Saturday, March 2, 2013

SAT Scores and College

The New York Times Choice blog here discusses the option some colleges offer of applying without submitting SAT scores.  Some students just feel tests shouldn't be used, but most who don't send scores have taken the SAT and are not happy with the result.  The blog discusses the pros and cons of not sending scores:


There is another option low-testing students can take, and that is to become an avid reader—of anything!—at least a year before taking the SAT.

As a high school English teacher for 37 years, I saw again and again that the high-scoring students were the avid readers.  The kids who thought they were “poor testers” were almost always students who worked hard and were bright, but read only what they had to for class. 

A remember one year a parent asked me to coach her daughter so she could get into Stanford with mediocre SAT scores.  It was a boarding school, and I simply got her daughter reading—bodice-ripper romances as I remember.  She read all the time. Within a year her verbal score had risen a hundred points, and she was admitted.

I don’t think many people understand that sophisticated reading skills are a result of falling in love with books, and forming a habit of reading

1 comment:

  1. That method worked for my brother. My scores were high; his PSAT scores were not high; he read for a year, and his scores went way up.

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