SAT Pressure Is On, and Even Online Prepsters Noodge
By Michael Winerip
CHAPPAQUA, N.Y.
THERE are thousands of SAT prep courses, but
Laura Wilson, founder of a new online company,
Wilson Daily Prep, has managed to come up with
a fresh angle.
If teenagers taking her SAT course online do
not do their nightly assignment, they get a
warning e-mail message. And if they still don’t
do it, they are put on her Slacker list, and
then Mrs. Wilson, or someone from her staff,
picks up the phone in the office here, calls
the slacker’s parents and rats out their kids.
“I’m the Mother Noodge,” Mrs. Wilson said.
“Nobody noodges like I noodge.”
“They’re always surprised to hear there’s a
voice reaching out from behind the computer,”
said Melissa Slive, a staff member busy making
calls to rat out 23 kids one recent morning.
“They don’t think anyone is watching or paying
attention.”
While there’s no scientific data yet,
everyone’s pretty sure what happens next. “The
kids get yelled at,” Mrs. Wilson said.
This was the story of Nick Torcivia, 16, a
junior at Niskayuna High, three hours north of
here in suburban Albany. Nick is a well-
adjusted, typically overprogrammed, all-
American boy (A-/B+ grades, plays three sports,
has a part-time job) who leaves for school at
6:30 each morning, doesn’t get home until 7:30
most nights and then has several hours of
homework. Free time? “Not really,” Nick said.
Nick figured a way to buy a few measly minutes
of peace by gaming the online SAT course his
mother signed him up for. He realized that an
automated warning e-mail message would not be
generated until he missed six nights of
homework. So he’d skip five, then do it.
Alas, poor Nick. Little did he know that the
Wilson SAT prep slacker squad scans nightly
homework logs for just such suspicious
patterns.
Ring, ring, ring. “When I told him we got a
phone call,” said Nick’s mom, Patrice Torcivia,
“his eyes popped out.”
“I was kind of surprised,” admitted Nick. “I
didn’t realize they’d call, like — your
parents.”
“He tried to say, ‘No, I’ve been doing it, I’ve
been doing it,’ ” Ms. Torcivia said. “Then he
said, ‘Well, maybe I haven’t, but I will.’ ”
Right. While the mother had no plans to abandon
Nick in Nebraska, she knew she had to do
something parental. “I went and yelled at him,”
Ms. Torcivia said.
Nick learned a tough lesson: SAT prep is always
watching.
The economy may be in freefall, but one
industry that continues to look promising is
SAT test prep. It is, after all, an industry
that thrives on parental fear and misery. And
the worse the economy gets, and the more
families look to scholarships to offset the
insane cost of college, the more important it
becomes to ace the SATs.
In Nick’s case, he’s a good lacrosse player
with good size (6-foot-2) and has good grades
at a competitive suburban high school, but as
his coach made clear, it’s not enough. “He felt
Nick’s SATs would be really critical,” Ms.
Torcivia said. “A really good SAT score could
maybe bump him in.” And since Nick would like
to go to Duke or Johns Hopkins, he needs a LOT
of bumping in.
His mother is divorced, has two younger
children, works as an instructor at Empire
State College, is studying for her doctorate in
education and does not have a spare $200,000
lying around. So for Nick, it’s either get a
scholarship or go to a state school.
This is bliss for SAT prepsters like Mrs.
Wilson, but it’s misery for kids like Nick, who
have the demographic misfortune of being high
school juniors at this moment. For those who
thought the pressure on kids was ridiculous
when the Dow Jones was at 14,000, stand back;
we’re about to see ridiculous to the 10th
power.
When Nick was told that there was a time when
high school students like himself took no SAT
prep — including his mom and Wilson Prep’s Mrs.
Wilson, both 41 — he looked confused. “No, I
didn’t know that,” he said. “I assumed
everybody always did SAT prep. It’s all I
know.”
At some moment between the mid-1980s and modern
times, we reached the point where failing to
provide SAT prep for your son or daughter
constitutes child abuse. This was driven home
to Mrs. Wilson about eight years ago, when she
was nine months pregnant, working as an English
teacher here at Horace Greeley High and
tutoring a handful of students privately for
the SAT. She went into labor, and leaving
school, was chased by a boy she was tutoring.
“I told him I was having my baby,” she
recalled. “He said, ‘You’ll be back by Friday —
can you tutor me then?’ ”
Oh, the madness.
In 2001 Mrs. Wilson quit teaching to devote
more time to SAT prep. She now has 10 tutors
working for her. Besides monitoring the
Internet assignments, they see 120 students in
her office here; teach three SAT prep courses
of 30 students each at the local high school;
and serve as SAT prep consultants for another
150 students a year in the nearby Harrison
district. “It keeps growing and growing and
growing, oh my God,” she said. She already has
a waiting list for next year.
She now does less individual tutoring herself,
although for those who insist (“what everybody
wants is me”), she will take a few students
one-on-one for $300 an hour.
She herself did well on the SAT, though nothing
astonishing (“high 600s on the verbal”). But by
deconstructing the test, showing kids what to
expect and pinpointing questions that keep
turning up year after year — in short, teaching
them how to game the stupid thing — she says
she can typically add 200 points to a student’s
three-test total.
She knows a million test prep tricks. For the
essay, her students go in armed with five
fabulous facts, three historical moments,
familiarity with two novels and a surefire
writing formula. What is the meaning of
sacrifice? “I teach them, ‘Sacrifice is X,
sacrifice is Y, but most of all sacrifice is
XYZ.’ ”
Last summer, she started the online business,
which costs $139 for three months. Every day a
student like Nick is supposed to answer six
questions, which should take five minutes.
“It’s very important they do it every day to
internalize the patterns of the test,” Mrs.
Wilson said. “That’s why we monitor the
homework. With Nick, he kept showing up on day
6. It’s not what I want. I’m all about
internalizing.” There are also interactive
vocabulary games and weekly news articles whose
themes must be summarized in five words.
Ms. Torcivia had been shopping online for
“something not $1,000 where he could do a
little every day,” when she found Wilson Prep.
She also hired a private SAT tutor, who has
come to the house a few times for $30 an hour.
(This is what people mean when they say, “You
know, Chappaqua is not Albany.”) Like most
parents going through it the first time, she is
in a state of shock. “The biggest difference I
see,” she said, “is all the help the kids get
along the way.”
Students used to take the SAT for the first
time at the end of their junior year, but like
a lot of kids now, Nick will take it in
December, “for practice,” his mother said.
“They say it’s good to get used to it.”
She often feels conflicted between wanting her
son to feel the pressure so he’ll be focused,
and not wanting him to feel the pressure
because she loves him, and a nervous breakdown
does nobody any good. At one point during the
interview at their home, Nick said there was
some pressure now, but he felt there would be
lots more next year, when he’s a senior.
“By then,” his mother said, “it will be too
late.”
— Michael Winerip
New York Times
2008-11-14
INDEX OF OUTRAGES
