Stanley Kaplan

Opened a one-room tutoring shop in his parents' Brooklyn basement and spent 40 years proving the College Board wrong about whether the SAT could be prepped.

Stanley Kaplan was 19 in 1938 when he opened Kaplan Educational Centers in his parents' basement in Brooklyn. He charged $64 to tutor students for the SAT — which was new, and which the College Board insisted measured innate aptitude that could not be coached. Kaplan disagreed, and proved it with data. Repeating the test produced reliable score gains. The College Board denied this publicly for 40 years, banning practice tests, refusing to release real exam questions, and dismissing prep companies as fraud. In 1979 the Federal Trade Commission investigated and concluded that Kaplan's prep produced an average gain of about 25 points per section — modest but real, and replicable. The College Board began releasing official practice tests in the 1980s and now publishes them itself. Today about 55% of SAT takers sit the test more than once; the median gain on retake is around 30 points on the 1600 scale; and roughly 1 in 8 retakers gain 100 points or more — a small but real fraction who jump multiple percentile bands by the simple act of doing it again. The score, like the leadership stage, is something you walk toward by repeating the walk.