John Katzman Quotes

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.'

You still remember your SAT scores. And everybody else does too. Everybody's forgotten everything about themselves, everything else about high school. They remember their SAT scores.

It feels like it's the end of the world if you don't do well on your SATs.

I don't think anyone thinks that the SAT score is a measure of your innate intelligence. It is not. That is a fallacious concept, and we at Kaplan, and others who are in a position, should be out there making sure people know this is nothing, this score does not have anything to do with your innate intelligence.

If there's going to be an SAT, it's probably practical to invest in a book or perhaps in a course, but I'm sorry to say, I went to some classes that my kids took and it was clear in school that what they were doing was just SAT training.

You know, I'm fairly intelligent, but I don't think my grades reflected that.

Well, I don't think that the SAT is a scam.

If a teacher goes, 'Do you guys want an easy test?' You're going to say, 'Heck, yeah.' The less you've got to study, I'm going ace this test.

Academic studies in general is not something that I'm very good at.

Charter opponents often try to delegitimize strong testing results like those in Boston by attributing them to excessive test prep - as New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio did recently.

With my academic achievement in high school, I was accepted rather readily at Princeton and equally as fast at Yale, but my test scores were not comparable to that of my classmates. And that's been shown by statistics, there are reasons for that.

And finally I begin to have such a success in my examinations that I found myself in a career you see.

Why do men outperform women on the SAT? The SAT's supposed to predict college grades. Women do better in high school and they do better in college. What's the problem here? Ah, the more you use, the more you start accepting that the SAT's coachable, the more problems you have with it.

If my future were determined just by my performance on a standardized test, I wouldn't be here. I guarantee you that.

I myself scraped seven poor passes at O-level.

In K-12, almost everybody goes to local schools. Universities are a bit different because kids actually do pick the university. The bizarre thing, though, is that the merit of university is actually how good the students going in are: the SAT scores of the kids going in.

The SAT is not perfect. We all know smart, knowledgeable people who do badly on standardized tests. But neither is it useless. SAT scores do measure both specific knowledge and valuable thinking skills.

When I was growing up, the exam system didn't allow you to write fiction, so you never did.

I was studying for the SAT's and learning lines.

I scored a 910 on my SAT. I didn't care about education. I don't know what I cared about.

The Scholastic Aptitude Tests do not predict success any better than the socio economic status of the parents.

I didn't pass the scholarship exam for Oxford because of poor mathematics.

I was planning that whole athletic slide into Stanford rather than actually getting a 1450 on my SATs.

I wrote down the grades I wanted in every class.

I got through at Ignatius. I did OK, not great in any of my academic endeavors.