SAT

This is the third in my series aimed at trying to decrease the level of stress that many students feel regarding the SAT, ACT, and the college admissions process. For the previous posts click HERE and HERE.

In this post I would like to discuss something more general that I had actually planned to bring up in a later post, but the recent publication of an opinion piece in the NY Times by writer Frank Bruni has compelled me to discuss the issue now (Bruni’s piece was very popular and for a few days was the most emailed story in the NY Times). Whereas my previous posts were more about the SAT and ACT themselves, this post will be more about college itself: why does one go to college, what should one look to get out of college, which college is the right college to choose, and how important is it to attend one of the “elite” colleges?

Especially here in New York there is a tremendous emphasis placed on going to the “right” college and many kids get thrust at a very young age into the high stress, high stakes game of trying to prepare for acceptance to the elite schools. In the aforementioned article Frank Bruni tends to make the case that it doesn’t matter very much what college you attend. I think that view is a little bit extreme and distorted so I don’t want to pretend that it doesn’t matter at all (part of his point is just that so few of the people who we as a society view as hugely “successful” went to one of the “elite” colleges). Having gone to Yale I can say that a degree from one of the very top schools certainly opens some doors in life. That said, I think that that effect is limited to the top 10 schools or so. Having a degree from, say, Notre Dame or UVA (both top 25 schools in the latest US News and World Report Rankings) does not necessarily give you an advantage over having a degree from a lower ranked school, say an Indiana or one of the better SUNY schools (in fact in NY most people recognize the top SUNY schools like Binghamton as being excellent schools that provide a top notch education).

One of Bruni’s points is that it matters less and less what school you went to the further you get from college. What matters more is how you perform in college and more importantly what you do after college. When you are 30 years old and looking for a job, your work experience is much more important that what school you graduated from. And when you are 35 or 40 or 45 your alma mater is virtually insignificant.

Another issue to raise in the discussion is what do you hope to get out of college? Bruni makes the point that college should be viewed as an opportunity, a chance to expand your horizons, try new things, perhaps move away from home, etc. Why choose to go to a school that many of the people you know are going to or that is extremely popular within your community? College really is a unique opportunity in the sense that is a liberating time when you don’t have a ton of responsibility – many people don’t get that chance again in life (after college they take a job, have kids, and then never again get to experience the freedom and possibility that college represents). So to fixate on the big-name schools that most people focus on is really to limit your horizons and possibly miss taking advantage of an opportunity that may only come along once in your life.

Furthermore, college should obviously be about learning and thriving, but that does not necessarily happen best at the top schools. Many would argue that the small liberal arts schools (like Williams and Vassar) provide the best education because the classes are very small and the focus is really on undergraduate education (many of the bigger schools, by comparison, place an emphasis on graduate education). Yet many of these small liberal arts schools are not on the radar screen of high school students because they are not the big-name schools that many people have heard of.

College is largely what you make of it. Again, I wouldn’t dispute that if you go to Harvard or Yale you may always be able to use that very fact to impress people regardless of how you perform at those schools. But that really only applies to the top 5 or 10 schools if it even applies at all. And sometimes it is better to be a big fish in a small pond rather than a small fish in a big pond. Once you are at college you have a wealth of opportunities in front of you and you might find that you have more opportunities (and less competition perhaps) in a smaller or slightly less well-known school. It is pretty hard to be on a professor’s radar screen at a place like Harvard, where everyone is trying to get on the professor’s radar screen and where all of the students are extremely bright (anecdotally, when I was at Yale I took a seminar on Nazi Germany and there was a student in the class who chose to read all of the books in German even though he was a native-English speaker….I mean, come on!!!). And if you stand out at the school you attend that makes it much easier to catapult into whatever you choose to do when you finish college.

There is one more thing to consider that can really have a great impact on which colleges you get accepted to and which one you choose to attend. Certain schools tend to be very popular among applicants from a certain region and this makes it exceedingly difficult to get into those schools. When I was in high school on Long Island that school was University of North Carolina. For an in-state candidate the school was probably difficult but not impossible to get into, but from Long Island it was almost impossible to get in because so many people applied there and they were only going to accept a certain number of out-of-state candidates and from among that pool only a very small percentage from Long Island. On the flip side, however, there are schools that are really not popular among applicants from a certain region and some of these colleges are top schools. Again when I was in high school my brother was admitted to Vanderbilt, generally considered the Harvard of the South, even though he wasn’t admitted to any other schools of that caliber. The reason is that at the time not many people from Long Island applied there. So there are really excellent, top-notch schools that are relatively easier to get into from a certain areas – one just needs to stop following the herd and obsessing over the handful of schools that are popular within one’s crowd.

Getting back to the original purpose of this post, if you are competing for one of the very few spots at the very top schools (schools that have acceptance rates of around 5%) you are necessarily setting yourself up for a high stress game. If instead you take a step back and try to think about college from a novel perspective and open your mind to all of the possibilities out there, you are likely to reduce your level of stress and be a happier person. And I am in the business of making people happy.

This is the second post in my series on “Reasons Not to Worry.” Again my motivation here is to try to reduce the level of stress for people since it is really heart-wrenching for me to see some of my students worry obsessively about the test. A little bit of worry is often healthy because it motivates you into action, but when that worry becomes all-consuming it is no longer productive and it makes me very sad to see this sort of thing happen with students.

So, in the previous “Reasons Not to Worry” post I wrote about the fact that “score totals” don’t matter as much as individual section scores and the fact that you can retake the SAT multiple times to try to get better section scores. In this post, I would like to continue that theme of not putting too much emphasis on any one test sitting by discussing two more related points.

First of all, the SAT is only one of the standardized test options – there is always the ACT. All schools now accept both the SAT and ACT without bias. It doesn’t matter which test you take. Here on the East coast most people still take the SAT, but a growing number of students opt for the ACT and a seemingly bigger number opt to take both. In fact, many of the students that I tutor who do very, very well on the SAT end up taking the ACT also, just to give themselves an opportunity to shine on a different exam.

There are 2 significant points to make about the ACT that are relevant to this discussion. First of all, if things are not going that well with the SAT, it might be that you are better off with the ACT, so again there is no reason to get overly stressed or overly upset about the SAT. A second important point is that if you consider that you could take the SAT 3 or 4 or even 5 times and that you could do the same with the ACT, you could theoretically have upwards of 10 chances to shine on these college entrance examinations. To some people that would sound like a nightmare scenario and I don’t mean to imply that that would be ideal – obviously most people want to be done with the SAT/ACT as quickly as possible. I only mean to suggest that one need not get so stressed about how the test is going to go because most students take these exams multiple times and really there is almost no limit to how many chances you have to perform well. I have had many students who have taken both exams 3 times and I have had some who have taken them more. Additionally I have had some students who didn’t really have succesful outings for the first 4 or 5 tries and then finally after taking the SAT 3 times and then the ACT 4 times (or something like that) finally nailed it and achieved the score that they were hoping for. Again the point is that no one sitting of the test matters that much and for many people it takes a handful of tries to either piece together a really good score (through superscoring) or achieve the kind of single test performance that they were looking for.

There is one more point to make. Increasingly schools are choosing not to require the SAT or ACT. Now, most schools still require them and I think that most of the top schools (the Harvards and Yales, etc.) will probably always require them, but there are some excellent schools out there that are now test optional. Some examples include Bowdoin, Wesleyan, Brandeis, Wake Forest and hundreds of others, including many top schools. If you would like to learn more, visit http://www.fairtest.org/ (this is one of the organizations that is spearheading the push to get colleges to demphasize or completely do away with standardized testing). If you want to go right to a list of the top schools that are “test optional” go to http://www.fairtest.org/sites/default/files/Optional-Schools-in-U.S.News-Top-Tiers.pdf.

So again, these are just some more reasons not to worry. Between the SAT and ACT there is almost no limit to how many times you can take the test in order to achieve a score that you are happy with. And if all else fails, there are many hundreds of schools, even top-ranked ones, that don’t even require any standardized tests at all. There are still more reasons not to get too upset or worried about the SAT/ACT, reasons that I will touch on in future posts, so stay tuned!

This is one of my favorite topics to broach with students in part because most students don’t understand the fundamental issue that I am going to discuss here and in part because it is such a crucial issue on the Critical Reading section of the SAT. Usually when I begin tutoring someone in Reading Comprehension I ask them what percent of the passages on the SAT are fiction? Usually I get an answer like 90% or 75% or something in that range, even from students who have already been preparing for the test for a long time. The actual answer is that there is usually only 1 fiction passage on the test and that everything else is non-fiction.

This is important for several reasons that I have alluded to in previous posts, but before I get to that I want to discuss how to determine whether a passage is fiction or non-fiction. Well it is always crucial to read the little blurb that precedes each passages since it gives you some context for what you are about to read. However, I am always a little surprised (though perhaps I shouldn’t be at this point) when my students don’t realize that the words “novel” and “short story” in the blurb indicate that the passage is a work of fiction. When I first started tutoring many years ago I took it for granted that students would know what those words implied, but I realized after some time that many students did not in fact know. Well let me state it directly, “novel” and “short story” both indicate that you are dealing with a work of fiction!

Again, this knowledge is important for several reasons.

First of all works of fiction require a slightly different approach than non-fiction passages. In both cases it is crucial to focus on the intention of the author and how his or her reveals that intention, but details are definitely more important on fiction passages as one often has to pick up on the description of the characters or the setting of the scene. And mood is more important on fiction passages than on non-fiction ones. It is honestly hard for me to imagine reading a SAT passage and NOT knowing beforehand whether it is fiction or non-fiction and yet the truth is that most test takers probably don’t even make the distinction!

The other thing to point out is that the fiction passages are often very hard and for many test takers they are the hardest passages on the test. From a time management and strategy perspective, therefore, sometimes it makes sense to skip the fiction passage when it appears and deal with the other passages that appear in that section first. Obviously, however, this strategy is predicated on the ability to actually indentify the fiction passage when it comes along.

Ultimately, although being able to determine which passage is the fiction passage is important, the bigger issue really is that most students believe that everything or nearly everything that appears on Reading Comprehension is actually fiction! This gets to the larger problem that I have written about in other posts that most students are not really exposed to the kind of non-fiction reading that appears on the SAT, which is of course why they have trouble recognizing it when they see it.

Nevertheless, once my students start to learn how to approach the non-fiction passages and learn too that there is usually only one fiction passage on the test, they sometimes struggle to differentiate between the two. So let me state it one more time: always read the blurb that appears before each passage and when you see the words “novel” or “short story” understand that you are about to read a fiction passage!!!