Decision Hygiene
Cognitive Biases and Test Prep Strategy
A lot of people don't like test prep. You might hear critics say that it’s “just tips and tricks" or that it "only teaches you how to take a test". Of course, I disagree. As you prepare for a test like the SAT or ACT, you learn to parse difficult texts, interpret data, and apply math to real-world problems. These skills are very valuable in college and real life.
But good test prep teaches students something else too. It's very important, and we don't talk about it enough: Test prep teaches you how to make good decisions under pressure.
We're not the only ones interested in good decision-making. Surgeons care about it. So do judges and investors and business owners. In fact, everyone wants to know how to avoid mistakes, especially when they are making important decisions. And that’s why there is a gold mine of research on this topic – decades and decades of work on how the mind works, how it fails, and how we can avoid these failures.
In this series1 of posts, I’m going to explore some of this research2 and its connections to test prep. Loss aversion, the availability heuristic, anchoring and many other cognitive biases affect us all, but test prep is one of the few areas in which students directly face these biases and learn strategies for recognizing and avoiding them.
The title of this series is taken from Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment, and it’s the same one I used for a presentation at the National Test Prep Associations national conference in 2022.
In addition to Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment, I’ll also be relying on Thinking, Fast and Slow, The Checklist Manifesto, and Superforecasting.