Indiana University is “the new Wisconsin.” [WSJ]
NYC toddlers are 34% more excellent than last year. [NYT City Room]
The SAT still discriminates. [Head Count]
This professor is 110! [Tweed]
Archive for the ‘tests’ Category
after unforgivable delay, news you can use
Wednesday, July 28th, 2010more news you can use
Thursday, April 29th, 2010Good news: Some colleges (Boston College, Brown, Catholic, and a bunch more) do indeed superscore (combine a student’s highest scores on) the ACT. [College Admissions Partners]
Baddish news: Princeton fraternities are as awful as you would probably expect. [IvyGate]
Medium news: 1 in 3 of you will switch colleges. And there’s a podcast about it. [The Choice]
thanks, compulsive list-makers: high school rankings
Friday, December 11th, 2009The US News public high school rankings came out at midnight Wednesday. Meant to compete with Newsweek’s less-than-useful annual list (which ranks schools solely on AP/IB participation), the survey is based pretty much entirely on the same thing, plus state tests, with some attention to economic and racial parity.
12 NYC schools made the US News gold list: Newcomers High School in Long Island City (#6), the High School of American Studies at Lehman College (#19), Stuy (#31), Townsend Harris High School in Flushing (#33), Staten Island Tech (#34), the Baccalaureate School for Global Education in Long Island City (#35), the High School for Dual Language and Asian Studies (#52), Bronx Science (#58), Brooklyn Tech (#63), NEST+M (#64), the High School for Law and Public Service (#75), and Queens High School for the Sciences at York College (#81). You can judge for yourself how arbitrary (or not) this list is, but since no NYC schools made the Newsweek top 100, I’m inclined to think of the US News rankings as an improvement.
Also newsworthy: Stuy and Bronx Science are good schools with similarities and differences.
On the silver list: Baruch, the Collegiate Institute for Math & Science in the Bronx, Benjamin Banneker, Bronx Engineering and Technology Academy, Eleanor Roosevelt, LaGuardia, Frederick Douglass, the High School for Health Professions and Human Services, the High School of Economics and Finance, the High School of Telecommunication Arts & Technology, Hostos-Lincoln Academy of Science in the Bronx, the Manhattan Center for Science and Mathematics, Manhattan International High School, Queens Gateway to Health Sciences Secondary School, Millenium, Riverdale/Kingsbridge Academy (MS/HS 141), the Academy of American Studies in Queens, the Marble Hill School for International Studies in the Bronx, the Michael J. Petrides School in Staten Island, and the Urban Assembly School of Design and Construction. There’s also a bronze list, but you get the idea.
getting into u chicago
Monday, November 30th, 2009In honor of getting to hang out with my brother all weekend, a few words on applying to his alma mater, U Chicago, the brain-hive known for its Core, devotion to the free market (sort of), innovative undergrads, pirate professor (crazy like a fox), and Latke-Hamantash Debate. (U of C is also the former stomping ground and/or alma mater of much of the White House inner circle, and the possible location of the eventual Obama Presidential Library.)
U of C has a reputation for being no fun–among its grad students people who don’t get what its students consider “fun.” A postcolonial-themed costume party is fun. Drinking coffee with professors is fun. A recent protest against visiting loons hatemongers was fun (according to the Chicago Maroon), turning into a “celebration” that “raised about $500 for charity.” As one junior recalls, “When…[the Alpha Delta Phi fraternity brothers were] dancing around in their underwear, me and Rabbi Ruthie [Gelfarb] and this priest started dancing…”
Understanding this “let your freak flag fly” mindset is key to filling out the U of C’s Common App supplement, a painful document that forces undergrads to write an entirely new batch of creative essays applicable only to this application. When writing them, you must be as unself-conscious as a half-dressed frat brother dancing with a rabbi for charity. Via the excellent folks at Collegewise (who today wrapped up a 30 colleges in 30 days feature):
“For those of you who decide to take on the optional essay [about favorite books, movies, and music], all I can say is this. Geek out. Geek out like you have never geeked out before…
“If you have watched every single one of the Star Wars movies more than a dozen times, this is the place to celebrate it. If you’ve read “One Hundred Years of Solitude” over and over again, tell them why. If you read US Weekly because celebrity gossip is like an addictive substance to you, say so. If you think there should be a national holiday honoring Bruce Springsteen, or that you’re pretty sure you will break down and cry if The New York Times ever stops publishing [its] Sunday edition, or that “The Godfather”…or “Crash” or “Tommy Boy” is a DVD you’d save if your house were on fire (I would save “Tommy Boy,” by the way”), say so!
“Students who would love the University of Chicago experience celebrate what they read, watch and listen to without apology. Show them you can do it, too.”
BREAKING UPDATE (1/15/10): Congratulations to the readers of this blog entry! You all applied to U of C, creating an applications uptick of 42%.
kindergarten admissions: a total nightmare?
Monday, November 23rd, 2009This week’s 8th most emailed Times story (maybe you’ve seen it?) examined preparation of pre-schoolers for the admissions tests (the OLSAT and Bracken School Readiness Assessment) to public gifted & talented kindergarten programs. Most interesting (to me) is the difference between private and public kindergarten admissions practices, at the heart of which is, as always, the question of access:
“Private schools warn that they will look negatively on children they suspect of being prepped for the tests they use to select students, like the Educational Records Bureau exam, or E.R.B., even though parents and admissions officers say it quietly takes place…No similar message, however, has come from the public schools. In fact, the city distributes 16 Olsat practice questions to ‘level the playing field,’ said Anna Commitante, the head of gifted and talented programs for the city’s Department of Education.”
Fair enough. Spreading the SAT prep around is crucial (although not sufficient) for equal college access, so it makes sense to let everyone prep for the kindergarten exam. But Teachers College professor James Borland says the test itself causes major inequities in gifted admissions. And Leonie Haimson at the NYC Public School Parents blog, agreeing with Boreland, is sick of the Times’s “obsession” with gifted programs.
For more (Manhattan-centric) insight into kindergarten admissions, check out this awesome but completely horrifying documentary.
sleep
Friday, November 13th, 2009I love sleep, and I have also long loved this (slightly melodramatic) New York Magazine article about the effects of sleep deprivation on academic performance. From the article:
“The surprise is how much sleep affects academic performance and emotional stability…A few scientists theorize that sleep problems during formative years can cause permanent changes in a child’s brain structure: damage that one can’t sleep off like a hangover. It’s even possible that many of the hallmark characteristics of being a tweener and teen—moodiness, depression, and even binge eating—are actually symptoms of chronic sleep deprivation.
…The performance gap caused by an hour’s difference in sleep was bigger than the normal gap between a fourth-grader and a sixth-grader. Which is another way of saying that a slightly sleepy sixth-grader will perform in class like a mere fourth-grader. “A loss of one hour of sleep is equivalent to [the loss of] two years of cognitive maturation and development,” Sadeh explains.”
The SAT Reading Section (part I)
Thursday, November 12th, 2009Test prep books and courses don’t do a very good job of improving student scores on the SAT Reading test. That doesn’t mean students can’t significantly improve those scores; it just means that practice sections, drills, and techniques (which sometimes do wonders in the Math section) can only get them so far. It also means that some strategies will be long-term. In the coming days and weeks, I’ll talk about a few ways to do better on the Reading section, both for crammers and for people with more time until the big day.
I’ll start with the most important piece of advice.
This is SO important. According to the 2000 Perfect Score study, the number-one difference between perfect and average scorers (really, the actual number-one reason, bigger even than family income and other factors that we know make too big a difference on the SAT) was hours the students read per week.
Read every day, or almost every day. Read for pleasure and read everything assigned for school. Start by reading an extra hour a week—even this will make a big difference.
In coming weeks, I will talk a lot more about reading, including what to read (almost anything is okay, but I’ll get a bit more advice-y about it), how to read more critically, and what to do if even after reading more a student feels that he or she dreads reading.
Even for big readers, there is ALWAYS more to read.
And in general, no one should be caught without something to read. Once I was accidentally locked in a bathroom for an hour, and I had nothing to read.
