Students at Torrey Pines High School developed a free, personalized, AI-powered SAT prep tool available to students like them, regardless of income.
“SAT prep is basically pay to win right now,” said Ryder van Betten, the CEO and lead developer of SATStar. “It felt wrong that your zip code determines how prepared you are for the SAT.”
Wealth impacts the scores students get on the SATs, a test critical for admission to many colleges. Some of the most popular prep programs, like Kaplan or Princeton Review, cost hundreds if not thousands of dollars.
Van Betten and his classmates can largely afford those tools. At Torrey Pines High School, 17% of students qualify for free or reduced lunches, the closest metric available for tracking household income among students. That’s well below the state average, where 62% of students qualify for subsidized meals.
“If you go to school in La Jolla, your parents can probably afford (SAT prep), but if you go somewhere like Lincoln or Hoover, you’re just kind of on your own a lot,” van Betten said. “The SAT is not equal. Scores are directly related to how much prep time you can afford.”
These inequities prompted van Betten and four other classmates to devote a semester in a business class to developing a prep tool to help students like them, no matter their income level. The goal is to help any student, regardless of their background, prepare for the SAT.
That wealth impacts SAT scores is well known, and one of the reasons the University of California system dropped the metric in admissions. But professors are now pushing to bring back SAT and ACT scores in admissions, as too many students are not prepared for rigorous courses.
Instead of eliminating the test, these Torrey Pines students are trying to help everyone prepare for the test. The result of their effort is SATStar, a free website offering personalized daily quizzes to high school students, similar to popular language-learning app Duolingo.
When they join SATStar, students take a 20-minute assessment quiz based on public College Board questions that reveal their strengths and weaknesses in SAT subjects. From there, the website builds daily quizzes meant to improve those weak points over time.
The cost of other SAT-prep tools is not the only obstacle that many students face. As a varsity athlete, Van Betten struggled to find the time for SAT prep. The small, daily quizzes fit better in his own schedule.
From left to right, Max Brown, Raj Gollapudi, Ryder van Betten, and Daniel McKie discuss SATStar on the podcast High School Side Hustles hosted by Brown and McKie. (Photo courtesy Ryder van Betten)The other students behind SATStar, Max Kelley, Ian Sargen, Raj Gollapudi and Ana Barberena, are heading into senior year as well, so SAT scores affecting their college admission chances is top of mind.
“We are solving problems that we personally face,” van Betten said.
Van Betten does not know how to code, but AI tools brought his idea to life. AI also enables the tool to become personalized, so students struggling with vocabulary, reading, geometry or algebra can focus on just the areas they need help.
To motivate students, SATStar has leaderboards, experience points and daily challenges – everything to gamify the studying experience.
Without paid ads, the user base has gained traction slowly, but already, college prep organizations are taking note.
The Barrio Logan College Institute, a nonprofit helping San Diego youth exit cycles of poverty by achieving higher education, adopted SATStar as a tool for its students. That is exactly what the Torrey Pines students wanted when creating it and promising it would be free forever.
“Our ultimate goal is to level the SAT playing field for students at underserved schools, and people who can’t afford the tools, and people who don’t have time for the tools,” van Betten said.
To use the free, personalized prep tool, visit satstar.lovable.app.
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