Now, don't get me wrong: there's a clear disconnect in ability and means to prep. Even though there are cheap or free prep courses or materials, many won't be able to dedicate—for example—the time to cram or take Sunday classes an hour away due to jobs or family commitments.
People mostly act in their short term interest. When we do more forward-looking things like studying or investing in retirement, it's because we strongly believe those actions will pay off in the future.
That strong belief in the value of studying is the advantage rich kids enjoy. Everyone around them agrees that studying is a very good use of time with high expected value down the line, so on any given afternoon it's easy for them to choose that valuable activity over hanging out with their friends.
The same isn't remotely true for poorer kids. Some of their friends tease them for studying because "you're never going to get into college anyway," and the adults in their life probably support studying, but in an abstract and understated way. Studying is "a good thing" for a poor kid, while it's a critical factor for future success to a rich kid.
Yes, with the internet and public libraries it wouldn't be logistically difficult for a poor kid to study as much as a rich one, but without an entire community pressing its importance onto them it's immensely hard to actually do it.
The article describes a studying process that is nearly athletic for an exam that isn't stressed as important to high schoolers in lower income areas, this is a huge information gap between social classes that needs corrected.
As for the SAT, everyone studied their butts off. I also went off the beaten path like the author of the article, and enrolled in a local, inexpensive, SAT study course run by a Korean teacher for mainly Korean-American students in an upstairs office above a takeout restaurant (I was one of the only non-Asian students there). The course involved long hours of drilling vocab and some math, and expected us to drill much more at home.
In the end, the most valuable technique for the SAT was time management. One book[1] even had pages of "answer bubbles" in the back for you to practice penciling your answer, saving precious time. It also recommended skipping/guessing on questions you were having trouble on and moving on to the next one.
Students coming into the SAT with no foreknowledge have no clue that they will be racing the clock. It's not obvious that time management is one of the most important factors and if you simply told someone taking the test cold "make sure you fill in an answer for all the questions" their score would improve by 100 points or more. But I would guess that most students turn in answer sheets with blanks.
As they say, the SAT is a great test of your ability to take the SAT.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAT_Subject_Tests
[1]: https://www.workman.com/products/up-your-score-sat-2018-2019...
It really all comes down to effective studying, and is very accessible to all income levels. Just buy one or two good prep books, and get access to practice tests (I used only the ones in the books, BTW). I didn't enter into any SAT prep program, and always felt they were for people who did not know how to study well.
It doesn't even require much intensity if you do it right. For both the SAT and the GRE, I began studying 9-12 months before I expected to take the exam. I spent only a small amount of time a week on it (1-2 hours). The trick was to be regular and consistent. Towards the end, start taking practice tests. I got a pretty good score on the SAT and a fantastic score in the GRE (easily in the 99 percentile range).
No tutors. No prep programs. Just a bunch of books, and 1-2 hours a week. That's all it takes.
Again, I'm just saying that for many students, reading this article would expose them to something that they haven't really been exposed to so far.
So now we know the secret of poorly performing kids. Well, of course, if you want an ambitious score, you study. If you don't, you do not get a good score.
I think my other point was that it does not require a lot of study! I studied more for my usual classes in school than I did for the SAT/GRE. But if you try to cram it all in 3 months before the SAT, you're setting yourself up for trouble.
I did well in high school only studying on the train into school on the days of exams. That formula worked for me, and I figured everybody else did something similar. I knew I had to "study" for the SAT if I wanted to better than average, and practicing vocabulary during homeroom seemed like more than what everybody else was doing.
I happened to get into a good college and really struggled the first year. I studied harder than usual, but it wasn't until I started studying with some friends that I saw how much more work other people put into school.
once i got there, it wasn't easy. mainly because i didn't really care about school, and refused to put in the time. apparently cramming doesn't work for linear algebra unless you are a genius, which i'm not.
I would wager that most kids don't want to put in the work to be a true over-achiever. Or because they haven't been raised that way. Not because they're unaware of the benefits.
I'm trying not to fall into the trap of suggesting the reason for success is "hard work" when socioeconomic differences in opportunities explain much or all of the gap. But that truly seems to be the thesis presented here.
It's not that there is some bit of knowledge that poor kids don't have, it's that they have no one to mimic. There are a million little decisions that go into how to spend your time in high school. Figuring out the best way to spend it is far too big of a task for any one student. The only way to have any hope of spending it well is to copy what others have done and learn from their mistakes. In elite schools, you have much better role models to mimic. If you want to go to Harvard, you can mimic what that kid who got into Harvard did last year.
A general principle like "just work hard if you want to succeed" is worse that useless for a kids in mediocre school districts. Not only does it do nothing to show them how to actually spend their time, but it's so general that it can never be proved "wrong." So if a student tries to do what they consider "hard work" and that doesn't lead to success, people aren't going to stop saying it because it didn't work. Moreover, since the kid who failed knows that they were given "correct advice" they're just going to blame themselves for their failure rather than realizing that they have the same potential as people in better school districts, they just don't have as much opportunity to realize it.
Still, advice like "work hard to succeed" will always be "wrong" in the sense that it's the wrong thing to tell a young person. No matter what advice you give a young person, it needs to be much more specific and personalized if you want it to have a reasonably good chance of being understood and used correctly. You can't expect someone with so little life experience to fill in the blanks for themselves.
I did well on the SAT (the very top scorer in my class), but how much of that was due to natural gifts, and how much of that was due to having a parent who was both a high school math teacher and someone who spent years tutoring and administering the SAT?
That's the point of the article - why is the concept alien at all? Why should it be strange for children from lower- to middle-income backgrounds to be in academic programs over the summer, but perfectly normal for the rich? What has normalised that divide in society?
It's a valid question. Do poor children not want to work hard, or do they not know how hard they're obliged, or able, or work?
I don't know why, but I don't think it was just because their parents didn't happen to have cash. My totally anecdotal view on this is that looking at income might be the tail wagging the dog. The poor parents tended to have less complete grasps on their lives, which gave the kids fewer role models to figure out what "good habits" were and how they lended to success.
These parents didn't have habits of successful people, which contributed to their poverty, as well as the (lack of) habits of their children.
The poor kids I knew who were successful academically found other role models, people to explain to them that you can take the SATs twice, and if you spend a couple hours a week studying for them you'll do significantly better, and yes, it is worth the time, etc.