The schools are obsessed with perfecting their tests, trying to get inside our children’s minds for clues to success. Who knew that all the proctors really need is a bag of marshmallows and kitchen timer?

While researching for a recent interview with Ron McMillan, co-author of a new book called “Change Anything,” I came across a fascinating piece of research. The author and his colleagues recreated an experiment first done in the ’70s at Stanford University. They took each child into a room alone and put a marshmallow in front of him, telling him that if he could resist eating the marshmallow, later he would get two.

In the original experiment, the researchers then followed those children and determined that the children who successfully waited for the extra marshmallow reward outpaced their peers in many areas when they were 18 years old. They had higher confidence, were happier, were promoted more often, were more reliable and scored 210 points higher on the SAT test. The marshmallow test was twice as accurate at predicting later SAT test scores than IQ tests.

Who knew that methodically teaching children patience and impulse control with marshmallows could be as valuable for getting into college as flash cards with facts and figures?