Keith Berman, INCREASE Admissions Guru, on the Scarsdale Principle.

 

One year we were lucky enough to have the valedictorian of Scarsdale High School as one of our students. And to talk to this kid, this young lady, was quite marvelous. She would talk about advents in biomedical engineering, she had a balanced geopolitical perspective, she read Harold Bloom for fun as a companion to her Shakespeare anthology -- which was not assigned by school -- and for all intents and purposes it was like talking to an award-winning Ph.D. student who was amid their dissertation.

 

And then she had to take the ACT.

 

And, considering she had A-pluses at arguably the world’s most competitive public high school, for years, I figured, a test wouldn’t be so hard for her.

And she got a 29 out of 36, which to much of the world would be a quite above average score. But for arguably the smartest 17-year-old I had ever met, I was stunned that her score wasn’t close to perfect. And she, at some level, was stunned that I thought it was going to be perfect. And so we got into a little bit of a dialogue, and it went a little something like this:

 

I said, “How did you study for the exam?” and she folded her arms with the pride of a valedictorian and she said “Well, every Tuesday and Saturday I take a full length ACT practice exam and I go over what I got right and wrong.”

I kinda shifted in my chair like I’m shifting now and I said, “Is that all you do?” and she looked at me bug-eyed and said “That’s ten hours of studying a week!”

And I started laughing and I said, “How is that studying?” She said “What do you mean?” and I said, “Well, let me take a guess here. You pretty much get questions 1-15 correct every time. You really hate dual passage reading questions. You miss questions that are word problems in the math section and maybe a probability question or two. And the science section, it really depends on the topic.”

And she just sat there stunned, like, “How did you know that?”

And I said, “When you study for a test in school, do you go back and get all the old exams that that teacher gave and start taking them one by one?”

And she said, “No, that would be really inefficient. I just open the textbook and learn the stuff that I don’t know.”

And I said, “Yeah, why don’t you do that instead?”

And she said, “What do you mean?”

 

I said, “You’re going to continue to get the same questions right and wrong. Why not just study the stuff that you’re getting wrong?”

You could see the light bulbs flashing over her head. And so I called her parents and I said, “Listen, I know you guys are big into studying, and good, well, you should be, but I want to do a social experiment, and unfortunately, you’re the guinea pig.

 

There are 5 weeks till the next ACT and goodness knows she wants to take it again. She can study one hour a week, but she can never take another problem from the actual exam. She can only study the things that she doesn’t know, and she has to use other resources.”

And they were like “But that’s 10% of the studying she did previously!”  You could see where she got it from.

 

And I said, “I know. I will take the heat if this doesn’t work. But could you enforce her not continuing to take practice exams?” Fine. 5 weeks later she got a 35. And this created something that I have talked about with every private counselee since, and I call it the Scarsdale Principle, after her.

 

And it goes like this:

Raise your hand when you’ve solved this algebraic equation.