SAT Math and Logic

If honor, prestige, and academic satisfaction aren’t enough to coerce you into studying for the SAT, maybe some cold hard cash will. Colleges hand out a huge percentage of their endowment money to award merit, talent, and accomplishments of those students who have dedicated themselves to be great at something. Generally speaking, they do this because they feel that the value of money they invest in you will be returned through alumni donations, enhanced student body, and your telling 10,000 people over your lifetime that you went to XYZ College.

One of the money stats colleges look at is your SAT score. There’s no question about it: Students who have higher GPAs and test scores receive more money. How much would you have to improve your SAT score to be considered one of those students who gets the hook up? What if you made the decision that for 100 days before the SAT you would study 1 hour every day no matter what. Don’t you think you could improve your reading comprehension? Don’t you think you could advance your mental arithmetic skills beyond the norm? Couldn’t you learn all of the math and algebra equations inside and out?

If your combined efforts were able to earn an extra $5,000 per year toward college, that’s worth $20,000 over the course of a 4-year run. Let’s do the math: $20,000/100 hours = $200/hour. Sign me up for that any day! Folks that’s a tremendous amount of value for a very minimal time commitment. There’s not much you can do to earn that kind of money in high school. Somehow spending 20 hours every week earning $8.50/hour (bagging groceries, being a lifeguard, babysitting, being a hostess, etc.) just sounds really unintelligent when you could maximize your time doing other things. If you make $170 (before taxes) in 20 hours, and I earn $200 in one hour – one of us is stupid.

There is nothing wrong with getting a summer job, gaining work experience, or the jobs in and of themselves. But I would question your priorities if you don’t already have the stats to go with the job. Money aside, the benefits of academic pursuit far outweigh learning the PLU codes for broccoli and asparagus – but that is another discussion entirely.

– Andrew Turner

www.thinkarchimedes.com