Test-prep junkie takes exam most of us dread once a year

IOWA CITY - For most of us, the sweaty-palmed, brain-wracking experience of taking the SAT or ACT is one we have once, maybe twice, and then try to forget.

Adam Ingersoll, 41, of Iowa City, takes the SAT once a year, joining the tired and stressed-out teenagers with his No. 2 pencils and calculator to spend three-plus hours looking under the lid of the standardized test that serves as a gatekeeper to college admission.

Ingersoll, a 1993 Iowa Mennonite School graduate who moved back to Iowa from Los Angeles in 2012 after selling a real estate software startup for eight figures, believes in the SAT's power to help a poor kid with an erratic home life - which is how he started out - to get a top-notch education.

'In a perfect world, they (standardized tests) would reveal raw, latent potential and be an equalizer,” said Ingersoll, co-founder of the Compass Education Group, a test prep company focused on one-on-one tutoring for the SAT and other standardized tests. 'That is not always the reality. In my case, though, it was.”

Nomadic childhood

Ingersoll admits he has a colorful family. So much so that, rather than go into detail about his parents and six siblings, he sends links to news stories about brother Abe, who starred on 'Road Rules: Latin America” in the late 1990s; brother Chase, who, as a rookie lawyer, went after prostitution johns in Peoria; and about his parents.

When Adam Ingersoll was born in 1975, he said his folks were extricating themselves from a religious cult, the Children of God, known for handing out pamphlets and using sex to evangelize.

'My parents were both these very bright and interesting people who never quite found a niche in the society that suited them,” Ingersoll said. 'And they kept having one child after another. That amounted to us being, for most of my childhood, very to moderately poor. When I was very young, there were times we were borderline homeless.”

The family moved frequently, living in California, Washington state and Tiskilwa, Ill, where they were part of the Plow Creek Fellowship, a Mennonite commune of a few dozen families, Ingersoll said. There he met Tim Smith, who became a lifelong friend.

Ingersoll's mother, Dale, announced she was gay when he was in sixth grade, causing his parents to divorce and split up the kids.

Ingersoll was living with his father, Lewis, in Peoria in 1991, using a fake ID to work 40 hours a week at a grocery store while going to high school, when he decided to take a road trip to Wellman, where the Smith family had moved so Tim Smith's parents could teach at the private Iowa Mennonite School near Kalona.

'I was blown away by the rich basketball tradition at IMS,” Ingersoll said. 'I was, at least subconsciously, looking for an improved living situation.”

Finding his place

He moved in with the Smiths and finished school, playing basketball and meeting Brigette Nisley, who later would become his wife. He did well in school, becoming a National Merit finalist and earning an academic scholarship to the University of Southern California.

'In 1993, I'm a freshman at USC. I needed a part-time job,” Ingersoll said. 'I answered an ad in the school newspaper for in-home SAT tutors, paying $15 and hour, which sounded amazing.”

Ingersoll's Midwestern sensibility and status as a walk-on USC basketball player got him the job, which sent him to the homes of wealthy Los Angeles families for one-on-one SAT tutoring.

'One of the first students I tutored, her family had this palatial estate way up on a hill in Beverly Hills, which actually looked down on Sylvester Stallone's compound,” he said. 'We would occasionally see him tooling around with one of his cars.”

Ingersoll stuck with the company through college and by age 24, he was running the show. Owners sold the business to Sylvan Learning in 2000, but Ingersoll left to start his own company, Compass, in 2004.

The company, now with 35 full-time employees and 300 part-time instructors, focuses its one-on-one tutoring in California, but also is expanding into online tutoring.

Which bring us back to Ingersoll's penchant for taking the SAT.

'Anybody who works in test prep inhales everything they can about the test,” he said.

When Ingersoll sits for the SAT, he isn't memorizing questions to put them in his test-prep materials - that's illegal. He's seeing what experimental questions are included and trying to put himself in the shoes of a 16-year-old taking the test for the first time.

'There's just some street cred, some legitimacy, to putting yourself through that,” he said.

Ingersoll once took the ACT regularly, too, but allegations of cheating, mainly abroad, have caused ACT to bar test-prep employees, he said.

Concerns about bias

The SAT was introduced in 1926 as a way for colleges and universities to test aptitude, similar to I.Q. The Iowa-born ACT focused instead on mastery of information taught in school.

Revisions of the tests over the decades have attempted to address racial and socioeconomic bias, but concerns remain about the reasons whites, on average, score higher than other racial groups. Last year, the SAT got an overhaul to further reduce bias and more closely align questions with what students learn in their classes.

Of 2016 college-bound Iowa seniors, 878 took the SAT sometime during high school. More than 23,000 2016 Iowa graduates took the ACT.

A growing number of liberal arts colleges and universities - including some in Iowa - no longer require SAT or ACT scores for admission.

'Test optional is in some ways a counter movement, a backlash, against the success of companies like mine and all the painful evidence the tests provide impediments to disadvantaged students, who tend to be students of color,” Ingersoll said.

He's a little cynical about the motives of colleges and universities that go this route because it also makes their admissions process appear more competitive and most students still submit test scores.

Ingersoll favors making test prep available to more students. His company provides a free 80-page guide to testing and Compass works with school counselors to identify promising low-income students who would benefit from free one-on-one tutoring.

Adam and Brigette Ingersoll have four kids, with the oldest, Grace, in seventh grade. Ingersoll predicts he'll be a laid-back parent when Grace is ready to take the SAT or ACT. But maybe not that laid back.

'She would never in a million years allow me to be her tutor,” he said. 'But if she's willing to be tutored, I will get to handpick a tutor I think would be idea for her from our pool of 300. Which would probably be one of our tutors who is a working actor, as Grace loves theater.”

l Comments: (319) 339-3157; erin.jordan@thegazette.com