Hacker News Reader

Comment by qntty | Hacker News Reader

Studying with that kind of intensity certainly is. For most kids "studying for the SAT" means doing 1 or 2 practice tests on a lazy Saturday.

View on HN

I must echo the same sentiment as the GP.

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.

I would agree that it's accessible, but this doesn't make it any less alien. Most people I knew in high school (at a non-elite school) were barely even conscious of the fact that they would be taking the SATs 9 months before they did (they knew that it was something they would have to do, but it wasn't concrete enough to cause them to do anything about it). For most, studying at all was something that only the more ambitious kids did. I'm not sure if there was a single student in my graduating class who spent as much time studying as you did, including some students who went to competitive colleges (there might have been but they didn't talk about it, the fact that people do this wasn't part of the collective consciousness).

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.

>For most, studying at all was something that only the more ambitious kids did.

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.

Exactly. When I was in high school, two other classmates and I would go to our English teacher's class during homeroom for SAT prep. We did this for 10 minutes a day for maybe a month. Outside of that, the only prep I did was studying for the SAT IIs the night before.

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.

it's a common story. i slacked and crammed my way through most of high school and rode into university on super high SAT scores (because i studied a lot and took classes).

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.

But is the difference due to some secret that "non-rich kids" don't know? That most kids don't do more isn't a surprise. But why don't they know more? This article suggests that "they didn't know they could (or should)".

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.

I would certainly agree that they are aware of the benefits of going to a good school. I just think you are seriously underestimating the importance that mimicking other people plays in learning to do something you've never done before. We all do it, when you're writing some code that you've never worked with before, you read the code of someone else who has done something similar. When navigating the little rituals involved in going to college, you do what your friend is doing or what your older sister did or (for more ambitious students) what the people on college confidential tell you to do.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com