Peak Attempt: Why Good Exam Prep Goes Beyond Drilling and Practice

Taking an exam can feel like facing a steep peak.

You’ve no doubt seen the ads.

“This secret trick is guaranteed to raise your SAT score by 100 points!”

“Cheap, fast methods for success on the ACT!”

“Learn the RIGHT way to prep for the TOEFL test!”

“I scored a 1600 on my SATs and a 36 on my ACTs, and I can show you how!”

Marcia’s not sure about that.

These claims, made by more test prep companies and individual tutors than I can count, sound great. It’s pretty attractive to look to a process that is fast, easy, and only requires the help of the closest high-scoring person you can hit with a rock. But like most goals we have in life, at least the ones worth pursuing, there aren’t shortcuts. You know this already, but I understand if sometimes you get tired and impatient and just want to get your good score and move on. I know a lot about getting tired and impatient; I’ve made more mistakes than I can count for just those reasons. But at least in terms of helping you get ready for the next big exam, I hope I can keep you from making these kinds of mistakes.

There are no ski lifts to the peak!

There are a lot of myths out there about large-scale, high-stakes assessment, and even some very smart and credentialed people believe them. It was wild to me, working diligently as a content specialist for the ACT, to hear these myths repeated over and over.

I’m not going to present a thesis on why you need to put these myths aside and believe me instead of their purveyors. Instead, I’m going to ask you to use your noggin to think about it in a sensible way.

Like most thorny questions in life, our way through is often applying what we know and understand to what we don’t. As a passionate lover of the outdoors, I am going to explain to you what I mean above by talking about something that seems unrelated: mountaineering.

These dudes definitely didn’t take a ski lift.

A mountain climber will often talk about their[1] next big goal as their “peak attempt.” It’s the process at the end of all their preparations that they hope will get them to the summit of Everest or K2. These preparations can take months and even years to complete. According to climber Carol Copeland, there are five specific domains of work needed to ready oneself for the peak attempt: functional, or repeating the moves you’ll need on the mountain; cardiovascular, to train your heart and lungs; strength, to move your body up steep assents and prevent injury; flexibility, to increase your range of motion; and cross training, so that your body has a well-rounded foundation and arrives at the mountain balanced and resilient.

Now—who in their right mind would say, “pshaw, Ms. Copeland! Big Everest wants you to think climbing is hard so that fewer people will try. If you buy my secret, you’ll glide right up that mountain!”? Nobody! Then why would we believe that carefully constructed assessments based on curriculum that students learn over the course of 12 years of education can be hacked with what amounts to a cheat code (I have actually seen this analogy being used without irony)? It’s absurd. I understand that climbing Everest and scoring well on the SAT are not the same in terms of difficulty, but they are analogous in the sense that they are hard tasks that take work and preparation (whether that is just schooling or schooling plus extra help) to achieve. High-stakes assessments are supposed to be difficult, because they are designed to provide information about how ready you are for the rigors of a university education. And it’s not because they’re “tricky.”

I saw the unfortunate fallout of the “cheat code” rhetoric when I worked with teams scoring writing tests. So many students used obviously coached approaches (the five-paragraph essay, rote sets of transitions, five-dollar words, etc) in an attempt to score well, but fewer of them knew how to use them in an actual writing situation in which they had no AI to assist them. This attitude hurts students because it steals the time they could be learning in a deep and transformative way, a way that, incidentally, would actually help them excel on tests, and replaces it with false promises and emptier wallets.

Fall prey to the hucksters and you’ll find yourself far from the path to the peak.

Let’s return to the peak attempt metaphor and see what it can teach us. We’ll take the “claims” above and replace them with the principles advanced by Ms. Copeland. Hopefully you’ll see that your path to a better test score, and a more enjoyable and lasting kind of preparation, is superior to the snake-oil claims of test prep mills.

You can do hard things.

Tests are designed to trick you provide evidence of what you know and how well you use critical thinking skills, so success is about cracking the code working diligently to acquire the knowledge and skills you will need to do well.

Working out to train your cardiovascular and musculoskeletal systems to withstand the punishing expectations of climbing a mountain doesn’t start on the mountain, but in the gym and streets of your hometown. Similarly, training your mind to be ready for your exam requires refreshing what you have already learned in your education up to this point and pinpointing what content and skills you are still missing. While taking a practice test (the functional training of test prep) can get you started, the real value is in isolating areas of needed growth and training them up. In practical terms, this work can take the form of completing exercises in a grammar book, reading a short story and doing a close reading discussion with a teacher, or writing an essay from a perspective opposed to what you will argue in your final essay. Doing different academic exercises with a skilled teacher will help you become flexible enough to handle anything the test throws at you. Diverse and dynamic learning is the yoga of test preparation. Also, if anyone guarantees you a score? RUN.

Those muscles didn’t grow overnight.

Preparing for an exam won’t will cost you much time or and effort.

Earlier we discussed how no one would expect someone to summit Everest after a week of practice hikes. Now, climbers start from a wide range of skill levels; maybe they’ve climbed K2 already, and need mostly to become familiar with the specific contours of Everest, or maybe this is their first major climb. In either scenario, the climber will need to put forth both time and effort, just as time and effort are necessary for you to do well on your upcoming exam. Even if you’re fairly confident already that you will score well, no one is ever truly done learning; preparing for your test is going to return dividends down the road, in college, in work life, and in your personal life. Here’s a “secret” that’s actually true: the goal is not the highest score. The goal is acquiring the skills and knowledge necessary to do so. Everest isn’t the end of a mountaineer’s career, but an achievement along the way. You, too, will continue to use what you’ve learned in the leadup to your exam for years to come—if you are committed to putting in both the time and the effort.

A good mechanic always knows which size wrench to use.

There is one no right method for preparing for an exam that applies to everyone.

Yes, there is solid pedagogy that every experienced teacher will use. But those are applied skills, not rote practices that they will use the same way with every student. Just as every climber has a different body, mental profile, and experience level, every examinee has a different brain, physiology, set of learning habits, experience with education, etc. (the list is almost endless!). A good teacher will evaluate what you need—and what you love, because we only truly pursue what we love—and tailor their lessons to those needs. Anyone who promises you something different is misleading you.

This raccoon probably has lots of ideas about how to get up a mountain.

Scoring well on an exam doesn’t qualify qualifies a tutor to teach you how to score well.

At first glance, the original claim seems to make sense. If you’ve done the thing, doesn’t it follow that you can teach someone how to do it? Someone who has prepared for and successfully summited Everest can give advice to future climbers, and what they have to share is certainly valuable. But that climber is not an expert in training for the peak attempt; they are the expert in training for their peak attempt. They may understand how to train weak hamstrings, but what if their cardiovascular system didn’t need much conditioning at all? How would they be able to help someone whose system did? That’s because teaching is an entirely different set of skills than doing. Teachers are trained and practiced in identifying what students need, how they learn best, and how to address those needs in an effective way. They’ve studied all the knowledge and skills areas, so your needs won’t be a mystery to them, whatever they are.

The harder the climb, the better the view.

At Minser Mentorship, I am here to be your guide up the mountain. I’ve been a “climber” for decades, but more importantly, I’ve been guiding students to success for my entire career.  Are you ready to train for your peak attempt? Book a free consultation and let’s talk about it.

-Your guide for the climb, Dr. Pannell

P.S. You don’t have to take my word for it. For a more in-depth exploration of research around test preparation effectiveness, dive into this report prepared by my former colleagues at ACT:

“Research has found that longer-term preparatory activities such as taking rigorous coursework have a greater association with score gains than shorter-term activities such as using workbooks, workshops, or learning test-taking skills.” No Pain, No Gain: Lessons from a Test Prep Experiment Edgar I. Sanchez, PhD, and Ty M. Cruce, PhD.

[1] Is this poor subject-pronoun agreement? Nope! I’m a writer. I know that “they” has been a plural pronoun for a long time. But language changes! And the Chicago Manual of Style agrees.