How I Learned to Take the SAT Like a Rich Kid - The New York Times - 0 views
www.nytimes.com/...e-the-sat-like-a-rich-kid.html
test SAT test-prep college admission wealth inequality
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I’m from Flint, Mich., and even though I recently transferred to a private Catholic high school in my city, top tier-education is new to my family.
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Stanford researchers found, for example, that sixth graders in our town are two to three grade levels behind the national average. They are almost five grade levels behind students in more prosperous counties 30 miles away.
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The friends I made at Phillips Exeter were from fancy-sounding towns and seemed to have it all. Most attended prestigious private or highly ranked public schools. They were impossibly sporty, charming and intelligent
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they were clearly affluent, but they also came from diverse backgrounds. They had been on exotic vacations and had volunteered for the needy. They were truly interesting people.
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So I didn’t understand why so many of them were enrolled in the optional SAT prep section of our summer program. Why would such impressive high achievers spend their summer nights storming through a massive SAT book? Many of them already took weekend SAT prep courses back home.
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the kids at Exeter saw summer academic programs as normal and enjoyable. I was happy to be around so many fellow nerds. Still, they approached studying for the SAT with a near-professional intensity that was alien to me.
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I realized that they didn’t just want to score exceptionally well on the SAT. They were gunning for a score on the Preliminary SAT exams that would put them in the top percentile of students in the United States and make them National Merit Scholars in the fall.
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The majority of low- and middle-income 11th graders I know in Michigan didn’t even sit for the preliminary exams. Most took the SAT cold. Few were privy to the upper-middle-class secret I discovered that summer: To get into elite colleges, one must train for standardized tests with the intensity of an athlete.
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My newfound friends worked extremely hard, but they also seemed to have access to a formula for success that had been kept from the rest of us.
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I had opted out of Exeter’s SAT prep. So the following fall, when I posted a so-so SAT score, I went into Super-ZIP-kid mode.I couldn’t afford a $3,000 40-hour prep course or tutor. But I could take out test prep books at the public library. There were very few checkout stamps on the book jackets, so I kept renewing them. I also took a $99 online program I heard about on NPR and Khan Academy’s free SAT section. On Saturdays, I commuted an hour each way to Ann Arbor for a free test-prep program at the University of Michigan.
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My post-prep score saw a solid pop, and that awarded me access to tens of thousands in automatic merit awards to local colleges. I was encouraged to throw my hat in the ring at some more selective universities.
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This past month, I watched many of these friends dazzle their social media followers with acceptance letters from Northwestern, Harvard, Williams and Duke, as well as six-figure Presidential Scholarships to various public universities.