Top 15 Eliot Schrefer Quotes

As someone who attended six different public schools across America, went to Harvard, and subsequently became a tutor in Manhattan‘s affluent Upper East Side, I’ve witnessed firsthand the differences in learning styles between public school educations and private.

Anguish over the loss of a loved one or feelings of helplessness have complex roots. But in the end, they make you feel bad because they adjust your brain‘s chemistry. Happiness and its opposite are both electro-chemical reactions; those reactions are temporary and ineffable and could even have hidden benefits.

The College Board is both in the business of test administration and test prep. If this feels inherently unfair, it should – it’s like a doctor whacking your knee with a sledgehammer and then offering to patch you up.

Tutoring follows the lucrative philosophy of advertising: if you can manufacture a need, people with disposable resources will find ways to fill it.

Line up a group of Horace Mann students, interview them, and take a look at their resumes, and you’ll be hard pressed to pick out the students who require extra time. So then, what qualifies these students to receive special accommodations on the SAT?

In my business – SAT tutoring – you get used to sighs. A client‘s mother frets over the sheer amount of work her daughter has to do to get her score up, until she reaches the resigned moment when she will sigh and observe that no one thought you could prepare for the SAT back when she took it – it was ‘untutorable.’

Readers have always read high and low, and to fight that urge is to fight the freedom inherent in the act of reading itself. The only arguments that have any traction, as best as I can see it, are about whether the genre classification of ‘young adult‘ should exist at all.

Students raised on Park Avenue are born into family situations in which overachieving merely maintains the status quo, and therefore the market is primed for anyone offering services that provide an edge on local peers.

Higher SAT scores mean better college matriculation rates. So it’s no wonder that private schools in ultra-competitive environments would grease the qualifying process as much as possible.

Pick any scientific field, and you’ll find that those snubbed by their communities, left feeling alone and despised, were often those on the forefront.

Elite private-school educations leave students unprepared for a standardized test with which their public school counterparts are innately familiar.

The most important factor in college admissions is a test that benefits those who are least prepared for college.

Colleges accept the highest sub-scores from different administrations. So if a student takes the SAT many times instead of once, she has a larger pool of scores from which to pick out the highest math, critical reading, and writing.

I remember my guidance counselor, when I told her I wanted to apply to Harvard, she paused and said, ‘That’s in New York, right?’ The funny thing is, I didn’t really know. It was a few weeks before I was like, ‘No, I think it’s in Massachusetts.’

The fact is that the College Board’s products – the SAT, other standardized tests, the accompanying strategy guides – are sold at far higher than the cost to make them.