coping with a low SAT score

floridadad55
Sat, 10 Mar 2012 02:00:41 +0000

I agree with student 2407 that this is a very pretentious post.

You can be a success in life without high SAT scores.

However, that being said, I do think that the SAT has great value.

I say this because many high schools hand out “A” grades like candy in this country.

My wife was a Calculus teacher, and she was under tremendous pressure from the principal to give out good grades, because the kids taking Calculus with her were the best students in that school, and that school naturally wanted their kids to go to to colleges. If a kid got a B or a C in her class, the parents would immediately call to complain about her. (rather than ask how their kid could do better)

Standardized tests expose such fraudulent activity. For example, if a kid gets an A in his AP class, but then gets a 1 or a 2 on his AP exam, this would tend to show that he did not deserve an A in the class.

I deplore those schools who have gone SAT optional. Basically, such schools don’t like the results of the test, so they declare the test to be unimportant.

I am always amazed when I see some kid on CC saying that they are valecdictorian, but that they only have a 1900 SAT score. Many kids explain away their low (relatively low) SAT scores by saying that they are not “good test takers”, but I am not sure what that means. How do you go through four years of college and be the valecdictorian without being a good test taker? The sad truth is that a kid in the middle of his class at a fancy private high school in Boston would probably be the valecdictorian at many public high schools.

I have found in life that those people who got high SAT scores are indeed more intelligent than the rest of us. However, I know of many people with high SAT scores who were not successes in the real world, and visa versa.