Sixth-Graders Get an Early Crack at High School
On Friday morning, wind lashed snow down a frigid East 69th Street, where some of the only light in the near-dawn darkness came from a metal food cart.
But the mood was already foreboding enough for hundreds of sixth graders who were there to take the entrance exam for the highly rated Hunter College High School, a public institution that is among the city’s most competitive, with an acceptance rate of about a 10 percent.“I’m really nervous,” said Nathan Mulady, 11, of Jamaica Estates, Queens, as he waited inside glass doors at Hunter College, one of two locations where the test was being offered to students who had previously scored at top levels on state standardized tests.
The high school, which actually offers grades 7 through 12, is located on East 94th Street, where hundreds of students took the exam on Friday. The rest of the group brought their No. 2 pencils to the campus of Hunter College, on Lexington Avenue at East 69th Street, where they began lining up before 7 a.m. for an exam that began nearly two hours later.
At one of the two entrances at the college, the police guided