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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: LindyBill who wrote (12999)	10/19/2003 2:49:49 PM
From: Tom C	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 793690

We know that by every other measure, school achievement has been going down. Do you know this to be true or is it just assumed to be true. In 1970 when I took the SAT and ACT, we just showed up on that Saturday and took the test. I don't remember preparing for it at all. Today, kids take PSATs in 9th grade and usually take the SAT twice. While my daughter was in high school, she is a first semester college freshman now, I don't think I met a single parent who didn’t sign their child up for an after school SAT prep course. A lot of the parents hired SAT tutors for their child during the summer after their Jr. year to give them as much of an edge as possible before taking the test for the last time. All the antidotal evidence I’ve seen leads me to believe that the kids today are working much harder to score well on this test then we did. The reason (again antidotal) is that getting into a "good" college is a lot harder today then it was in 1971. A lot harder! Even the local state school (Maryland) is an order of magnitude harder to get in to then when I graduated from high school. I’m going to guess that you are not really familiar with today's teenagers, they’re spoiled and naive but they are pretty amazing. The ones I know are doing more work in HS and taking advance placement courses. These are kids going to a school that others refer to as Gaithersburg "High" not the county’s best or most competitive school.