as those who score lower on standardized tests than their grades and class rank warrant --after ten weeks of coaching could improve both verbal and math scores by an average of 25 points. The largest average gain ever found by the College Board was eight to ten points.

The College Board was quick to point out the report's limitations. It studied the curriculums of only two commercial coaching schools, and only one of them (Kaplan's) was found effective. Nonetheless, the Educational Testing Service, which actually administers the tests, grudgingly admitted that "some students on some occasions may have increased their scores after attending some coaching courses." It was one more retreat from a mid-1960s position that "intensive drill is at best likely to yield insignificant increases in scores."

Meanwhile, Kaplan, who opened his first school in 1938 in a Flatbush apartment, has seen enrollment in his courses double over the past five years. Almost 3,000 students in his S.A.T. course alone are currently working their way through his voluminous home study notes, hunching over tape recorders, or laboring through four-or five-hour classes. "So many people think that aptitude is innate," says Kaplan, "but a test just measures the level which you're at. And if you get an improved student, you should have an improved score." All of which seems to show that the distinction between ability and acquired skills is blurry, that college admissions officers should not rely too heavily on test scores, and that anybody who wants to learn can learn.

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