55 Quotes by Eliot Schrefer

The College Board is officially a non-profit. But all that means is that it doesn't have shareholders and that their financial accountings must be available to the public; it certainly doesn't mean that they're not also into making money.

The fact is that the College Board's products - the SAT, other standardized tests, the accompanying strategy guides - are sold at far higher than the cost to make them.

The College Board is both in the business of test administration and test prep. If this feels inherently unfair, it should - it's like a doctor whacking your knee with a sledgehammer and then offering to patch you up.

Colleges accept the highest sub-scores from different administrations. So if a student takes the SAT many times instead of once, she has a larger pool of scores from which to pick out the highest math, critical reading, and writing.

In my business - SAT tutoring - you get used to sighs. A client's mother frets over the sheer amount of work her daughter has to do to get her score up, until she reaches the resigned moment when she will sigh and observe that no one thought you could prepare for the SAT back when she took it - it was 'untutorable.'

Tutoring follows the lucrative philosophy of advertising: if you can manufacture a need, people with disposable resources will find ways to fill it.

The elite private tutor is typically ivy-educated and falls into one of two categories - a twenty-something pursuing an artistic career on the side, or someone older who has made a career out of college-prep. They are presentable, well-spoken, and are treated by doormen as guests more than as employees.

As someone who attended six different public schools across America, went to Harvard, and subsequently became a tutor in Manhattan's affluent Upper East Side, I've witnessed firsthand the differences in learning styles between public school educations and private.

The SAT allows less-privileged students access to universities that previously were the bastions of the wealthy.