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Wanna get a good score on the SAT? Forget studying - the (criminally)
smart way is to buy the perfect score.
Here's the story by Alison Stewart at 60 Minutes of how one really smart guy named Sam Eshaghoff ran a criminal enterprise of taking tests for profit (an academic gun for hire, if you will), and how he got caught:
Eshaghoff: As soon as I took that first test, and I went in and I killed it, like my first time ever taking the test for somebody else, I got a perfect score on the math section. It was like, "Whoa, that was easy and that was great. And I'm good at this."
It was clockwork from there. Over the course of nearly three years, he took the SAT over and over again, consistently scoring in the 97th percentile or higher for the students he called his "clients."
Eshaghoff: I mean my track record speaks for itself. Like if you know somebody's so stellar at doing something so flawlessly, without one exception it goes without saying: that's a reliable service.
Stewart: Were you invested at all in the score you would get?
Eshaghoff: Oh yeah, absolutely. Just like any other business person, you wanna have a good track record, right? And essentially like my whole clientele were based on word of mouth and like a referral system. So as soon as I, like, as soon as I saved one kid's life...
Is there a secret to scoring higher on the SAT? According to 14-year-old Milo Beckman, there is: just write longer essays, regardless of content.
A new study contends that if you write a longer SAT essay, you will get a higher SAT score, regardless of the content of your essay.
But that’s not the most surprising thing about the study. No, the most unusual thing is that this study was conducted by a 14-year-old high school student who is in the process of taking the test himself.
Milo Beckman, 14, has taken the SAT twice. The second time, he improved his score on the essay. Most students would be thrilled, but Milo was annoyed because he thought his second essay was inferior. [...]
Milo said his second essay did have one thing going for it: it was longer.
"My hypothesis is that longer essays on the SAT essay component score higher," he said.
So he asked his fellow students at New York City’s Stuyvesant High School to count how many lines they had written on their essays and to provide their scores. [...]
Milo says out of 115 samples, longer essays almost always garnered higher scores.
Elizabeth Leamy of ABC’s Good Morning America has the story: Link
Want to go to a good college? Besides doing your homework, studying hard, and acing the SAT, it sure helps if you weren’t born Asian.
While this isn’t exactly a new phenomenon ("overachieving" Asians have been blamed for ruining the curve and the college admission "reverse discrimination" charge has been around since before I went to college many, many moons ago), this article by Kara Miller at The Boston Globe does raise an interesting question: is the "Asian ceiling" a necessary evil in order to maintain a racially diverse college environment?
Princeton sociologist Thomas Espenshade, who reviewed data from 10 elite colleges, writes in “No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal’’ that Asian applicants typically need an extra 140 points to compete with white students. In fact, according to Princeton lecturer Russell Nieli, there may be an “Asian ceiling’’ at Princeton, a number above which the admissions office refuses to venture. [...]
A few years ago, however, when I worked as a reader for Yale’s Office of Undergraduate Admissions, it became immediately clear to me that Asians – who constitute 5 percent of the US population – faced an uphill slog. They tended to get excellent scores, take advantage of AP offerings, and shine in extracurricular activities. Frequently, they also had hard-knock stories: families that had immigrated to America under difficult circumstances, parents working as kitchen assistants and store clerks, and households in which no English was spoken.
But would Yale be willing to make 50 percent of its freshman class Asian? Probably not.
Indeed, as Princeton’s Nieli suggests, most elite universities appear determined to keep their Asian-American totals in a narrow range. Yale’s class of 2013 is 15.5 percent Asian-American, compared with 16.1 percent at Dartmouth, 19.1 percent at Harvard, and 17.6 percent at Princeton. [...]
In a country built on individual liberty and promise, that feels deeply unfair. If a teenager spends much time studying, excels at an instrument or sport, and garners wonderful teacher recommendations, should he be punished for being part of a high-achieving group? Are his accomplishments diminished by the fact that people he has never met – but who look somewhat like him – also work hard?
The following is a guest post by Charles
Horn, Emmy-nominated writer of Robot
Chicken and author of The
Laugh Out Loud Guide: Ace the SAT Exam without Boring Yourself to Sleep!
Whenever I tutor for the SAT, I invariably see either a boredom factor or a stress factor come into play. If they’re bored, they just won’t put in the effort, and if they’re too stressed, their learning ability becomes impaired. Comedy helps in both regards, because it reduces stress and keeps them interested and engaged. The other remarkable thing about comedy is that it actually increases recall as well, so they’ll remember the information better on test day (and apply the same concepts to the more boring SAT questions).
I won’t lie – Robot Chicken is still way more fun than studying for the SAT. But I figure if they’re going to be forced to take the dreaded test, at least they deserve to have a little fun along the way.
The Laugh Out Loud Guide: Ace the SAT Exam without Boring Yourself to Sleep!
1. Yo Momma so _______, when you mail her a letter, you need two zip codes.
(A) diaphanous
(B) luminous
(C) ravenous
(D) grisly
(E) corpulent
2. At a Saks Fifth Avenue store, Winona Ryder examines four distinct blouses, five distinct dresses, and two distinct handbags. How many different combinations of items can she shoplift if she takes exactly one blouse, two dresses, and a handbag?
3.My parents, Brad and Angelina, went to Vietnam and all they got me was this lousy brother.
(A) went to Vietnam and all they got me was this lousy brother
(B) went to Vietnam, all they got me was this lousy brother
(C) went to Vietnam, this lousy brother was all they got me
(D) went to Vietnam; and all they got me was this lousy brother
(E) went to Vietnam; and this lousy brother was all they got me
4. On a scale of 1 to 10, Warren’s hotness can be expressed as
a 
,
where a and b are positive integers and a
b.
If Warren’s hotness is equal to 2
,
what is the value of a – b?
(A) -10
(B) -1
(C) 0
(D) 1
(E) 10
5. Loading The Toddmeister
onto a gurney, the emergency
A
medical technicians, who happened
to be Kappa Omega
B
Kappa brothers themselves
and the winning team of the
C
2000 Chug-a-thon, was relieved
to see that the
D
championship drinking trophy was still out on display.
No error
E
6.
In the figure, if x = 5 - y, what is the value of y2 + 25?
(A) 7
(B) 32
(C) 39
(D) 56
(E) 64
7. After a _______ investigation, the inspector _______ that faulty wiring was foshizzle the cause of the fire that burned down Snoop Dogg’s hizzouse.
(A) lengthy, realized
(B) complete, prognosticated
(C) cursory, ruled
(D) thorough, determined
(E) copious, charged
ANSWERS:
Charles
Horn is the author of The
Laugh Out Loud Guide: Ace the SAT Exam without Boring Yourself to Sleep!
He is an Emmy-nominated comedy writer with credits including Robot Chicken and the Robot Chicken: Star Wars special, as well as The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. He also has a Ph.D. from Princeton University. Charles writes a blog and a comic strip. You can also check out his education-themed and other fun t-shirts.
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