Sunday, October 26, 2014

The Cost of Success

This Saturday I took my first ACT test. For that one test I had prepared for several months, taking practice tests and meeting with a tutor to maximize my score out of 36. The tutoring did help me improve my score but what it also showed me is that the ACT is not a measure of any student's actual aptitude. The ACT is a measure of how well you can take an ACT. My tutor didn't teach me any new information; all I learned were strategies on how to manage time, on how to manipulate the test, and how to go about each separate section. Without a professional feeding me tips, my score might well have been a few points lower, but I would be no more or less prepared to go to college.

If my family couldn't afford a tutor, I likely would have done worse on the test. The few points that I may have earned because of my training could be the difference between meeting a top tier college's requirements or not. It would be a nearly impossible monetary commitment to get tutoring for a family near or below the poverty line. It would be a very hard thing to do even with modest means. What the ACT is effectively doing is making it very hard--no matter someones actual aptitude--for someone in a low income family to go to a very good school. A table of the average scores at top schools can be seen here.

4 comments:

  1. Henry, you bring up an excellent point in this post and I can relate to your point very well. I happened to also take the ACT this past Saturday. Through my few months of prep for the test, I found very similar conclusions to what you talked about. I didn't learn any new knowledge whatsoever with my tutoring. However, I learned to take the test much better and familiarized myself with it greatly. I think the ACT test is relatively dumb in terms of colleges judging your intelligence. It is a test that awards people scores based on how well familiar they are with the test taking strategies that apply to it.

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  2. Google blogger deleted my entire comment so I'm not gonna retype it, but basically what I said was that sure there might be correlation but there is no causation to prove that. There are many other factors that can determine whether you get in to colleges. Just because you have a good ACT score doesn't mean you're gonna get into college. Plenty of people with perfect scores get denied all the time by top tier colleges. If you're low income, you might not be able to afford to go to college in the first place. Its not the ACT's fault.

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    1. David, I'm not saying that a good ACT score will get someone into a good college, nor am I saying that it is the only factor that matters. What I am saying is that the fact that someone in a lower income family can't score highly and it is a fact that with a low ACT score it is an immpossibility to get into a top rated university. The trend of kids from wealthier families going to better school can partially be blamed on the ACT becasue if the test measured aptittude rather than test taking skills the door to top tier schools would no longer be closed for low income students. The college system is stacked against people with less money in many ways, the ACT is just one example showing how flawed the system is.

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  3. Henry, Thoughtful job blogging this term. This post has great potential. I like the explicit link of your personal experiences to class issues in the U.S. This post is a little short on specifics. How much does tutoring cost? How out of reach is it for the average family? Some financial aid is based on "merit" (i.e. test scores). Isn't that a case of the rich getting richer? I'd also like you to exploit that clever title: aside from money, what are the other costs associated with these tests?

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