Tucked inside a long essay on the challenges of getting a kid into college these days, I noticed these interesting snippets:
Although originally devised as alternatives, counselors now tell students to take both the SAT and the ACT and submit the score of the one they do best on. These tests are in addition to at least three SAT II “achievement” tests and, of course, a battery of Advanced Placement exams for those rigorous courses they are counseled to take. Pile on top of these the now de rigueur SAT and ACT review courses — at, not incidentally, anywhere from $700 to $3,000 a pop.
Emphasis mine. Why is test prep now de rigueur, I wonder? I consider the ACT and SAT to be solid but not overly-challenging exams. Why isn't it de rigueur for parents to question why their kid is frightened of math and verbal items after 10 or 11 years in the public school system? Why isn't it de rigueur to wonder why test prep is even necessary?
And in this case, it wasn't.
Our son, a motivated student with top grades and a challenging academic program, is a very good, but not spectacular, standardized test-taker. Friends with children at other schools told us that kids had to have 1500 SAT’s to be in the admissions hunt at top-echelon colleges...even if it meant going to a lesser member of the “nifty 50” group of colleges, our son eschewed review courses on the grounds that he already had a heavy schedule and would rather read some good books than spend hours taking boring SAT or ACT prep classes. Obviously, we had done something right in his education, but we were definitely out of the mainstream.He opted not to take the SAT at all, and ended up scoring in the 99th percentile on the ACT after doing some test prep at home on his own. This he was proud of, because, as he said, he isn’t a wiz at standardized tests, and he didn’t take an expensive prep course. I suppose it was a kind of reverse snobbery (“anyone can do well if they take a prep course, but I did it on my own”) and a real sign of the times in the selective college admissions world.
Kudos to this family for ignoring what's "de rigueur." The entire article is definitely worth a read.
Posted by kswygert at July 12, 2005 08:52 AM