Tomorrow is the Nov. 5th SAT, which I can guarantee is freaking the crap right out of teenagers across the nation. Poor bastards. When I took the Rite of Passage for American High School Students (standardized tests written by pain-in-the-ass adults whose heads are shoved so far up their exit ramps that they can no longer navigate reality), I must say I had a rather cavalier attitude about the whole thing. Almost twelve years of public school had made me quite the badass standardized test taker; I was unconcerned.

Most students don’t have that attitude. To them I advise chilling the eff out, this is not the end of the world. I promise. Shite of a much higher magnitude will befall you in the course of your lifetime, I can guarantee it. So quit your whining and suck it up, kiddos. You walk right in there with your #2 pencils and kick some standardized ass! Or don’t, and head for your 5th choice school. No biggie.

Need some advice on SATs and ACTs and how they may affect your future matriculation plans? Allen Grove is a font of information about college admissions. Here are four of his bits of wisdom:

Low SAT or ACT Scores? These Colleges Don’t Require the Tests
What ACT Scores Do You Need to Get Into College?
Are My SAT Scores Good Enough?
Low ACT Scores? What Now?

Further Reading (my cranky attitude toward standardized tests in general):

Secret SAT Scores
Colbert’s Wickedly True Take on the SATs
Testing Season Begins
An Excellent Argument for Abolishing the SAT
The Newly Unfabulous SAT
Awesome Parent
The SAT Is Not Good
College Admissions Testing: For and Against
January 23rd SAT Results
Calculating Potential
Kaplan SAT Prep Tools on Facebook

Posted by Alexa Harrington

(image: panic)

It turns out parents and students are less than rational when it comes to choosing institutions of higher learning for the prospective college student’s matriculation. Paying for the education venture twists everyone’s grey matter into knots as well. Let’s keep our heads in the game, people! Read this article in the Wall Street Journal: Get Smart About College.

From the article:

When weighing present obligations against future potential, it can help to take a step back. College is an investment but it’s a peculiarly intimate one; students are investing in themselves, parents in people they love. To get some perspective on the matter, families should look at choosing and paying for a college like starting a small business (You, Inc.). Would someone launch an enterprise without a line of credit? Or skimp on equipment and human capital to avoid cutting into short-term consumption?

Families should also think carefully about context when they’re making estimates of future earnings. Someone who graduates in four years is likely to have a shot at a much better first job than someone who graduates right now; many experts hope and expect the economy to look quite different by the time today’s high school students finish college.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

(photo: campus)

Hate high school? Want to get the hell out and be done with it already? Indiana’s got a new plan to have high school last a slightly less excruciating three years in lieu of the standard four. If you like high school (which I kind of did, but please don’t judge me), feel free to stick around and have the full experience and give your teen self time to mature a bit before throwing yourself into college or reality or wherever it is you wish to escape to.

Reasons behind the reduced high school experience: Indiana will save between $6,000 and $8,000 per student, which will then be used for college scholarships; and most college-bound teens are done with their core requirements and have sent their paperwork in to their future colleges and universities and spend most of senior year decompressing and having fun (the humanity!) instead of focusing on their studies.

One might argue that any high school senior who has managed to get him/herself pretty much into college by junior year deserves a year to just be and relax before they start the rat race all over again in college. And then again in post-college real life and on and on until old age does everyone in.

From The Hechinger Report article:

[Indiana Gov. Mitch] Daniels said he came up with the idea after years of asking seniors he met across the state what they were up to and too often being told “not much.”

“I kept bumping into seniors who said, ‘Well, I’m done,’ “ he said. “They’d laugh and tell me they were having a good time. We are spending thousands of dollars on students who are eligible to move on.”
Senior year has long troubled educators and policymakers, well aware that tests required to graduate often are passed by junior year. The National Commission on the High School Senior Year found in 2001 that senior year was “a lost opportunity: a year where we have significant drift and disconnection.”

Solutions over the past decade have trended toward mixing college and high school courses through dual-enrollment programs or early-college high schools, where students can earn an associate degree and a diploma. More…

Posted by Alexa Harrington

(image: senioritis)

Allen Grove, one of my favorite college-advice guys, has calming and ever-so-practical words of wisdom for any college hopeful who’s recently blown the SATs. Stop panicking, all is not lost. There’s work to be done, so pull your freaking out little self up, take a deep breathe, and get to it.

And remember–or make yourself really listen if this is the first time you’re hearing this: Getting into the college at the top of your list is not a life or death situation. I promise you it’s not.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

(bootstrap)

Slacking off now is probably not the best plan. Perfection to the 80-billionth degree is no longer necessary, but there are a few deadlines and dates to be aware of so you don’t hose your future completely.

Allen Grove has a simple but detailed list of everything a high school senior needs to do between now and August/September, when college newbie frosh head for the dorms. Hang in there, follow the list, and it’ll all be fine. And breathe (you have time for that now). And perhaps unclench just a little.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

(AP calculus 0/10; atomic to do list)

One family has managed to get it right—or do it well or actively walk away from being total whack jobs when it comes to dealing with their children’s higher education situations or whatever. However you’d like to put it, the Demarees of Bethesda are lovely in their lack of over-control. The parents have raised happy, successful kids. Three of them. Not one has flunked out of life due to the freedom allowed them by their parents. During the kids’ college-admissions-gauntlet years, Debby and Larry didn’t show a single SAT score to a single kid. It’s a good message: this number is not what it all comes down to. Move on.

It has been fully documented that there is no love lost between myself and the high-pressure helicopter parents of this country. I yammer on frequently about them and their crappy parenting skills. Classes are taken and volumes of how-to books are read so they can raise their offspring excellently; then unconditional love is tossed out the window so the whole damn family can focus on getting junior into a fantabulous college someday. The goal to be perfect, loving parents lasts until around preschool admissions time, and then it’s all about higher education for the next sixteen years or so.

Education is a right, and we all deserve to have as much of the learning as we can stand. College is a marvelous place; I’d live there if I could. I am all for higher education. But it’s not life or death, I promise. Relax, give your kids the tools and support they need, allow them their options, and then, for the love of all things holy, let them go. They’re not as stupid as some parents seem to think.

Previous Posts:

Tightly Wound Parental Units
Awesome Parent
What Makes A Good Parent?
Colbert’s Wickedly True Take On the SATs
Have Some Perspective
Media Frenzy Around High-Pressure College Admissions
Testing Season Begins
“Bursting the AP Bubble”
Play-Doh Smeared Credentials
Find Your Happy Place
(Possibly) The End Of Helicopter Parenting

Posted by Alexa Harrington

(freedom)

It’s April! For college students that means digging in a little deeper and trying to find a few more months’ worth of motivation to get through to summer break.

For high school seniors, April means making the biggest decisions of their College Admissions Odyssey: Which college to pick among the colleges that have chosen said seniors?

No pressure, but most people meet the friends and life partners they will keep throughout adulthood while they’re awash in higher education matriculation. Which is to say that your future relationships are kind of riding on which college you decide to attend. Again, no pressure.

Can’t breathe? Need an inhuman, analytical tool to help you decide while taking the pressure off of you? International Counselor pointed out this nifty and simple it’s-out-of-my-hands tool. Punch in the colleges you’re thinking yourself in circles about, answer some questions, and done. Go forth and make good choices, people.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

(mainframe)

The parents who will be driving their offspring to insanity as soon as the kids can spell S-A-T start in on the psychotic haranguing early:

Try to stay off of my sh*t list, lesser humans.

Further Reading:

What Makes A Good Parent?
Media Frenzy Around High Pressure College Admissions
Testing Season Begins
Play-Doh Smeared Credentials
Find Your Happy Place
(Possibly) The End Of Helicopter Parenting

Posted by Alexa Harrington

Having barfy feelings about the college interview process? You’re in good, high-numbered company. Options for College has created the Entoview College Edition app to save your stressed-out tweaker self.

From the press release:

Options for College is pleased to announce the release of Entoview
College Edition, the first iPhone/iPod application designed to help
students ace the dreaded college interview.

Most high school students have never been on the receiving end of any kind of interview,
let alone one that will determine the next four years of their lives. It can be an
intimidating, foreign process – but it doesn’t have to be.

Entoview College Edition is an opportunity to get college interview experience before you
ever set foot in an admissions office. It contains an informative interview prep section,
including Ten Cardinal Rules and how to avoid common pitfalls, and a practice interview
with a wide variety of sample questions and a real evaluation at the end. The content was
written by a team with on-campus interview experience at Harvard and Yale (the “right”
and “wrong” answers are based on real answers from interviewees).

Sometimes flying by the seat of your pants works out stupendously, but every once in a while it’s wise to be prepared.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

I’ve always suspected that the morally screwed essay-writing-service industry was real, but couldn’t quite let myself believe that such moral larceny could occur in academia. I’m sure everyone else has always understood its existence to be true, but I’ve always worked hard to maintain the lie (to my obsessive, rule-following little self) that essay-writing services were evil myths, like Munchkins, that thing under my bed that won’t stop drooling, and that freaky tooth fairy bitch–stealing children’s teeth? Not unlike collecting the ears of your enemies.

It turns out you really can pay someone to do your writing for you in high school, college, and grad school. You just need a fistful of cash and a moral compass that’s lacking a true north. Outsourcing your brilliance is dumb. But apparently if you’re not the sharpest tool in the shed and your written communication looks like this:

“You did me business ethics propsal for me I need propsal got approved pls can you will write me paper?”

This:

“did u get the sorce I send
please where you are now?
Desprit to pass spring projict”

Or this:

“thanx so much for uhelp ican going to graduate to now”

Then maybe paying a professional is the way to go.

Oddly, I have a huge amount of respect for pseudonymity guy, Ed Dante, who wrote about his career writing strangers’ papers for money in The Chronicle of Higher Education. I somehow find only his clients to be reprehensible. He’s part of the machine, sure, but I’m going with the argument that if there weren’t a market for his services, he wouldn’t be writing other people’s essays. Please add to that the fact that Dante makes more money writing emergency thesis chapters for sub-par grad students than he could at almost any above-board writing gig.

Here’s what he says about the money:

I live well on the desperation, misery, and incompetence that your educational system has created. Granted, as a writer, I could earn more; certainly there are ways to earn less. But I never struggle to find work.

The endless admissions essays:

I have become a master of the admissions essay. I have written these for undergraduate, master’s, and doctoral programs, some at elite universities. I can explain exactly why you’re Brown material, why the Wharton M.B.A. program would benefit from your presence, how certain life experiences have prepared you for the rigors of your chosen course of study. I do not mean to be insensitive, but I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been paid to write about somebody helping a loved one battle cancer. I’ve written essays that could be adapted into Meryl Streep movies.

Seminary students:

I do a lot of work for seminary students. I like seminary students. They seem so blissfully unaware of the inherent contradiction in paying somebody to help them cheat in courses that are largely about walking in the light of God and providing an ethical model for others to follow.

And retirement:

…there is little discussion about custom papers and how they differ from more-detectable forms of plagiarism, or about why students cheat in the first place. It is my hope that this essay will initiate such a conversation. As for me, I’m planning to retire. I’m tired of helping you make your students look competent.

You should read Dante’s whole confession. He’s damn smart, and makes such beautiful points about higher education and the levels of academia that are shockingly (maybe only to me) rife with cheating. It’s an unpleasantly shite-ful situation, but Dante’s article made me feel all warm inside. I do love honesty, but I think perhaps it was seeing the dirty unmentionables behind the curtain that did it for me in the end.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

(moral compass)