The Scholastic Aptitude Test is one of the most important tests a 21st century student will ever take. The SAT makes up the most important three hours and forty five minutes of one's high school career. Your performance during those three hours and 45 minutes can determine what school you spend the next four years of your life attending, and paying for.

The SAT originally consisted of two parts, Critical Reading and Mathematics, 800 points each, for a total of 1600. Now a third part has been added, writing, which brings the total SAT value to 2400.

The writing section has four main components: the 25-minute essay, sentence improvement, error identification, and paragraph improvement. It tests writing and grammatical skills.

That's where I began to have problems.

I have been taking an SAT prep class designed for juniors for the January 22 exam. The January SAT is mainly for juniors who want to get an early crack at the SAT, and avoid cramming the SAT in with college applications October of senior year.

I was handed a packet of practice writing tests while sitting in SAT prep class with ten other high school students, including one other from John Jay. The questions were testing wether or not we understood such basic grammar rules as a dangling modifier, idioms, or parallelism. Confused, my friend from John Jay and I sat doing questions until we were told to stop and check our answers. We scored significantly lower than students in the class who attended other high schools.

The reason, I  believe, is that we were never truly taught grammar at John Jay. I confronted my teacher the following day, and he agreed that there is no true grammar at any level of English in the Katonah Lewisboro District. I remember learning about the placement of commas, periods, and even semicolons in elementary school, but I never recalled going over word placement, subject agreement, or how a sentence is really supposed to sound.

By fourth grade we were already writing papers, but without any real focus on grammar. We've always heard—even in high school—"here is the rubric; grammar and mechanics will account for 5 points," but we never review grammar, we learn paragraph organization, structure, and developing a clear thesis.

I knew that if I was going to spend thirty hours studying for the SAT, twenty of them needed to be spent learning grammar—the math program at John Jay has done an awesome job at preparing students to handle the level of math on the SAT.