“nonchalant” and “abjure,” but also canny strategies like eliminating patently wrong choices so guesses will be more focused, thus reducing penalties for wrong answers. “If you’re certain two of the five choices are wrong, then answer that question,” their teacher Clayton Harding instructed them. “Then you have a one-in-three chance of getting it right.”</p>
<p>The course, paid for with a $100,000 federal grant, is intended to help poor and immigrant runners in the Armory’s program decipher the often complex college admissions process. Malia, Dieubi, Altagracia and the other 35 students have already taken three sessions in which they learned how to choose a college, charm a reader on an essay, scout out financial aid and conduct oneself during an interview.</p>
<p>“They taught me don’t use the word ‘like’ or don’t say ‘ummmm,’ ” said Malia, a 400-meter runner from Paul Robeson High School in Brooklyn whose parents are immigrants from Haiti and Jamaica. “Take a deep breath. Try to focus on what you have to say. Be polite, as respectful as possible.”</p>
<p>For such students, the playing field is being leveled — just a few notches, but in significant ways. Suburban or upscale city youngsters are more likely to afford SAT prep courses that cost $1,000 and up, have parents who have been through the admissions rigmarole, and attend high schools where counselors focus on fewer students. </p>
<p>To borrow a track metaphor, students like those at Robeson do not begin at the same starting line as students from the suburbs, though they want to reach the same finishing line. Look at the contrast with a suburban school like Mamaroneck in Westchester County. There, perhaps 70 percent of the students have college-educated parents and perhaps 90 percent buy outside tutoring, Bob Sweeney, a counselor at the school, estimated. “The guidance service helps students through the maze in filling out applications, helps them put an essay together, points them in the right direction,” Mr. Sweeney said. “Sometimes the kids are so overwhelmed by paperwork they just can’t get started.”</p>
<p>Counselors at public urban high schools may do as good a job, but they are “swamped,” said Richard Carlin, an assistant coach at Sheepshead Bay High School who helps Armory runners with their essays. A typical public school counselor handles 300 students, not the 185 in Mamaroneck.</p>
<p>Until Malia and Dieubi and most of the other students began the coaching, college was a fuzzy place on the horizon, as dreamlike as a royal palace, and the road toward it might as well have been hidden by jungle. In many cases, parents could not help find the path. Dieubi, 17, a middle-distance runner at Wingate Educational Campus in Brooklyn, said his mother, a Haitian immigrant who did not complete high school, “can offer me moral support or tell me whether a decision is right or not, but other than that she doesn’t know about the logistics of application or financial aid.”…</p>
<p>The question a program like Armory’s raises is why, if college has become as necessary as high school was a half century ago, aren’t more public high school students — and not just athletes — receiving this kind of assistance? Even here, the students get only 10 hours of SAT practice, a sharp contrast to as many as 30 hours they would get at Princeton Review. But that is far better than zero hours.</p>
<p>The program began four years ago, and there are no results yet. Derrick Adkins, a 1996 Olympic hurdles gold medalist who directs the foundation’s educational development, said that before ProTesters was hired, the Armory used Columbia students whose high SAT scores sometimes did not equip them to understand issues facing students with very low ones.</p>
<p>One thing seems clear. Students like James Hubbard like the idea that the prep courses are given in a setting different from school. “It gives us a chance to get away from school and it lets us know that besides school there are more people out there who care about us,” he said.