PrepPoint, a test prep, academic tutoring, and college advising group, has a great list of books and resources for students in the pre-college phase of their existence. The list is long enough that I won’t regurgitate it here, but it includes several resources in the following four categories:

Academic Performance
Test Prep
College Admissions
Online Resources

Posted by Alexa Harrington

This guy explains in the smart magazine The American, with more eloquence and less crankiness than I, what has gone wrong with the SAT. It’s an excellent article and totally explains why I have such a severe dislike of that most vile example of standardized tests.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

That’s a lame title, I know; I couldn’t come up with anything that didn’t involve either profanity or a description of me sticking a fork through my eye. To back up my previous statement regarding the overall suckiness of the SAT, I’m re-posting the article below wherein I explain my personal history with standardized testing.

And here’s a morbidly funny older post about more recent high school students and their stance on the SAT. I think the videos help to highlight the warped level of importance everyone (students, parents, teachers, and admissions personnel) has placed upon the SAT. I think it has come to be viewed as the magic-bullet yardstick for measuring an individual’s worthiness of a higher education.

The Re-Post: College Admissions–Looking Good Only On Paper

There’s an article in the NY Times about the increasing numbers of small liberal arts colleges dropping the SAT from their admissions requirements: Students’ Paths To Small Colleges Can Bypass SAT. Call it what you will (I like to call it WASP Guilt), but it’s moving me to confess: in high school I was an under-achieving slacker who got into college because I look good on paper. Many a kid smarter than I am (and possessing both an excellent work ethic and academic drive) didn’t end up in college because the realities of their lives made it hard for them to look as shiny as I did.

I test well. I’m a public school kid, and this theory of mine may be a bunch of crap, but I think 12 years of standardized tests prepared my brain very well for taking the SAT and the ACT. I skated along without having to do much actual work in school because the language spoken in my home was English and my entire family are voracious readers, which meant I was always reading or being read to. So I have that whole “excellent reading comprehension skills” thing going for me. Do you know what your life needs in order for you to be able to read a lot? Time, money, and a fairly low stress level.

Half of the population of the tiny California farming town I grew up in had arrived pretty recently (within a generation) from Mexico. I’m not an idiot, but I’m not a genius either, and I somehow always tested several grades above my actual grade level. Every year at testing time, the adults in charge made a big deal about how damn smart I was. I never corrected them, but I had a sneaking suspicion that I might not be as smart as the tests said I was.

I could see what went down in the classroom: there would be a tiny handful of extremely smart kids in the class. Of that handful, the smart kids who spoke English at home would grasp the material as soon as it was out of the teacher’s mouth. The smart kids who spoke Spanish at home would have the language hurdle to jump over, but then they would be off and running, still faster than the majority of the other students.

By the time I was applying to colleges, I got it that I looked good on paper, but that my test scores weren’t the whole picture. What my 98th percentile test scores didn’t show was that I was a decently (but not supremely) intelligent, English-speaking, total slacker with no work ethic to speak of (proof: my verbal scores rocked through no effort on my part, but my math scores blew hard because math requires studying, which I was too lazy to sit down and do), who came from an educated family which would be funding my college career.

There were several kids who we all knew were not only smarter, they also had more drive, and were generally more interested than I was in expending the energy required to kick some ass in the world. And would they be joining us at university in the fall? Not so much. And why? Because their families had bigger issues than SAT scores and college transcripts to tackle. Those kids didn’t get a lot of recreational reading or SAT prep-course work done because they spent their spare time working to help their parents make ends meet.

Here’s what my fortunate, English-speaking booty was up to. My habit through school was to complete my homework assignment in the five minutes of paper-shuffling before class started. I rarely studied for exams. I ditched the two SAT prep courses my parents paid good money for and spent those two Saturdays wandering aimlessly in the sunshine while those other suckers sat inside and wrote pages of intensely-scribbled (but probably very organized) notes on how to kick the ass of the kid sitting next to you when you go in to take the SAT’s.

I lacked a good work ethic. I was not the spastic over-achiever I am today. Far from it. How did I manage to get into Cal State? I test well. And I look good on paper because of it. My high school transcripts looked good because, since I didn’t have to work to survive, I had the time after school to do four years of swim team and student government.
Honestly, here’s what I think. If any college admissions person worth their salt had spent a day watching me and one of my Spanish-speaking counterparts, I would not have been chosen. I completely screwed up my first semester away at school. Eventually I gave in and saw that even I was going to have to buckle down and study in college.

That’s not the point. The point is that admissions boards are scanning transcripts and SAT scores to decide which kids should get in. I’m telling you (and hopefully them) that I did no more than I absolutely had to, and I sailed on in to a university. If someone had watched me in action or had interviewed me or had looked at my cush life next to that more-deserving-because-she’s-smarter-and-harder-working girl over there, I would have been passed over. Looking good on paper should get you nowhere. The whole picture, the whole package, that’s what should be scanned and weighed.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

Hey, look at that–the SAT still sucks. What are the odds?

Posted by Alexa Harrington

If you apply to a school that doesn’t require SAT scores, chances are it’s a liberal arts college. Smith College announced this month that they are now an SAT-optional school. This is a big deal and is an encouraging step in the right direction; I’m a firm disbeliever in the accuracy of standardized testing. I’m very, very happy about Smith’s decision to no longer require SAT scores on their admission applications.

In no way am I lessening the awesomeness of Smith College’s pronouncement, but it’s incredibly exciting that a high profile non-liberal arts university has also announced it’s decision to make SAT scores optional. Wake Forest University receives over 9,000 applications every year. They just increased their admissions department by twenty percent so as to better deal with the influx of admission applications (which is predicted to increase after the SAT-optional announcement).

You can read Inside Higher Ed’s great article here—it goes into all the details behind the decision. And you can go here to read the list FairTest keeps of all schools that don’t require standardized test scores on their applications. I’m going to bask in the glow of hopeful optimism that I will live to see the eventual demise of standardized testing.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

In honor of the first SAT and ACT test dates of the 2007/2008 school year, I found these excellent arguments for parents to simmer down and back off. Your kids won’t end up working in badly ventilated, inadequately lit factories. Probably. But keep in mind that this is what they’re doing when you think they’re locked in their rooms studying:

Posted by Alexa Harrington

Just as the American Medicial Association is debating whether video game addiction is a bonafide disorder, a leading test preparation company has come out with tutoring via iPod.

In the 1990s companies like Kaplan and Princeton Review started coming out with CDs, which was far more exciting than simply using the standard books to study. The CDs contained computerized assessments and personalized tutorials. It was a way to capture the attention of the AOL instant-messaging teenager.

But CDs are old news, clearly.

Learning styles have changed a lot since Stanley Kaplan founded Kaplan in 1938,” said Kristen Campbell, the national director of SAT and ACT programs for Kaplan. “Students take their iPods with them all the time, whether they’re in a car driving to baseball practice, or at home, or sitting at school waiting for their parents to come and pick them up.”

But even Campbell admitted that when it comes down to it - it’s the studying that matters, the iPod will always just be an accessory.

The iTunes downloads are “a great supplemental product,” she said, adding that Kaplan recommends that students continue to use traditional classroom and tutoring preparation. “Keep in mind that the SAT is a pencil-and-paper-based test,” she said.

By Sindya Bhanoo

I accept none of this. I’ve been doing a lot of ranting and raving, bitching and moaning about the college admissions insanity in this country. If I could laugh about it I’d feel better. Maybe this book will help. I love that someone wrote a book satirizing the bizarreness that is the college admissions process (albeit for only a teensy fraction of the population). Not necessarily high-end literature, but isn’t it enough that someone wrote a satirical novel about this subject? At any rate, it makes me feel better. The rest of you can use your free will to suffer or laugh (at yourselves or the other poor bastards who’ve allowed themselves to be sucked into the vortex). Do I still sound cranky?

Acceptance: A Novel (Sarah Crichton Books 2007) by Susan Coll

Publisher Comments:

A comic chronicle of a year in the life in the college admissions cycle.
It’s spring break of junior year and the college admissions hysteria is setting in. “AP” Harry (so named for the unprecedented number of advanced placement courses he has taken) and his mother take a detour from his first choice, Harvard, to visit Yates, a liberal arts school in the Northeast that is enjoying a surge in popularity as a result of a statistical error that landed it on the top-fifty list of the U.S. News & World Report rankings. There, on Yates’s dilapidated grounds, Harry runs into two of his classmates from Verona High, an elite public school in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. There’s Maya Kaluantharana, a gifted athlete whose mediocre SAT scores so alarm her family that they declare her learning disabled, and Taylor Rockefeller, Harry’s brooding neighbor, who just wants a good look at the dormitory bathrooms.

With the human spirit of Tom Perrotta and the engaging honesty of Curtis Sittenfeld’s Prep, Susan Coll reveals the frantic world of college admissions, where kids recalibrate their GPAs based on daily quizzes, families relocate to enhance the chance for Ivy League slots, and everyone is looking for the formula for admittance. Meanwhile, Yates admissions officer Olivia Sheraton sifts through applications looking for something — anything — to distinguish one applicant from the next. For all, the price of admission requires compromise; for a few, the ordeal blossoms into an unexpected journey of discovery.

Posted by Alexa Harrington
College