The frantic talk, last week, of the President’s mental condition brought back memories of the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, the test he took earlier this year to reassure the public. Its challenges include identifying pictures of a lion, a camel, and a rhinoceros, and repeating the phrase “I only know that John is the one to help today.” Trump aced it, prompting his physician to pronounce him “very sharp,” and his son Donald, Jr., to tweet, “More #winning.”
One wonders how he would fare on the Specialized High School Admissions Test, or S.H.S.A.T., which more than twenty thousand New York City eighth and ninth graders will take next month. The test is the sole admissions requirement for eight of the city’s specialized public high schools, considered the “Ivies” of the system. This summer, Mayor Bill de Blasio proposed changes to the admissions process, including scrapping the test altogether. Proponents of the exam claim that it creates a merit-based system; critics argue that it disadvantages blacks and Latinos, who make up sixty-seven per cent of the city’s student population, but account for only ten per cent of the students at specialized high schools.
In the meantime, students spent the summer studying. At Think Prep, a testing outfit near Penn Station, six students bent over desks in a windowless classroom. They’d been there for the past six weeks, Monday through Friday, from 9 A.M. to 2 P.M., studying practice S.H.S.A.T. questions. (The program costs five thousand six hundred dollars.) “The test is very difficult,” Ethan Woo, the company’s director, said. “But it’s fair.”
The group was racially diverse: black, Asian, Latino. A young male instructor stood before a dry-erase board that was covered with notes about a passage of eighteenth-century fiction: “Nettleton—widened her eyes. North Dakota—once again shrank in size”; “Mountain = crappy.”
The students reviewed a set of multiple-choice questions about the passage. A black student wearing a Minions shirt raised his hand. His name was Nyrell. “What’s stagnation?” he asked.
“No movement, no progress,” the instructor said.
“Oh, like stagnant!” Nyrell said. “I was afraid to pick ‘D,’ because I didn’t know what it meant.”
They moved on to a lesson on semicolons. The S.H.S.A.T.’s English component includes a section called “Revising/Editing.” “The grammar part is tough,” Nyrell, who attended M.S. 337, in the Bronx, said. Though most of the students at Think Prep were rising eighth graders, he was a rising ninth grader. He’d taken the S.H.S.A.T. the year before, and had just missed the cutoff for the Bronx High School of Science. He was planning to retake it and transfer for his sophomore year. “I had little to no information about grammar when taking the test,” he said. “I only knew that, A, you end sentences with a period, and, B, you put some commas in between.” He’d been studying all summer, and, he said, “it’s working. We just took a practice exam, and the first sixteen questions were grammar. I only got two wrong.”
When the class broke for lunch, most of the students ran outside, but two remained to study. The instructor, whose name was Andrew, wiped down the board. He’d attended Hunter College High School, another school with exam-based admissions, though it uses a different test. “It’s a mess,” he said, of the S.H.S.A.T. “It’s one test—one test date. You might get sick. You might get nervous. The test itself is a black box. It tests obscure concepts. They don’t release how the scores are calibrated, and there’s a weird curve.”
De Blasio’s critics have argued that, in an effort to help black and Latino students, he is pitting those minority groups against others, particularly Asians, who are excelling under the current system. Andrew, who is Korean, used to teach test prep in Queens. He described a class that was “all Asian,” “sixty kids,” and “very cheap.” “They have tutors starting in kindergarten,” he said. “But it’s the culture. How do you criticize the culture?” He said that some of his co-workers at Think Prep feel “under attack.”
“There is no solution,” he went on. “There are too many people, too many sides. Inequality always exists. There are the kids who don’t hear about the test early enough, and the Chinese immigrants breaking their backs to prepare their kids for it.”
The students returned from lunch with paper Chipotle bags and sodas from Burger King. “Mmm, gotta love stale fries,” Nyrell said.
“What’s better?” a girl asked. “Burger King or McDonald’s?”
“McDonald’s!” Nyrell said. “Is that even a question? It’s better, period.”
Woo arrived to drill the students in math. He wrote a series of algebraic equations on the board, and set a timer.
“O.K., time’s up,” he announced, after twenty minutes, and the students put down their pencils.
Nyrell breathed a sigh of relief. “I figured it out in the last second,” he said. ♦
