Readers have always read high and low, and to fight that urge is to fight the freedom inherent in the act of reading itself. The only arguments that have any traction, as best as I can see it, are about whether the genre classification of ‘young adult‘ should exist at all.

Elite private-school educations leave students unprepared for a standardized test with which their public school counterparts are innately familiar.

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.

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

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.’

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 most important factor in college admissions is a test that benefits those who are least prepared for college.

Higher SAT scores mean better college matriculation rates. So it’s no wonder that private schools in ultra-competitive environments would grease the qualifying process as much as possible.

Pick any scientific field, and you’ll find that those snubbed by their communities, left feeling alone and despised, were often those on the forefront.

With few exceptions, the publishing industry has come to a consensus: if a book has a young protagonist, and if its worldview is primarily interested in the questions that crop up when coming of age, then it’s a young adult novel.

Students raised on Park Avenue are born into family situations in which overachieving merely maintains the status quo, and therefore the market is primed for anyone offering services that provide an edge on local peers.

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.

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.

I remember my guidance counselor, when I told her I wanted to apply to Harvard, she paused and said, ‘That’s in New York, right?’ The funny thing is, I didn’t really know. It was a few weeks before I was like, ‘No, I think it’s in Massachusetts.’