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The SAT tests "basic" concepts and knowledge that are "supposed" to have been taught in the K-12 education system. Sadly, there are too many outside influencing factors that can affect just how much of this "basic" knowledge students have learned, granting an advantage to students with teachers, parents, and tutors who go out of their way to provide SAT preparation and a disadvantage to students who have gotten the short end of the stick on the education front. Luckily, most colleges do not rely heavily on SAT scores to determine what students they accept, but for those moments when the only difference between two applications is the scores, the choice becomes unfair.

I teach SAT prep courses on the weekends to high school juniors and seniors. The parents of these students have paid for the courses, and their money goes towards paying for SAT preparation books, DVD's, and practice tests. Their parents can afford these courses, and their students are learning all the little helpful tips and tricks that can help raise their SAT score (strategies for tackling the different types of reading questions, information on how the essay portion is graded, and lots of interesting information regarding the type of content that will be on the test). I've thought to myself many times over the course of helping these students, "Goodness, but if I had taken one of these courses four years ago when I took the SAT, my score would have been much higher!"

Why didn't I take one of those courses? Neither I nor my mother could afford it. My school did not offer free SAT preparation, the area I lived in was devoid of any such thing, and my teachers, though I was lucky enough to have a few wonderful ones, for the most part were concerned with their own curriculum. I could not afford a course that would prepare me to earn a higher score, and for the most part, neither could my classmates.

Luckily, most of my schooling had been in a large, rather nice school with great teachers who integrated a little SAT prep into their class. I had enough background to still do decently on the test. My classmates: not so lucky. They had been in the same school system all their lives, trapped in an area that "good teachers" are not attracted to, meaning that their quality of education was lower than that of students living in places like where I grew up. Even as I took the SAT my junior year, I caught myself thinking, "I only know this stuff because of what I learned back home, these new friends of mine must be so lost!"

And they were. And there was nothing they could do about it. They were, for the most part, smart kids. Great at analyzing literature and building physics modelsbut the SAT chewed them up and spit them out with its archaic, unfamiliar language and its unexpected content. The culture bias was obvious (these were students in the US Virgin Islands); the students didn't have a chance. Most of them got low to average scores but still got into great schools, thank goodness, but I still think that their scores were an inaccurate representation of their intelligence and grasp of basic knowledge in comparison to the more well-prepared students in other areas or with more money, and thus an unfair factor in their college applications.

Learn more about this author, Shannon Burton.
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