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The most important factor in college admissions is a test that benefits those who are least prepared for college.

At Horace Mann High School in affluent Riverdale, New York, one of the top schools in the country, those who receive double time on tests are plentiful enough to qualify as their own segment of the student body. Known to their peers as 2Ts, they participate in the same activities, get the same grades, and attend the same range of colleges.

From Eliot Schrefer

What SAT tutoring does is it invisibly alters the admissions pool so a school could try to be as egalitarian as they can, but if a student is SAT-tutored, and their score goes up 200 points in a year, and the college admissions committee has no idea that the student got tutored, all of a sudden it's shifting the pool back toward old money.

From Eliot Schrefer

I remember my guidance counselor, when I told her I wanted to apply to Harvard, she paused and said, 'That's in New York, right?' The funny thing is, I didn't really know. It was a few weeks before I was like, 'No, I think it's in Massachusetts.'

From Eliot Schrefer

Higher SAT scores mean better college matriculation rates. So it's no wonder that private schools in ultra-competitive environments would grease the qualifying process as much as possible.

From Eliot Schrefer

Line up a group of Horace Mann students, interview them, and take a look at their resumes, and you'll be hard pressed to pick out the students who require extra time. So then, what qualifies these students to receive special accommodations on the SAT?

From Eliot Schrefer

When I was a teenager, what I most wanted to read were fantasy novels. Not Tolkien and Malory, but sword-and-sorcery pulp. I craved glowy blue magic, chainmail bikinis, dragons with unpronounceable names.

From Eliot Schrefer

Readers have always read high and low, and to fight that urge is to fight the freedom inherent in the act of reading itself. The only arguments that have any traction, as best as I can see it, are about whether the genre classification of 'young adult' should exist at all.

From Eliot Schrefer

With few exceptions, the publishing industry has come to a consensus: if a book has a young protagonist, and if its worldview is primarily interested in the questions that crop up when coming of age, then it's a young adult novel.

From Eliot Schrefer

Calling a book 'young adult' is only important in that it can help get a book to the right reader. After that, it's a useless abstraction and should be discarded.

From Eliot Schrefer

Eliot Schrefer

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