Making the Grade Learning about the SAT and the people who create it can help test takers boost their scores

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For Katie Porter, last spring’s Scholastic Aptitude Test was a nerve-wracking experience that made her dread the prospect of another try at the college entrance exam.

So when the Bangor High School senior heard she could bone up for her next SAT at the Haworth Academic Center in downtown Bangor, she jumped at the chance.

This week, a few days after completing the grueling four-hour English and math exams, she sounded happy and confident.

“I felt better prepared. There weren’t as many butterflies this time. I think I did better,” she said during a telephone interview.

Porter’s optimism is well-founded, according to Haworth director and tutor Wayne Shorey.

By showing students a variety of test-taking strategies including how to manage their time and how to guess intelligently, the center can help them “beat the system” and improve their SAT scores by as much as 100-200 points, said Shorey.

Thousands of SAT preparatory centers have sprung up across the country since the 1950s, mostly in metropolitan areas, according to Shorey, who believes Haworth is the only one in this area.

Students may take the college preparatory exams as many times as they want to.

Since opening Jan. 1, the center has prepared 30 students for their SATs, both privately and in group sessions that are offered seven times a year to correspond with each test date. A maximum of 12 students are accepted for each class.

SAT preparation accounts for about one-third of Haworth’s business, and individual tutoring for adults and children on a variety of subjects makes up the remaining portion, according to assistant director and tutor Jan Kaufman.

This summer found Haworth “busier than we could believe,” said Kaufman, as students continued their private tutoring to make sure they didn’t lose ground. Others sought individual instruction to “build a foundation before the school year started,” she said.

Individual SAT tutoring costs $50 an hour, while the 27-hour, nine-week group session is $495.

Named for the home of the Brontes, the famous British literary family, Haworth provides an inviting and intimate atmosphere for learning.

Comfortable chairs are placed around small tables and lamps give off a soft glow. Bookshelves line the walls, which are covered with maps and drawings, and the front window contains displays of artworks from university and high school students.

While many students are reluctant to guess on the SAT, Shorey said they could rack up points once they learn strategies for eliminating answers.

“Leaving them blank just kills your score,” he said.

Guessing pays off since students lose a quarter of a point for each wrong answer and gain a point for each right one, according to Shorey.

Even if they “guess wildly” on 20 multiple choice questions, probability dictates they’ll get four right and gain four points, he said. By getting 16 wrong, they’ll lose four points, “so even in a worst- case scenario you’d break even,” he pointed out.

Students also can get a leg up by learning “the philosophy of the test makers,” who typically have a politically correct bent, Shorey said.

For example, answers to questions based on certain reading passages would use negative terms to describe European explorers and positive phrases to depict American Indians.

Since the test makers also are “very middle-of-the-road people,” Shorey suggested staying away from multiple choice answers that contain “overtly dramatic words.” In a choice between a response using the word “surprise” and one using “astonish,” the correct answer likely will be the former, he said.

Students also are shown how to save time by answering the critical reading section without reading more than a quarter of the passage, Shorey said.

By contrast, the secret to doing well on the math SAT is careful reading. “The skills tested are rudimentary high school math, and the only reason kids do poorly is because they leave out a key phrase or don’t read the last line of a word problem,” he said.

Unlike many other tutoring programs, Haworth requires students to do “maximum difficulty workouts,” in which they’re drilled with the SAT’s most difficult questions, Shorey said.

“We give them the hardest of the hard. Once they master these, the easy ones – and the test as a whole – seem like a breeze,” he said.

Haworth also is unique because the two SAT tutors are veteran teachers. Many SAT preparatory programs use graduate students or a recent college graduate to do most of the tutoring, Shorey said.

With a doctorate from Northwestern University, Shorey has been a college professor and dean. He has taught high school and been headmaster at a private school.

Tutor and assistant director Jan Kaufman has bachelor’s degrees in fine arts and English and a master’s degree in journalism from Temple University. She has taught elementary and high school and college and is on the faculty of the University of Maine’s Division of Lifelong Learning.

The SAT isn’t a particularly valuable predictor of how intelligent students are or how well they’ll do in college, according to Shorey, who has seen students with A’s in calculus do poorly on the math SAT.

In fact, studies indicate that high school grades are a more precise indicator of a student’s ability, he said.

“I hate to see so much riding on this particular score,” said Shorey, who worries that a student’s self-image will be affected if he or she performs poorly.

“It’s mostly because they don’t know how to take the SAT,” he said.

By helping to enhance vocabulary, reading concentration and memorization skills, tutors prepare students for life as much as for the SATs, Shorey said.

“Students will bring up what they’re reading in literature class or mention a word they came across in their reading class that they didn’t know,” said Shorey. “I like to think what we do is so much beyond test preparation that there’s a challenging and stimulating level to the discussion itself. Students really seem to enjoy it.”

Sending his children to Haworth was money well spent, according to T.J. Goetting, whose children, Robin Tiller and Abby Goetting, both Bangor High seniors, took the SAT class last spring.

“Both girls are excellent students, and we wanted them to be sure and have a choice of where they wanted to go to school,” he said.

Abby Goetting, who improved her score by a whopping 150 points, said she’s now “pretty confident” she’ll be accepted to the University of Southern California.

“It’s competitive out there,” she said. “It’s kind of frightening.”

For more information about Haworth Academic Center call 990-3500.