Can you answer the questions on the test that eighth graders take to compete for admission to New York City’s Top High Schools?
Chalkbeat posted sample questions.
Very few African-American or Hispanic students gain admission, which is based entirely on passing the test. They ar3 70% of students in the city’s schools but only 10% of those in the specialized high schools.
Asian parents object to any effort to replace the current test-based system.
“While just 16 percent of public school students are Asian, they make up 62 percent of students at the specialized schools. White students also make up a disproportionate share of the students, though by a much smaller margin. They are 15 percent of the system overall and 24 percent of students at specialized schools.”
Mayor de Blasio ultimately hopes to eliminate the test and use other criteria for admission. The Mayor prefers to judge applicants by such metrics as class rank at their middle school and scores on state tests. However, to make these changes would require approval by the State Legislature. Alumni of the selective schools in the Legislature have prevented change in the past. In addition, de Blasio has enemies in Albany. The odds of a victory in Albany are slim. It may seem strange that the Mayor needs to get the Legislature’s okay to change admission requirements to selective high schools, but defenders of the school put this into law many years ago.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“The Mayor prefers to judge applicants by such metrics as class rank at their middle school and scores on state tests.”
Great, because the state tests are so much better.
Remind me why we need to stack rank students? Remind me why we need selective enrollment schools? I guess because some pigs are more equal than others?
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The state tests will produce the same results as the SHSAT test.
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The unrecognized issue is that everyone stipulates to the idea that the specialized schools are “excellent” schools. They are not. Because schools are judged by the conspicuous success of their students, Stuy and Bronx Science are considered superb. But their students have conspicuous success because they were selected because of their already conspicuous success. It is meaningless self-fulfilling nonsense. I know students and faculty from these elite schools who testify to the utter mediocrity (or worse) of the teaching. This is just like the “success” of Success Academies. Distill a school to only those who are likely to burnish your reputation and voila! You have a burnished reputation.
The impulse to diversify admissions is admirable, but misses this point. Many students of color, like many white students, would be far better off going somewhere else.
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Exactly right, Steve! A school that chooses its students will always be “excellent” as compared to a school that enrolls everyone who walks in the door.
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Excellent observation, Steve.
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Thank you sir. I’m glad someone said this.
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Steve Nelson,
I think it is rather unfair to compare the specialized high schools to Success Academy. The specialized high schools have never made claims to being miracle workers and they almost never take credit for their students’ success.
In fact, the shocking thing is how little those high schools bother to even publicize some of the amazing accomplishments of their students. They don’t have a PR machine or staff devoted to marketing and their interest is in teaching those students, not getting political mileage out of them.
No doubt there are mediocre teachers at specialized high schools just like there are mediocre teachers at private schools and at every school. And there are great teachers, too.
And certainly having to teach in classes of 32 doesn’t make it easy for teachers in any school. Unfortunately, unless a student is lucky enough to win a scholarship to a private, that is the situation that will happen in every public school. A student may choose a smaller high school that is only 1/10th the size of one of the big specialized schools, but they will still be stuck in classes of 30+ students.
What the size of the specialized high schools do provide is opportunity. Opportunity means a choice of languages, a choice of Regents or more advanced science and math and literature. (The number of NYC public schools that offer only one foreign language only is shockingly high — even for the “top” non-specialized publics).
It also means more opportunity in music and the arts. Instead of one chorus class or one band class, students have choices of choirs and different levels of orchestras and bands to join — so that a student who has never learned to play an instrument might get that opportunity.
It also means extracurricular activities. Debate teams, Math teams, Robotics teams, Chess teams, student newspapers, clubs devoted to astronomy, K-Pop, crocheting, the Science Bowl, Step Dancing or politics (to name a very few out of many dozens). There are more varsity teams than at suburban high schools — the students at the Big 3 specialized high schools have over 40 sports to choose from (counting each gender separately).
Some students don’t do well in schools the size of specialized high schools. But there are opportunities in them that a student will not have even in the very best private school in NYC.
And if Bloomberg had worked to make more large schools work the way Midwood and Edward R. Murrow do, there would be a lot more opportunities for students in large high schools that were not specialized. Instead, there are myriad “choices”, each with very limited offerings.
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Hello, parent. I’m not sure what one thing has to do with another. The only real comparison I made was that both Success and Stuy/Bronx select the students most likely to succeed and then claim victory because they have success. I could write much more about why the competitive schools are not the best environment for kids, but I’ll certainly concede that nearly anything is better than Success, KIPP, Democracy Prep and their ilk.
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But the specialized schools do not “claim victory”. That’s what I mean. You don’t hear any of the principals claiming they are better. The Stuy principal isn’t crowing that his school is better than Tech.
You seem to have missed most of what I wrote. I wrote about the opportunities at the schools that are unmatched and are a reason why students would choose them.
And one of the advantages of size is that while there are “competitive” students at specialized high schools, there are also students who aren’t competitive. There is no single culture. There are dozens of smaller cultures and unparalleled opportunities to find the culture that the student wants! Because that culture is there somewhere even if it can sometimes be tough to find it.
Compare that with a typical private school with 70 or 100 students. Sometimes even fewer! The cliques are apparent. And there are fewer of them. Even the richest of the private schools can’t offer the variety of choices that the big 3 specialized high schools do.
I agree with you that those specialized high schools aren’t the best environment for SOME kids. But I could also write much more about why a small progressive private is not the best opportunity for some kids. There are pros and cons in both.
I only replied to your comment because it seemed as if you had completely overlooked that there are pros to those specialized high schools. It doesn’t mean they are “superior” schools or even “better” schools.
But it absolutely does mean that there is something important that they can offer and therefore having a single admissions test like the SHSAT that seems to exclude many perfectly capable African-American and Latino student should be questioned and rectified.
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Sure they claim victory. Not in the obnoxious Eva way, but the claims to be “elite” or “excellent” are ubiquitous.
You make good points, in a reasonable way and thanks for that. Yes, I certainly agree that more students of color would be a good thing and that the current system is exclusionary. However, the game is what the game is and that is what leads to resistance to change. The kids who score well on SHSAT are also (generally) the kids who score well on SATs. Therefore and thereby they are the most likely to get into the most elite, prestigious colleges, like the Ivies, who are playing the same game. This further reinforces the generally held idea that the specialized high schools are special. Modifying the entrance requirements would, de facto, slightly reduce the prestigious, albeit meaningless, college placement statistics that attract so many families and kids in the first place. All of these things have nothing to do with learning – in fact inhibit deep and meaningful learning (in my humble progressive opinion).
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I should add: Missed in the SHSAT brouhaha is perhaps the most powerful reason to change the process in order to create a more representative student body. It would make the education exponentially better, regardless of my skepticism on other grounds.
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Thank you, too, for your thoughtful reply.
Did you know that Stuy had something like 200 National Merit Semi-Finalists this year. Maybe more. Probably not because it wasn’t actually reported by anyone and the principal never bragged about it.
I’m sure there are parents of students in specialized high schools, graduates of those schools, and student now at specialized high schools there who brag that their school is elite but that’s no different than the students at any private school who think their school is better than another one or than the neighborhood public. And I can’t tell you how many “progressive” parents at “progressive” privates are absolutely certain that the students in their good neighborhood publics are taught by mediocre teachers who do nothing but test prep and rote learning throughout elementary school. Your comment was nothing like those parents, but it did have some of the same attitude about it.
Parents don’t send their kids to specialized high schools because of their stellar record of college placement! It is considerably harder for an extremely bright and hard-working student from specialized high schools to get into those schools and they’d have a much better chance from a “progressive” private and a slightly better chance at or near the top of their class at a smaller selective public school.
I also find it odd that you say that modifying the entrance requirements would lower their prestigious college admissions statistics. You seem to be implying that the college would find the new student population less worthy than the old. But it would be very similar to the old except more diverse. The college admissions statistics at all of the specialized high schools have never been commensurate with the academic achievements of their students.
What I object to is your complete dismissal of everything I just wrote about what IS special about the specialized high schools (and it isn’t that the students or school is superior because of their high SAT scores).
“All of these things have nothing to do with learning – in fact inhibit deep and meaningful learning (in my humble progressive opinion).”
It’s honestly just shocking that you are this certain that most of the students at specialized high schools are being inhibited from “deep and meaningful learning”. It’s exactly that attitude that college admissions officers use as their excuse to admit rich full pay kids from privates with lower standardized test scores and academic achievements over much poorer students from specialized high schools. They just “know” that private school student is better educated because the people at the private school tell them that it is so. And of course, it can never actually be disproven because the fact that college admissions officers admit private school students at a much higher rate than they admit specialized high school students is evidence that it is true!
Let me state for the record that specialized high schools have some mediocre teachers and some classes that are not very “meaningful”. But to simply dismiss the entirety of the education that students there receive as not particularly deep and meaningful (unlike progressive privates, I presume?) is just wrong. No doubt there are some students at specialized high schools who are getting very little out of going there. But for many students, there is a lot of deep and meaningful learning going on both inside and outside of the classroom.
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Steve,
Upon re-reading your comments, I apologize if I misinterpreted your original post. I thought you were trying to make the point that the specialized high schools may have excellent students, but they offer a mediocre education that is not “deep and meaningful” like the education those same students would receive in other (more progressive?) schools. That’s what I was objecting to in your posts.
But it occurred to me that I may have been putting meaning into your remarks that you never intended. So if so, I apologize.
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As much as I loathe any and all standardized tests, and without stipulating that there is anything good (or even valid) about the linked test, it is actually better than the state tests. At least there is some actual content that tests relevant writing/editing skills. The state tests are all based on some variation of the Common Chore which is utterly (and intentionally) content free.
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Agree.
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It’s not clear what weight the Chancellor would put on state test scores under the proposed law (which itself is just one many problems with the bill — it would give massive discretion to the Chancellor to play around with weightings and factors), but one obvious effect of the law would be to take of the test-prep insanity currently surrounding the SHSAT and redirect it to the state tests.
If test prep is indeed a huge differentiating factor in student performance, as the SHSAT critics say, and if we make the logical assumption that kids who would have been prepping for the SHSAT will be doubling down on their prep for the state tests, then I would expect the test performance disparities that we currently see on the state tests to widen.
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This test will still make few ELLs eligible as anyone that performs well needs to have a thorough command of English with understanding of the many nuances of the language. Long sentences with multiple subordinate clauses, as shown in the samples, are confusing to students new to English. In this case, I am talking about five to seven years of exposure, and lots of reading and writing practice on a fairly sophisticated level.
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This is an interesting point, as it addresses a specific academic prowess [English] sought by these schools. In a way it is different than noting the extraordinary mismatch between racial makeup of the overall schools & selective-hisch populations, which improbably suggests there are few brainiacs among non-Asians/ -whites.
Personally [as a world-langs teacher 😉 ] I would be all for developing a Spanish version (& others if warranted by large ELL subgroup). If there are students out there who can, e.g., parse/ discuss Vargas-Llosa in their native tongue, let’m at it.
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First, let’s assume one believes (as I do) that you should have gifted programs because if you don’t then you don’t want any specialized schools.
Given that assumption, the test is certainly flawed but I’ll take a flawed test any day over what amounts to total control by a political appointee which is what BdB is proposing since the Chancellor will decide on what measures to use and how to weight them.
If you leave the test as is or move to another standardized test and don’t fix the K-8 opportunities you’ll get the same results.
If you go to “alternative measures” you’ll get schools that look like screened schools which have the demographic profile that people claim the specialized schools have.
If you go to some % kids from each school then you’ll kill middle school gifted programs and if you don’t make sure all middle schools give the same preparation then you’ll lower the level of rigor at the specialized schools.
If you’re assuming that the specialized schools are to deliver instruction at a certain level then it’s perfectly fine to have some test that makes sure that the students can meet that bar and then you have to make sure that the K-8 schools are all preparing the kids to the same level and educating families as to why they might or might not want their kids to attend.
NYC has ~240,000 high school students. There are ~15,000 seats in the specialized schools. That’s ~6%. There should be schools for all types of students. It doesn’t seem unreasonable that 6% of the seats be for good test takers.
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Should 6% of the gifted kids be segregated to a special building when they are 12 years old, or maybe 8? Are segregated high schools by ability a good idea?
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This goes to the root question of if you believe in gifted education or not. My post said let’s assume we agree that there should be gifted programs. It certainly helped me to be in a school where I wasn’t worried about being physically bullied or made fun of for being smart.
Would a better solution be to have gifted programs in large comprehensive high schools? Maybe but we’ve got to recreate those large comprehensive high schools again first.
If you believe we shouldn’t have gifted programs at all,that’s all fine and good until you have a gifted child who spends a year learning nothing because their teacher teaches “at grade level.”
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I attended a selective high school many years ago. I disliked the school because we were constantly being reminded of how fortunate we were. The attitude seemed snobby to me. In those days they did not have special interest schools. I did very well through sheer determination. I did not want to struggle the way my brother had at his selective school. My parents urged me to attend this school because the two local options were not for me. One offered only a technical program. I didn’t want to be a beautician or secretary, and the second school was known for gangs and violence.
Despite the competitive climate, I made some good friends. In hindsight, I am grateful for having had the opportunity. I learned discipline, time management and how to expect more from myself. I was thoroughly prepared for college. These skills helped me be a better teacher too. Ironically, my old high school was originally called The Girls Normal School. It was designed to train young women to become teachers.
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I didn’t preform particularly well at Stuy. I’d generously say I was in the pack. That said I believe it was the right place for me for a variety of reasons. I also feel that it was the best fit school for both of my kids.
I also have known many kids who I believe would have been better served elsewhere and this includes kids who did very well academically.
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Mike, how would you describe the kids who would’ve been better served elsewhere, including the strong performers? What about Stuy wasn’t right for them?
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Some were low performers but that’s not what you asked.
Some fell through the cracks. Never found a peer group or anything else to latch on to.
Some kids didn’t make any use of the special offerings at Stuy and had a long commute. Given that they didn’t find a home with any of the more specialized or advanced academics they would have done just as well at a high school that didn’t offer them (or or had other advanced offerings).
Stuy also attracts kids who are interested in doing academic things in their spare time. I would have kids in the CS area hand out during free periods and after school to work on neat CS / Math / Science projects. If you find your clique in one of these groups, that’s terrific. If it’s not for you, the advantage goes away.
The pressure at Stuy is frequently either self or parent imposed. A kid might do well academically but still suffer from the pressures placed upon them by parents or by themselves.
My kids were both strong academically all around and wanted a strong music program. When Bloomberg killed the large high schools he decimated the art and music programs city wide. Stuy still has a robust music program, a strong varied overall academic program and Stuy is still the only place with the CS program I designed.
They didn’t have issues with pressure. Every term I’d ask “how’d you do?” They’d say “ok.” I’d ask “could you do better?” They’d say “probably.” I’d say “would it be worth the effort?” They’d say “No.” I’d say “cool.”
Finally, they both found their cliques.
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“I attended a selective high school many years ago. I disliked the school because we were constantly being reminded of how fortunate we were. The attitude seemed snobby to me. ” – specialized school does not necessarily mean a school for the kids of the well-off parents. A proper specialized school accepts students based on merit. I am for specialized schools and for having entrance/placement tests. Affirmative actions or holistic scores or any sort of political decisions wil ruin them, like they have been ruining higher education.
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After freshman year in my school, we lost about 20% of the class. They returned to their regional high school.
My son attended a selective high school as well. He is bright in ways that I am not. He is very mathematical and technical. He was a mediocre student at the school. He is more interested in pursuing his own interests than being a “nerd” like his mother. That’s what he still calls me.
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Does anyone believe that Stuy teachers recognize a huge difference in the abilities and class performance of the students who had 660 and above on the SHSAT and the students who were just at the cut off 100 points lower? Did anyone at Stuy do a correlation that indicated that the likelihood of a student who got in just at or over the cut off of being able to handle the Stuy work and do especially well was slim to none? Would Stuy become an even more superior score if it was limited to 500 students with cut offs of over 610 so those “meritorious” students did not have to be exposed to the low-scoring students who couldn’t even manage a 590 and were bringing them down?
And do the teachers at Bronx Science feel even more distress when they have students with lowly 520 scores in the very same class as students who scored 680? Do they spot those students with 520 scores right away?
I find it odd that anyone can read the first question of the practice SHSAT that Diane linked to and possibly believe that the students who picked answer D because they had no problem adding a fact that may or may not be true to a sentence to make it more “precise” are far superior to the students who did not pick answer D because they understand that being “precise” does not meaning adding random information without knowing whether it was true.
Here IS a fact: one of the largest magnet schools in NYC with over 3,200 students has virtually no African-American students. And it is because of the SHSAT. What that should tell us is that the SHSAT is an imperfect measurement of a student’s ability to learn advanced material. Instead we have too many people saying it reflects that African-American students just aren’t prepping enough for the test.
And that, to me, is absurd. Thank you Mayor de Blasio.
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NYC Public School Parent:
I never asked for actual scores but I and most teachers do notice a range in our classes wherever we teach — that’s one of the hardest parts of the jobs – how to differentiate with 34 in a class and part of the reason for a need for gifted programs.
Yes, at Stuy there are kids who struggle overall and who struggle in specific subjects.
If you look at Tech, there’s a large number of kids who don’t do all that well on regents exams which is something you’d expect them to score highly on without any stress at a gifted school.
So, it is reasonable to have a base line cut off that’s consistent for all kids across the city.
You’re right that kids within some range of the cutoff are pretty much interchangeable w/r to their ability to succeed at the school which is why programs like Discovery make sense but getting rid of the test (or a test that gets to the right level mathematically and can differentiate) would certainly lead to kids not ready for the level of work currently expected at the specialized schools.
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It would be a vast understatement to say that the Charles Barron bill is openly hostile to the concept of gifted programs. It would mandate that 95% of the students at the city’s most exclusive middle schools (schools like NEST, Lab, Anderson, Salk, etc.) are ineligible to attend any specialized school, save for whatever remaining seats are allotted by lottery among the sea of students citywide with a 3.7 GPA.
The Barron bill also appears to be oddly hostile to boys, too, as the city said that its projections showed that under the Barron formula, only 38% of offers to specialized schools would be given to boys. The current SHSAT-based admissions formula skews male (although not as dramatically as the Barron bill would skew female, about 56/44). If the Barron bill became law, it’s likely that every selective middle school in the city would skew heavily female, as the elite District 2 high schools that rely on “holistic” admissions standards currently do (and as most colleges and universities have done for years).
In the rather chilling words that Richard Carranza used on Brian Lehrer’s radio show this week, “We can’t treat everybody equally. We have to have equity.”
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Sorry, meant “it’s likely that every selective HIGH school in the city would skew heavily female.” (The selective middle schools, which also use multiple-measures admissions standards, probably already all skew female.)
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I can’t speak for the ELA test, but the math test should certainly not be difficult for bright 8th graders. My 6th grade Pre-Algebra students would ace it. Perhaps instead of opening up seats for less prepared students, more math enrichment programs should be offered at all school districts. It takes a lot of practice at progressively more challenging levels to excel:
http://www.joannejacobs.com/2018/05/how-asian-kids-ace-exams-for-elite-schools/
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just testing to confirm that I’m back in moderation.
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What you do this time? 😉
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Opined against the bill to eliminate the SHSAT and completely restructure selective schools admissions. I find it hard to believe that that voicing that opinion is verboten, so perhaps I used a “trigger word” that got caught up in the filters.
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Yes, there are reasons to have specialized schools, programs, or classes, especially with the economies of scale available in a large urban school system. (There are also, to be clear, very defensible reasons to not have such schools.)
There is no reason, however, for the screening method for such schools to so shockingly and completely exclude the two racial groups that make up the large majority of the students who utilize the city’s schools. Kids whose parents work and sacrifice and pay taxes and want the very best for their children. Kids who from what I’ve read and seen over the last few days probably have more to teach to the people who have gone or go to specialized high schools than they do to learn from them.
To put into context how bad the situation is at the specialized high schools, consider the city’s gifted programs for grades K-8, which have rightfully been under scrutiny and attack for years now. Those programs proportionately have two and a half times more black and Latino representation than the SHSAT schools. 250%!
De Blasio is sticking his neck out here to do the right thing, and I’ll applaud him for it as long as he quickly follows up on his pledge to have this tip of the iceberg initiative turn into a much larger change to zoned schools, other selective/lottery schools, etc.
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Thank you. This is right on. The SHSAT, if anything, should be used as a threshold because it is more than evident that it is possible to score much lower than the cut offs of these schools and easily handle the work and it is possible to score over the Stuy cut off and be absolutely no different than the students who did not.
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The art history questions are bizarro, misleading content and opinion.
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And so many questions written for test companies by dominant-culture, dominant-culture-educated college grads looking for work.
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Trying this again as a standalone comment to see if it gets through moderation. This relates to Mike Z’s comment above regarding the threshold question of whether we believe in “gifted” or selective admissions schools.
It would be a vast understatement to say that the Charles Barron bill is openly hostile to the concept of gifted programs. It would mandate that 95% of the students at the city’s most exclusive middle schools (schools like NEST, Lab, Anderson, Salk, etc.) are ineligible to attend any specialized school, save for whatever remaining seats are allotted by lottery among the sea of students citywide with a 3.7 GPA.
The Barron bill also appears to be oddly hostile to boys, too, as the city said that its projections showed that under the Barron formula, only 38% of offers to specialized schools would be given to boys. The current SHSAT-based admissions formula skews male (although not as dramatically as the Barron bill would skew female, about 56/44). If the Barron bill became law, it’s likely that every selective high
school in the city would skew heavily female, as the elite District 2 high schools that rely on “holistic” admissions standards currently do (and as most colleges and universities have done for years).
In the rather chilling words that Richard Carranza used on Brian Lehrer’s radio show this week, “We can’t treat everybody equally. We have to have equity.”
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Tried reposting the same comment, Diane, and it’s hung up in moderation just like the prior one. Not sure what’s up with that. The only words in the post that I could imagine being objectionable to anyone on the planet are “Charles Barron.”
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Nothing objectionable, FLERP. I was busy for a few hours and offline, I have no idea why the comment was in moderation. WP decided that.
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See my other comment on this — it appears that if I included the words “Charles Barron,” the comment went to moderation. When I didn’t include those words, the comment posted fine.
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Wow, I think the thing that’s causing my comments to go to moderation is the name of the man that Wikipedia describes as “an American activist and politician who currently represents the 60th District of the New York Assembly” and who formerly “represented Brooklyn’s 42nd District on the New York City Council from 2001 to 2013.” Rhymes with Gnarls Sharron.
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Trying this one last time to get around the moderation filters, using asterisks to obscure the name that apparently must not be named. Diane, feel free to delete my other, redundant comments on this thread, which will be cluttering up the place if they eventually go through moderation.
This comment related to Mike Z’s question regarding whether we value “gifted” or selective-admissions schools.
It would be a vast understatement to say that the C*****s B****n bill is openly hostile to the concept of gifted programs. It would mandate that 95% of the students at the city’s most exclusive middle schools (schools like NEST, Lab, Anderson, Salk, etc.) are ineligible to attend any specialized school, save for whatever remaining seats are allotted by lottery among the sea of students citywide with a 3.7 GPA.
The Barron bill also appears to be oddly hostile to boys, too, as the city said that its projections showed that under the B****n formula, only 38% of offers to specialized schools would be given to boys. The current SHSAT-based admissions formula skews male (although not as dramatically as the B****n bill would skew female, about 56/44). If the Barron bill became law, it’s likely that every selective high
school in the city would skew heavily female, as the elite District 2 high schools that rely on “holistic” admissions standards currently do (and as most colleges and universities have done for years).
In the rather chilling words that Richard Carranza used on Brian Lehrer’s radio show this week, “We can’t treat everybody equally. We have to have equity.”
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Diane, out of curiosity, why does a post with the words “Charles Barron” get placed in moderation?
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FLERP,
I have no idea.
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When he hears about this, there’s going to be litigation. . . .
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I read the first four or five questions from the test. I plan to complete it just for kicks. The first question was completely idiotic. “Option A and Option C do not precisely state how many people the reporter interviewed.” – but of course, because this information was not present in the original sentense! Likewise, does “did the best” mean they all won as a team, or that they all came to the top, as individuals? In the first case they are winners, in the second they are not. I did not choose D, and even after I’ve read the “explanation” I still did not go “A-ahh, I see” because their explanation is bogus. This is an invalid question, plain and simple, and should be excluded from the score. For the record, I chose A, and I still think this is the best answer from all the imperfect choices.
Now I have the questions to those in the know (zamanskym, possibly): do they return the tests after they have them scored? Do they provide “correct” answers and student’s answers just like they do in this sample? Can the student or anyone else (his friend, parent, etc) check the questions and answers? Can the invalid questions like the above can be disputed?
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I made the same “error” on question 1.
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It’s hard for me to understand why anyone doubts the intelligence of a student who understands that adding a possibly false “fact” pulled out of thin air is not the proper way to revise a sentence to make it more “precise”. But apparently many people do since they put all their faith in the SHSAT as the sole arbiter of “giftedness”.
And it astonishes me when people say the solution is to test prep a student to understand that his concern with adding unproven facts is wrong. Because the goal is to APPEAR more precise even if the sentence is false.
But I guess I shouldn’t be surprised because isn’t that what Donald Trump is all about?
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So this post had nothing to do with the high percentage of Asian students in these (and most other) specialized schools for high achieving students?
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I could not finish the ELA part despite trying twice. It is a murder. I’d rather have written three essays. But the math tasks were fun, decent enough for a selective high school entrance exam.
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