Just over 0.2% of students got a 1600 on the SAT in 2018. Not at all common. Where is this idea that 800 is not unusual? I couldn’t find a number on how many got 800 on each section, but 7% got a score between 700 and 800 on ERW and 9% on math. It can be presumed that more of those scores are in the 700s than are 800 so again not common.
In the 1970s, I got over 1400 on the SAT and knew several other kids from our highly ranked HS who did even better and we did not get into the Ivys. That was the height of the baby boom and also schools were not need blind. Plus there were still a lot of NY suburban kids vying for seats in the Ivys. I went to a great college full of smart kids that did not get into an Ivy. And the wealthy kids in my area were taking SAT prep classes.
Exactly UCBalumnus. SAT was never an IQ test with a very high ceiling. And the higher ceiling on the verbal was based on vocabulary words and analogies. I still remember the word spelunker on the SAT I took. I had never heard of it. Not sure that knowing or not knowing that word measured much of anything.
To add more anecdotes to Data10’s post - our very middling high school just north of the City also sends a bunch of kids to Cornell. Even more get in who don’t go because they go to other similar schools they like even better. If anything I think it’s easier to stand out at a school where everyone isn’t gunning for the same dozen schools.
I went to a girl’s school and graduated in 1973, a year after a bunch of Ivies went co-ed. My recollection is that those with scores over 1400 got into Ivy’s or the equivalent LACs. My best friend got into Yale (off the waitlist) with scores around 1300. U. Penn was my safety school with a score of 1470.
Everyone loves to debate the abstract, without looking at the reality of the situation in NYC’s specialized schools. The SHSAT is scored very weirdly to overlook low performance on one portion of the test (math or verbal) if the other is exceptionally high. Many recent immigrants with limited English proficiency get admitted because they do very well on the math portion. The reason so many Stuyvesant grads go to CUNY is because their English skills are too poor for more competitive colleges and they need to be close to home to help their families. Do most NYers (or Americans) think that a student who can barely speak English but gets two more math questions right is more “meritorious” than one who scores better than 95% of other test takers on both portions?
In addition, people outside the NYC Chinese-American community don’t really understand how extensive the Chinese test prep business is. They are direct copies of “buxiban” or cram schools in China. Chinese parents are acculturated to send their children to test prep cram schools from an early age to prepare them for China’s middle school entrance exams, high school entrance exams, and college “gaokao” exams. The extensive system of cram schools is a core feature of the Chinese education system and paying tuition for these programs is considered a measure of parenting. A parent who doesn’t pay for them, no matter how poor, is considered a failure. The cram schools are strictly about teaching to the test, exploiting the test quirks, following the program, and doing what you’re told. There is absolutely no room for the love of learning, critical thinking, or independent thought. Perfect for a living in an illiberal state, but is it best in a democracy?
Non-Chinese really do not have access to these cram schools. Most are known only by word or mouth or ads in Chinese media. Many NYC cram schools are conducted in Chinese, not English. And because their are so many Chinese cram schools in NY, they are much cheaper than comparable test prep programs for non-Chinese. So an African-American or Latino student has no way to prepare for the SHSAT the way a low-income recent Chinese immigrant from Flushing does. Should black and brown kids be expected to make up for the advantages of an entire parallel Chinese education system on their own?.
Thank you for posting this. It is the God’s honest truth, and I think it’s something that people who don’t live here don’t understand. The prep is nothing like a Princeton Review or Kaplan course, and some of the material on the test is never taught in schools.
I kind of disagree with @zoosermom and @SlowPop .There are lots of prep courses in English. Some, admittedly, are very pricey. See Kweller, for example. Khan Academy used to offer classes; I’m not sure it still does.
You can buy test prep books for the test and self study, just as you can for the SAT and ACT. Public libraries have these test prep books.
The NYC schools offer free prep classes. They’ve had trouble filling the seats some years and the drop-out rate is high. URM grads of Bx Science and Tech offer a free course. As I said above, Khan Academy offered a prep class. Khan, who is a Bronx Science grad, offered scholarships to these classes a few years ago. He sent info to middle schools and did it for at least 2 years. He could not fill all the spots. https://www.wnyc.org/story/why-test-prep-may-be-key-improving-diversity-citys-specialized-high-schools/
So, he put a course on the free online version of Khan Academy. Three of the seven Black kids who got into Stuy this year took his free online course. One Hispanic kid who got in did too. Another 20 Black and Hispanic kids who used the free Kahn prep course got into other specialized high schools. https://nypost.com/2019/03/19/the-real-issue-on-elite-high-school-admissions/
So, cost isn’t the barrier here. And while I am not usually a fan of the NY Post, I salute it for mentioning the free Khan course in its story about the results.
No matter how you try to spin it, IMO, more Asian kids WANT to go to the Specialized High Schools and are willing to spent the effort to study for them than Black and Hispanic kids. And, if you’re not an ostrich, you know that most of the Black kids who get in aren’t from “real” “African-American” families. They have West Indian or African roots; some are immigrants themselves.
Oh, and BTW @SlowPop , Hunter College High School, another more humanities focused selective high school, uses a different admission process.
Hunter starts in 7th grade. You take the test in 6th grade. To take the test, you must score 90% or higher on BOTH the math and English Language Arts achievement tests in 5th grade. In other words, a composite score of 90% or better isn’t good enough to sit for the exam.
The exam has 2 sections: one math, one verbal. You also have to write an essay on a specified topic. After both sections are scored, the essays are read. Even if you achieve a high score, you won’t get in if you don’t write an acceptable essay. Every year, there are kids who exceed the cut-off score for the multiple choice portion of the test who get rejected because their essay isn’t good enough.
Jonri, I apologize if I wasn’t clear. There are absolutely prep classes in English - as I posted earlier, my D took one back in her year. But they are vastly different than some of the Chinese language situations, which are more lifestyle choices than prep courses. they last for years and take over lives. My issue isn’t with the test but, rather, that I think it could be communicated better, particularly in the Asian immigrant community, what a fantastic array of other options there are and how successful graduates from those other programs are. I often wonder how many Asian kids want to go to the specialized schools versus Asian parents.
Considering that immigration from many countries to the US has a selection effect in favor of highly motivated and/or highly educated people, is it that surprising that the kids of such immigrants are often high academic performers?
Oh, @zoosermom I TOTALLY agree with your post #108. I thought you were saying that Chinese-Americans do better on the SHSAT because they have better, cheaper test prep available to them than African-American and Hispanic kids.And @SlowPop said
. I’ll buy the second half of that sentence but NOT the claim their English is too poor to go to more competitive colleges. After 4 years at Stuy taking the required curriculum, it would be a very rare kid who had English skills which aren’t good enough for more competitive colleges.
I think among other reasons, two of the reasons why so many Stuyvesant grads go to CUNY are (1) they are poor. As we know, even with great stats, it’s still hard for a poor family to send its children to sleep away colleges, and (2) some families/cultures don’t really see the need for the whole dorming experience.
A lot of people in this thread seem to have a strong distaste for test prep. In affluent parts of LA (where I’m from) most white families send their kids to activities like tutoring, dance, sports, and music that are very intensive and take lots of time and money. The kids aren’t always interested or motivated either.
(By the way, outside of some majority Asian suburbs the public schools are very bad in this area. Most white families of all socioeconomic classes send their kids to private schools.)
It strikes me as very hypocritical and racially motivated that people are critical of Chinese parents for doing the same thing with their children. And these families are often low income and ESL, and they get criticized for staying in their own communities and using their native language. Now we can see where a lot of the motivation to increase “diversity” and change objective evaluation metrics comes from.
Isn’t it more like more Asian parents want their kids to go to those high schools? Given the age at which test prep typically begins, I think it’s unrealistic to assume that the motivation starts with the kids. I mean, are these kids even given a choice in the matter when their parents sign them up for the test prep?
The point I was trying to make is that there are structural explanations for the lack of diversity at the specialized high schools in NYC. A poor recent immigrant from Fuzhou doesn’t need to know how to teach her child to do well. To be a good parent, she knows she has to sacrifice to pay to send him to a cram school like all the neighbors do – just as she would have done back in China. And he has to do what he is told. Black and Latino students don’t have that infrastructure to rely on. Nor do low and moderate income whites, who are pretty underrepresented too.
What is an individual Black or Latino child supposed to do to when they don’t have access to the same system? According to that NY Post story, Khan succeeded in getting all of three kids across the line. A series of Khan Academy web videos is not equivalent to many years of formal instruction in cram schools. It requires heroic effort or incomparable talent to compete with what is simply standard-operating-procedure for others.
FWIW, @jonri Hunter also admits about 1/4 of its high school class from Hunter Elementary where admission is limited to Manhattan residents who can pay $350 for a psychologist to administer the Stanford Binet IQ test to your four year old.
@zoosermom Agree with you on both points. Low to mid income Asian American families are not going to take loans etc to do the sleepaway college experience. Mine didn’t. It’s a cultural thing.
I live in the ny/nj metro area in a mostly white upper middle class suburb that echoes many of the sentiments posted here. I hear this narrative about the pushy Asian parents and test prep. But sports since preschool is okay even if kid has no interest? It’s okay to practice and work hard at lacrosse or soccer but not expend that effort for academics? We do not push excessively for either, but make sure kiddos are working to their potential.
I detect a certain uneasiness that a growing minority population is performing at a high level in academics even when the family is low income. Even when the parents are uneducated , speak no English, and are working in menial jobs. It is such a huge counterexample to the income inequality narrative. And what about the many African and West Indian immigrants who also push their kids towards education? No one is attacking their parenting style, or cultural values or whatever. Perhaps they’re not viewed as big a threat to the status quo hierarchy?
I hope I haven’t given the impression that I judge test prep harshly because I don’t. I just think it is myopic after a certain point. There are so many great programs that I just don’t think it’s necessary or even beneficial to all kids.
It’s not a high ceiling on the verbal section and/or weighting at the tails that primarily makes a test easy/hard to prep for is. What makes test easy/hard to prep for is primarily the test content and the available of test prepping material and strategies. For example, the old pre-1995 SAT emphasized vocabulary. I’d expect vocabulary to be fairly difficult to prep for, if there is a large number of possible words on the test. As a hypothetical example (I realize this is not how the old SAT worked), suppose test makers randomly selected among 2000 obscure vocabulary words. Taking a one time test prep class for a few hours probably isn’t going to be much help. They might teach some strategies for eliminating possible choices, if you don’t know the words or guessing based on similar words/roots, but students aren’t going to learn thousands of vocabulary words over a few hours. A student who spends months prepping and manages 50-100 new words each week could make more of a dent in their score, but even then, it would probably be more efficient to focus time on other exam sections that are easier to prep for.
Rather than vocabulary, the SHSAT emphasizes 7th grade common core taught material. For example, a few years ago, the SHSAT replaced their logic type questions with 20 questions related to 7th grade common core literacy material. An example of one of the field test questions is below. This type of question seems more easy to prep for than trying to memorize hundreds (or thousands) of vocabulary words. To prep, one needs to review the 7th grade common core language arts material, including use of commas in separating coordinating adjectives. Most students should have access to these materials, the SHSAT offers practice tests, there are free SHSAT test prep options, etc.
Making a test that is easy or hard to prep for is not automatically a good or bad thing. Instead it depends on what you are trying to measure. For example, if you are trying to predict HS GPA, then it’s possible to have a better predictive ability with tests that give more benefit to students who prep than students who don’t bother to study. Students who study class material in preparation for the SHSAT are probably more likely to study class material in preparation for their HS exams, which is a key component of having a high HS GPA.
They go mostly unnoticed because the population of other black people in the US is much larger. You can observe a similar thing with recent white immigrants from Europe and the overall white population in the US.
So I feel like we’re all converging on the same basic truths here. We all largely share the same personal views on the test prep (it’s fair, it helps a little bit, but we don’t necessarily want our own kids to do it) and about the realities of the NYC school system.
Where I think we diverge–and this is perhaps the most important point–is the wisdom or value of forcibly racially integrating these schools by changing the criteria and biasing it against people of Asian descent. I would love to see black and Latino students succeed at prestigious schools, but I’m not willing to do it by making government policy targeting other particular races.
And this is exactly right—the backlash against Asian success is because they didn’t have the right skin color to blend in.