I have this vague notion that Kaplan or some similar program was just starting to appear about when we took it and there was a sort of "if you really need it, pay the money but otherwise don't bother" vibe about it. This was in CA and I seem to remember thinking that if I didn't get a good enough score to meet the University of California cut off, I would get one of the books then.

and that was the hot item to study from.

in the end, either you were good at math and english or you weren't.

I was one of the lucky few outliers...crappy in school but good at the SAT.

didn't do me a whole lot of good in the long run.

I also took them in Senior Year of High School in 1987.

Plus AP English. They were called "college prep", but it was just SAT training (and we spent much of the year specifically doing SAT work).

My HS math was much the same.

I come from the "do not fuck up and fail at life" generation.

going to college to succeed in life, but nothing about any tests. We just took them if they were needed.

We took em like they were candy.

back in 1959-63. Nobody ever really mentioned the SAT tests, though. When the tests came up, we just signed up and took them. None of our teachers really even talked about them, except to tell us we needed to take them before applying for college, I took mine in my Junior year. I could have retaken it the next year, but I couldn't see any reason to do that, and nobody suggested it.

PSAT, SAT, National merit Scholarship Exams, New york State Regents Exam, National Defense Scholarship Exam, you just took 'em as they came along. I don't remember any special study for any of them. There wasn't any stress (at least for me.) It was just something you had to do.

My SAT exam was actually perfunctary. I took the PSAT (preliminary SAT) in the spring of my junior year in 1965. I did rather well, with a 99th percentile score in both math and verbal. We didn't get numerical scores in those days, just the percentile where you ranked against all others taking the test nationwide. I don't know when/why they changed that. Then in the fall of my senior year I was recruited to, and accepted under early decision, to my school (then Clarkson College of Technology), so when the SAT exam came around in the Spring of my senior year I didn't really need to take it as I was already accepted. But my HS guidance counselor told me to take it anyway, just "for the experience." So I did, and got both 99 percentiles again. I was never particularly stressed by tests, and usually do well on them, but that SAT was about as laid back as I could get.

I did pay a little more attention to the National Defense and National Merit Scholarship exams, as they were important for MONEY! Luckily, I did well on both and received scholarships from both. That was a good thing as I was going to a rather expensive private engineering school, which, back in those days, provided no financial aid whatsoever. You paid your bills or you were gone. Since my parents had no money to contribute, I got through the four years of engineering school on scholarships, what money I could make working summers, and loans from my national fraternity organization. I barely squeaked by, but graduated with only $6000 or so in loans, which I paid off in 5 years.

Sorry I rambled. The point was I agree with you. The tests weren't a big deal to us back in the 60's.

portion of the SAT, but it was also quite useful for paper writing in general. Nobody I knew in high school "studied" for the SAT; we just showed up and did it.

I took it '61 or '62. Made it to college. In late '80's my son took it...don't remember anyone suggesting he get coached. He just took it, got in the college of his choice and went on with life. I don't remember what either of us made. Didn't much matter, apparently. We both met our college goals.

The same time all work related stress has come into effect. It has happened since offshoring and reagonomics killed the working class and created a glut of unemployed/underemployed people fighting to keep a roof over their head and food in their tummy.

That the 80's also brought in the fighting Parents trying to get their children into the best pre-schools. So it does not surprise me that the kids in the 90's were stressed out about SATs....they probably have been stressed their entire lives. They even had to be strapped into a car.....how some of us older folks survived childhood is amazing....lol.

and I didn't get any prep either. I scored somewhere in the high 1200s, nothing spectacular but good enough for University of Houston. I was in National Honor Society, too, and got an "honorable mention" on the scholarship.

I remember taking some aptitude tests and whatnot, but we had no prep for any of it.

That was sort of a running joke.

especially Longhorns. I still can't sit through a whole UT or A&M football game. Lol.

Kidding aside, I think I got a pretty good education at U of H, and we were ahead of the curve as far as integrating athletics.

No stress, no prep. I have always been grateful for the SAT because it was the first time I understood that I was really smart; no one in my family had ever told me so. I was given honors at entrance to college because of my SAT scores. Those honors English classes were affirming.

Though I took the ACT rather than the SAT.

I do remember my husband getting a study guide for the GRE before grad school, but I didn't use a guide when I took the GRE.

Seems like using a study guide defeats the purpose of the exam. But I guess I'm old, too.

the 90s. Was it that late?

I remember taking the GRE in 1970, or thereabouts. There were guides available in the campus bookstore, but I just took it cold. I can't remember that score, either. It was good enough, apparently to get into the Master's program. I did well on the Russian language test, too, which surprised me, since it had been a while since I had used my Russian.

but since my college grades were (cough) uninspiring, I wanted to do better. I bought one of those books of old tests and it was very useful. I had a chance to figure out what I was missing, and why. My score went way up the second time I took the test.

I can't imagine paying $$$ for a weeks-long prep course.

Actually, neither did I. I did well, but certainly not THAT well.

My experience in the '60s was the same as yours.

But the latest I'm hearing on the news is that they are now going to return to the 1600-point SAT, with no essay question. Looks like we had it right.

It was 15nn. I think it might have been 1540 or 1560, but I don't remember for sure. It was high, though, which surprised me. I had no idea what to expect. Nobody at my school got a perfect score, but there were a dozen over 1500 in my class of 104 students. It was a good school in small-town California. But there was no teaching to the test there, ever.

Our S '66 class was 1200-strong (in an L.A. suburban SFV school of 3600), and I had friends who were National Merit Scholars, going on to Harvard and Yale and MIT.

My father's death when I was in 11th Grade slowed me down a bit, in a way, and got me thinking more about getting life experience than academic credentials. Like you, I ended up in military service--even though it meant declining a full-tuition scholarship to USC.

After HS I called up my draft board and asked them to take me and --surprise, surprise!--they were happy to oblige. I did go to college after Vietnam, but with a year left to finish at USC I had to relocate across the country for more surgery for my VN injuries and I never went back to finish my degree. C'est la vie.

As for my SAT score, I know I did well, but I really don't remember. And I don't really care enough to go through my stuff to look it up.

I take tests exceptionally well.

I was a little pissed that my 790 was in the English section. I aced Math, which I still surprises me.

I took it in 66.

No prep, no special books.

and I didn't know anyone who prepared for the SAT like that, though I remember reading about rich kids out east doing it. It was not the norm in the upper midwest though.

It seems like high school kids today are panicked about it, if all the ads are true. How strange.

to take the SATs. They checked them out and picked one they thought would be the best and the sessions are via Skype. I was surprised by it.

It's a problem imo. Yet again, the rich are better prepared to succeed. Plus all this studying for tests does not give you real knowledge.

I'm sure there are test-taking techniques they could teach, but if you don't know the stuff, I can't see how that would help. Having good math skills and a large vocabulary seemed to be the most important thing, as I remember. You can't cram that kind of stuff through short term tutoring. So, they must be teaching test-taking strategies. I can see how those might raise someone's scores to a certain degree, through a higher probability that a guess would be correct, but that's the only benefit I can see.

As I went through the school system in California in the 50s and 60s, we had some standardized testing. About every two or three years, as I remember, we took some California standardized test. They used the results of those to handle tracking of students to match their abilities. Our small town school system had three tracks through elementary, middle, and high school. But, there was never any prep for any of those tests that I can recall. The curriculum taught students, not the tests, and testing was never mentioned.

As I remember, we got to see the results of all the standardized tests, with the scores also given to parents. Percentiles were the measurements we saw, in different subjects and academic areas. Somewhere in there, we were also given the Stanford-Binet IQ test. I believe that was in sixth grade. We never saw the results of that, nor did our parents. I did see mine while snooping in the band director's file cabinet at student files, so the teachers had that information, apparently.

... from back in the 50's and 60's was the Iowa Test of Basic Skills. We took them every year starting sometime in Grade school through sometime in Junior High. I don't remeber exactly when. We always wondered why we were taking a test from Iowa when we were in New York? I guess they were standardized, but I don't remeber much about them.

Can't remember, and probably paid no attention to them anyhow.

... the company that made it stressed that it measured "aptitude", and that studying would not increase your score. By the mid 1970s this was shown to be a lie: studying did in fact increase scores. The timing also happened to coincide with college admissions giving relatively more weight to test scores for their applicants (as opposed to high school grades).

who took the SAT. It measured what you had managed to learn at school and on your own. Vocabulary was a big element, as was math skills. Not aptitude. They may have said it was aptitude, but it wasn't that at all. About the only aptitude portion I remember was a few questions that involved unfolded solids. The test showed you a solid figure, and you had to choose the unfolded figure that matched. Nobody had taught that in my school, and I probably missed some of those, since I didn't have time to really think very long about those questions.

The rest though just measured stuff we had been taught, along with things like reading comprehension and a smattering of practical math word questions.

There were two main scores you got -- one for mathematics and the other for English.

I did well on the mathematics portion and average on the English portion; combined score was abt. 1000 if I remember right (1972 was the year I believe). There was no "prep" for this that I knew of but I knew it was very important that you scored high so you could get into a good college/university.

Depending upon how high the two scores combined were set the stage for what sort of a college/university you would likely be able to apply to and be admitted to if you had taken the necessary preparatory classes in high school. These included advanced mathematics (Algebra III) as well as three years of a foreign language.

Mostly with other kids in the college prep track. I don't remember caring very much, though. My scores were high enough that it wasn't a concern for me, and so were the scores of most of my friends.

And my parents paid for a prep course. ACT they did not - but ACT was starting to be weighed less then.

Interesting.

That's also around the time that tuition started to jump in leaps and bounds.

My dad did both of his masters at RIT in the late 70's to early 80's for less than my first year at Niagara University -tuition, room, board.

That's crazy.

It was something like 6 consecutive Saturdays before the test.

Preparing for the SATs and the focus on getting a high score was a huge big deal in 1981 where I grew up.

Your example is the earliest, so far, of people prepping for the SAT. Thanks for sharing it.

3-13 I'll be 57...Christ I was 34 just a few years ago.
now it's on my mind ALOT...

Ah, dumb to answer a post heading...guess I took em.
Wasn't a college degree in my future anyway.
no and no prep in 74. just another test.

Still wet behind the ears, if you ask me....

really, thinking about.
Of course I "thought" about it. then has a way of putting off serious
thought of age.
I'm not putting it right, but an unease has settled over
me...just my .02
Oh, never said it, but I enjoy your posts.

My mid-fifties were when I started thinking about aging, too. The year 2000 was a big year for me. I remembered thinking when I was a young guy that I'd be really old when we got to 2000. So, when that year came around, I felt old for a while. I was just 55 that year.

But, then, I got over it.

Thanks for the kind words, too.

no big deal

I think the stress started when tuition costs starting skyrocketing.

college. In 1963, when I graduated from high school in a class of 104, well under half of the class went to college at all. And a part of that number went to the local community college. And only that half of the class even took the SAT, as well. If you weren't heading for college, you didn't take it. There wouldn't be any reason to.

I think the idea that everyone should attend post-secondary schools has led to the increased importance of these tests in people's lives. I'm not sure, but that's how I'm seeing it right now.

All of a sudden there were a lot more young men going to college in order to get student deferments from the draft.

In more normal times, many might have gone on to vocational schools or voluntarily joined the military for the job training.

We had three career tracks at my high school in NJ: college prep, business and secretarial, and vocational. I graduated in 1969.

We all knew that our college deferment meant something. I learned that even better when I dropped out of college in 1965. I ended up joining the USAF because of the certainty I'd be drafted. I returned to school in 1969, after finishing my enlistment.

I can't remember.

People were being drafted in the early 1960s, and they made a very big deal about registering on your 18th birthday. That was the year I graduated in 1963. People were being drafted, even before the Vietnam War. Not a lot, but some.

In 1964, the draft became more of a factor, and by 1965, it was clear that if you lost your student deferment you were going to get drafted. I though about going to Canada, but decided not to and joined the USAF, which kindly sent me off to Syracuse University to learn Russian and then sent me to Turkey.

But, dropping out of college got you drafted, pretty much for sure, then.

The draft never ended after WWII. They just didn't need too many draftees until the mid 1960s. My brother didn't turn 18 until the lotter system was in place. He got a very high number and didn't have to worry about it.

A lot of voluntarily tutoring classes for SAT offered at my HS after and before school in 1984. A pretty big deal for the college bound and AP students-- lots of stress, practice tests and weekend study groups in the weeks leading up to it; not so much a big deal for the other students.

I appreciate the feedback.

Back then, it was mostly: you could take some practice exams, if you wanted. But test-prep books and classes existed.

I think my question is finding an answer.

I got into to two great schools anyway...I often wonder how that happened...

I don't know why I bothered, my aspirations were pretty much limited to the local community college, but I got a pretty good score on the math portion of the SAT, although not high enough to offset my generally mediocre high school GPA.

In fact I can remember being told, don't bother to study for this, it won't help. It's not test of what you have actually learned, it's the Scholastic Aptitude Test, and as such it's measuring your learning potential rather than your academic achievement. In those days, if I was told not to study, I didn't need to be told twice.

For me, it was because there were all those books out there I wanted to read. Who had time to study?

And there were girls at some point. Girls were even better than books, as I remember.

us downtown to take the police exam. They made sure we covered all the bases.

Like you we had prep sessions on Sat if you wanted to, but no real pressure, it was a different time. All I wanted was to get out of town and had no idea what the hell I wanted to be or do.

So by Aug I was in Parris Island thinking the Air force might have been a better choice but that would have only gotten me to NJ. I'll be 74 Mon and it was my best choice.

I scored high enough that I got accepted to state colleges and universities without completing high school.

There was no GED in California then. To quit high school in a socially acceptable fashion you convinced the proper high school and college administrators to sign off on you and then :wohoo: you were a college student! (Awkward at times, too...)

There was a huge amount of push-back from counselors and advisors who remembered their own high school years as golden times...

... but nope, I never attended my high school football games, dances, proms, and I THANK PROVIDENCE FOR THAT! I'd had two years of the Americana High School experience and I still have nightmares about it, the worst nightmares where some malevolent force is making me finish it.

"No!!!" I scream, "I have college degrees! I've TAUGHT kids this age! Why am I here forced to pick up trash in the quad while the "cool" kids throw pennies and trash at me!!!"

In middle school I'd acquired the nickname "queerbait" and it didn't go away in high school, in some ways it got worse.

My younger sister escaped her own high school hell by passing the newly implemented GED.

Oddly, of all my siblings my sister and I, the two high school dropouts, are the ones who graduated from college and beyond.

In our family graduating from high school seems to have a negative correlation with college graduation rates. Well, except for my own kids who are much smarter than I am. Awesome in high school, awesome in college. They get that from their mom.

But I'm old too...not as old as you, but old enough!

I got into law school on the basis of my LSAT scores (it sure wasn't on my college grades, ahem). Every place I applied took me, although i'd been a housewife for 10 years. If i'd known how important it would be, I might have panicked, but i just waltzed in one morning, lah di dah.

in the mid 60s but nobody in my HS was rich enough to use them.

I also don't remember that much anxiety around the SAT. It was the south and there were plenty of bible schools that admitted according to piety, not SAT scores.

I took the SAT again when I got out of nursing school and was toying with the idea of an advanced degree. I remember my score was the same as I'd gotten in high school, which was very good. I'm good at taking tests, whatever that means for the rest of my life. Not much, I guess.

Prep services might take some of the stress out of the whole business for stressed students. Since effective test taking strategy can be covered in 20 minutes, I imagine that's the basic purpose of the courses, de-stressing.

So they can later leap out of the windows of JP Morgan?

There was a time when there were jobs, before they were moved to China, and India, etc. There was a time when everyone was proud of whatever job they did - hairstyling, mechanic, factory, anything. There was a time, before everything became a race to work for the sob corporations, and before CEOs were making figures so astronomical it makes one's head spin, and everyone believed that the American Dream meant, "I, too, can become a CEO and make mega-millions per year."

Now everyone is in competition. Like a bunch of rats in a pail. Sad.

I was sick the day before when it was announced and the practice book was passed out. I showed up the next day at school and took the exam. I ended up being a national merit scholar and so I guess that I did okay.

some kids started taking it Freshman or Sophmore year, as soon as you were allowed to, so they could practice. There were prep books and classes for it back then too. That was 1979.

Obsessed with getting ahead and finding a way around things. Rather than just accept the results which might be that my kid is not as smart as the rest, I will give him a leg up with some help. Then everyone does the same thing and they are back at square one.

My parents paid ... I took the test ... that was it

Just like you said, there were no prep courses (at least that I remember) - if you were planning on going to college you just took it. Don't remember my score, but it was good enough to get me into the college I'd hoped for. A few years later I took the GRE. Same thing, no prep, you just took it. Same with the LSAT a few years after that. I thing this whole test prep thing is basically a racket. These commercial outfits get the kids scared into thinking they have to take one of their courses in order to do well, and make buckets of money in the process.

when I worked there as an employee. I refused to take the SAT back in HS in 1965. Major problems not just with my parents but also with the HS. Much ado about nothing. It all worked out, and for FREE.

as an elective. It's offered by the school & it would've been that or weights 4. His other elective is business law. He's at the point where he's running out of classes to take, I figured if they offered it he might as well jump on it.

around the time we as a country decided people need a 4 year degree to flip burgers. My parent's generation were threatened with "If you don't go to college, you'll be stuck working in a plant like your father." The generation before me was threatened with flipping burgers if they didn't go to college. My generation was threatened with not even being able to flip burgers without a degree. (Boomer, X, Millennial, respectively.)

Forgot about the test, I mean, it was a lovely sunny Saturday, got all Itchycoo Park and then..... "oh, shit!"

This was, of course, waaaaay back in the day.....Now kids, don't try this at home.

Still, both scores were, shall we say... respectable. But the stoned score blew the first one out of the water. Not sure what the lesson is, there, about stress.