My 54 Year Love Affair With the SAT

• This essay deals first hand with a very influential man when it comes to todays testing and textbooks. The esay takes you through the first time Stanley Kaplan ever heard about the SAT to how he made a living prepairing kids to take it. The central argument was that the SAT weighed a great deal in the admissions of colleges because it dealt with the academic abaility of the student rather than the grades they had previously recieved.  It was a total new way of testing at the time and made kids use critical thinking rather than memorization.
• With this essay in particular i think its hard to say if the writer argued his point well or not. I dont feel like this piece was meant to argue that the SAT was beneficial or not. I think that it was more to show you his experience with it and to show the reader it was a new kind of test by telling the reader about how it was so much different than the other tests at the time. It also showed his enthusiasm to be teaching kids a new style of studying and comprehension.
• I think that this essay was really interesting because it showed how truley passionate Kaplan was and it makes reading his course material and textbooks more interesting. I think this effects me as a student because when the SAT first came out he was one of the few people teaching EVERYONE how to take it rather then the top 5% of a school that actually went of to college around the time it came out. I look back at my high school experience and I always skipped the PSAT and because i wasnt prepaired mentally and emotionally so I never took it. The writer goes into depth about how with practice you feel familiar and with that familiarity comes confidence.
• I chose 2 quotes that I really liked 1) Aquiring test-taking skills is the same as learning to play the piano or ride a bike. it reqiures practice, practice, practice. Repetition breeds familiarity. Familiarity breeds confidence. Confidence breeds success. I chose this quote because like i said earlier i can relate to this easily. I have mild test anxiety but when it came to the SAT i had  psyched myself out, crashing my confidence before i ever signed up to take it, resulting in me never taking and it in turn never applying to school. 2) "It was not a lack of ability but poor study habits, inadequate instructors, or a combination of the two that jeopardize students perfromance." I feel like this quote sums up CMS in one beautiful quote. (I would like to prefix this by reiterating that i did have a handful of great teachers) Because Myers Park was an IB/AP school the great teachers taught those classes while the rest of us were left with sub par teachers who werent nearly as excited to be there and teaching us.