The Test Score Isn't the Problem. Waiting Is.

Why Strong GPAs Don't Always Predict PSAT, SAT, or ACT Scores

My test scores were bad. 

Not "off day" bad. Not "I forgot to eat breakfast" bad. Consistently, confusingly bad. Bad in a way that didn't match the person my teachers described, or the effort I knew I was putting in. 

That gap is what finally got someone's attention. My scores were the discrepancy that led to my ADHD and dyslexia diagnosis — years after I could have used the support. The test didn't fail me. The waiting did. 

I think about that every single time a family calls me in the fall of junior year. 

The call always comes at the same time

The call sounds like this: "She just took the PSAT. The score wasn't what we hoped. We need test prep." 

I understand that call. I respect that call. And I want to tell you honestly what I have learned from being on the other end of it. 

By the time most students understand what these tests actually mean for their future, the runway is short. Reading habits are set. Math gaps that started in fifth grade are now sitting quietly underneath Algebra 2. And we are asking a sixteen-year-old to fix all of it in eleven weeks, on top of AP classes, a sport, a job, and applications. 

That isn't a tutoring problem. That's a timing problem. 

What the "system" actually buys you

Almost every test prep company sells a system. Tricks. Process of elimination. Timing strategies. Question-type recognition. 

Some of that is genuinely useful. I teach some of it. But I am not going to pretend it's transformative, because the research doesn't say it is. 

The most rigorous analysis of commercial test prep, conducted by Derek Briggs using a nationally representative dataset of roughly 16,500 students, found that after controlling for prior scores, family background, and motivation, commercial coaching produced a combined SAT gain of about 20 points (National Education Policy Center). On the ACT, effects were smaller still. Earlier meta-analytic work found the same modest range of 9 to 25 points per section. 

Here's the part that stopped me cold when I first read it. In that same data, students who simply sat for the test a second time — no course, no tutor, no tricks — gained about 33 points on math and 27 on verbal. 

So when a program promises your child 200 points, ask what they're actually counting. 

The thing I'm seeing in my own practice

Now let me tell you what walks through my door, because it's the reason I'm writing this at all. 

Students with strong GPAs and very low test scores. Not occasionally. Constantly. 

A 3.8 and a 19 composite. A transcript full of A's and a reading score that says fifth grade. Families who are blindsided, because nothing in four years of report cards prepared them for that number. 

For a while I wondered if I was seeing a fluke in my little corner of Southwest Florida. I am not. This is one of the best-documented trends in American education right now. 

ACT studied more than four million students across a decade. Average high school GPA climbed from 3.17 to 3.36 — and the rate of that climb increased sharply in 2020 and 2021 — while average ACT composite scores went down (ACT Research Report R2134). The share of test-takers with an A average went from 47 percent to 55 percent. Grade inflation was largest in math, where average math GPA rose 0.30 points, a full step from a B to better than a B-plus, while math scores slipped (ACT Research Report R2300). 

The pandemic grading policies left a mark you can measure. In Washington state, math GPA jumped from 2.36 to 2.70 in a single year under "do no harm" grading. The share of F's in math fell from 9.3 percent to 1.4 percent in one semester. And the link between a grade and actual mastery loosened: a student earning an A in Algebra I went from performing at the 73rd percentile on the state test to the 58th (CALDER Center). 

Meanwhile the underlying skills didn't recover. Twelfth-grade NAEP reading and math both hit the lowest levels ever recorded, with 45 percent of seniors below basic in math and 32 percent below basic in reading (National Assessment Governing Board). Students are still roughly half a grade level behind where they were in 2019, and reading has continued to slide rather than rebound (Harvard Center for Education Policy Research). Only 20 percent of ACT test-takers now meet all four college readiness benchmarks (ACT National Profile Report). 

Grades went up. Skills went down. That's the whole story, and your child is standing in the middle of it. 

So is the GPA lying to you?

Not lying. But it isn't telling you what you think it's telling you. 

Here's the cleanest way I know to say it. ACT's own 2025 research took two students with the identical GPA of 2.5 — one from a school with little grade inflation, one from a school with a lot — and their predicted first-year college GPAs differed by nearly four tenths of a point (ACT Research Report R2432). Same number on the transcript. Two completely different levels of readiness. 

That same research found something important: grade inflation waters down how much a GPA predicts, while it does nothing to the predictive power of a test score. The test is standing on the same ground it always stood on. The transcript is standing on ground that moved. 

This is why the colleges reversed themselves. MIT reinstated testing first, with its dean explaining that they "cannot reliably predict students will do well at MIT unless we consider standardized test results alongside grades" (MIT News). Dartmouth commissioned its own economists and found SAT scores explained far more of the variance in first-year college grades than high school GPA did (Dartmouth research memo). A larger study across the Ivy-Plus institutions found test scores roughly four times more predictive of college academic performance than high school grades, with no evidence that the relationship was biased against students from less-resourced high schools (Opportunity Insights). Brown, Yale, Harvard, Stanford, and Caltech all cited that work when they brought testing back. 

I want to be careful here, because the honest answer has two halves. 

A GPA still tells you something real and valuable. It tells you whether your child shows up, turns it in, recovers from a bad unit, asks for help, and manages a Tuesday when everything is due Wednesday. Four years of that is a genuine measure of effort, persistence, and executive function — things a three-hour test cannot see. 

A test score tells you something different. It tells you what your child can actually do, unassisted, with no extra credit, no retake policy, no teacher who likes them, and no curve. It is school-independent in a way a transcript no longer is. 

You need both numbers. And when they disagree by a mile, that disagreement is the most useful piece of information you will get all year. 

The score gap is information, not a verdict

This is the part where my own story becomes relevant, and it's why I don't treat a bad score as an emergency to be papered over. 

When two measures of a kid disagree, something is hiding in the gap. 

Sometimes what's hiding is grade inflation, plain and simple. Sometimes it's three years of unrecovered pandemic learning, never caught because grading standards fell at the same time achievement did. Sometimes it's attendance, still running about 50 percent above pre-pandemic levels nationally, quietly draining mastery without dragging down a grade (American Enterprise Institute). 

And sometimes what's hiding in that gap is a kid like me. 

A student who is bright, verbal, hardworking, well-liked by teachers, pulling respectable grades through sheer compensation and effort — and drowning the second the scaffolding comes off. A student whose decoding never became automatic. Whose working memory taps out on a four-step word problem. Who has been running a marathon in the wrong shoes for eleven years and assumed everyone's feet hurt. 

Nobody caught me until a score report made the discrepancy impossible to ignore. And by then I had built an entire identity around being the smart kid who somehow wasn't good at school. 

If your child has a 3.9 and a 19, please do not rush to bury that 19 under a prep course. That number is the first honest feedback anyone has given you. Find out what it's telling you. 

The cost nobody puts on the invoice

There's one more thing I refuse to be quiet about. 

The intensive prep sprint layered on top of junior and senior year has a price, and our kids are the ones paying it. 

The American Psychological Association's flagship journal now lists excessive pressure to excel alongside poverty, trauma, and discrimination as a top risk factor for adolescent mental health (Luthar, Kumar & Zillmer, American Psychologist). Read that again. Achievement pressure sits in the same risk category as trauma. The National Academies of Sciences reached the same conclusion in its consensus report on youth mental health (National Academies). 

Stanford's Challenge Success has surveyed more than 270,000 students at 380-plus high schools. Up to 79 percent name grades, tests, and exams as their primary source of stress. Among students doing three or more hours of homework a night, 80 percent point to homework as a top stressor. High schoolers in their data average 6.3 to 6.7 hours of sleep, and only 1.5 to 4 percent get what pediatricians recommend (Challenge Success). In APA's teen survey, 83 percent cited school as a stress source and 69 percent named getting into a good college specifically (APA Stress in America). 

All of this is happening against a backdrop where nearly 40 percent of high school students report persistent sadness or hopelessness (CDC Youth Risk Behavior Survey). 

I'm not going to claim test prep caused a national mental health crisis. It didn't. But when a child is already stretched thin and already behind in ways nobody has named yet, adding twelve weeks of high-stakes drilling is a decision with consequences. And we make it casually. 

So we made a harder choice

We decided WayPath Academics would not be a tricks-and-timing shop. 

Not because strategy doesn't matter. Because it isn't first. 

Look at what the divergence actually means. If a student's grades are strong and their test score is low, the missing piece is not test-taking savvy. The missing piece is content mastery. And you cannot trick your way into content you never learned. 

So we start underneath the test. 

Executive function. Planning, initiating, tracking, self-monitoring, recovering. The Dunedin study followed 1,000 children from birth to age 32 and found childhood self-control predicted adult health, finances, and legal outcomes — independent of IQ and social class. Children in the lowest fifth for self-control were three times more likely to land in the bottom income quintile as adults (Moffitt et al., PNAS). A comparison of siblings inside the same families held up. 

Reading and language. Decoding, fluency, vocabulary, comprehension, and yes, grammar. For most struggling students the reading section isn't a strategy problem. It's a decoding-and-comprehension problem wearing a costume. The National Reading Panel established the pillars decades ago, and structured literacy is still how you build them (NICHD). 

Math foundations. Not test-question types. Number sense, fractions, proportional reasoning, fluency. In a meta-analysis across six longitudinal datasets, early math skills were the single strongest predictor of later achievement — and predicted later reading achievement about as well as early reading skills did (Duncan et al., Developmental Psychology). This matters especially now, because math is exactly where grade inflation ran hottest. 

Mindset. Carefully, and honestly. The evidence says mindset work is a modest lever, not a miracle — but it helps most for exactly the students we serve: the ones who have been struggling long enough to believe the struggle is who they are (Yeager & Dweck). 

Then, and only then, we go into the test. Format, pacing, question types, all of it. With a student who now has something to pace. 

Start in ninth grade, not eleventh

If your child is a freshman or sophomore, you have the most valuable thing in this entire process. Time. 

Time to test early and find out where they truly stand, before the number carries consequences. Time to fix a fractions gap before it becomes a trigonometry crisis. Time to build a planning system before the AP load arrives. Time to get reading evaluated properly, if that's what's going on. 

Do not wait for the transcript to tell you there's a problem. Based on everything above, the transcript may be the last place a problem shows up. 

And if your child is already a junior, hear me: it is not too late. It's just narrower. We'll be honest with you about what we can build and what we can only patch, and we'll do it without setting your kid on fire to get there. 

What I actually want for your child

A good score can open a door. I'm not romantic about that — I want your child to have every door. 

But nobody hands you a diploma at 24 because you were fast at grid-ins. They hand it to you because you learned to read hard things, break down a problem, ask for help, keep a plan, and get back up. 

I found out at the wrong end of a score report that my brain worked differently. Not broken. Different. What changed my life wasn't a strategy for beating a test. It was someone finally teaching me how I learn. 

That's the work. The score is a byproduct. 

You can't stop the waves, but you can learn to surf.