The Neurotic Parent

Dear Neurotic Parents of the Class of '12,

Get prepared for a mass freakout.  Here are the early decision/action results for several Class of '11 applicants mentioned in an earlier post.  As you will note, many ended up with deferrals, a frustrating limbo which means they must wait until April to contract senioritis.  And, even worse, they must keep their fictious Facebook names for a few more months – names like like Annie Goolash, Lucas Schtick and Drew Grit. 

This is probably not a statistically-significant group.  It is just a random selection of nice kids (enrolled in both private and public schools, mostly from CA, two from NY, one from Ohio).  Several of the cases below were absolute shockers – deferrals for kids who have written operas and discovered new planets. 

BU – deferred

Bowdoin1 – accepted

Bowdoin2 – deferred

Brown – deferred

Colorado College – accepted

Duke – accepted

Georgetown – deferred

Kenyon – accepted

Michigan – accepted

Northwestern – rejected

NYU – accepted

Penn (legacy) – accepted

Skidmore – accepted

Stanford1 (legacy) – deferred

Stanford2 (legacy) – deferred

Syracuse (Newhouse) – accepted

Vanderbilt – rejected

Yale (legacy) – deferred

WashU1 – rejected

WashU2 – accepted

Out of twenty, that's ten accepted, three rejected, and seven sentenced to Limbo.  Not really the "bloodbath" that many have mentioned, but neither is it the great relief/edge up that lots of kids envision.  The moral for the Class of '12?  1) Rethink "Early"; 2) Go to ancestry.com and discover you have Inuit relatives; 3) Xanax.

 

 

It's the first day of winter break and 'tis the season for a four-hour practice SAT exam.  Don't know what I was thinking when I offered our home as a venue for GC and his three friends to take the grueling March 2005 SAT I. 

I procured the exams from GC's tutor, sent Mr. NP to Kinko's for xeroxing and collating, and got the power bars and water ready for the breaks. 

And now here I am, supervising the NINTH section of this joyous activity.  Although I have been doing little more than keeping the dog from licking the test-takers' feet and running back and forth to the kitchen to set the timer, I really feel the boys' pain.   As they complete the final section, which tests grammar and sentence construction, I feel as if I've tortured rather than empowered them. 

A few random observations:

- I could not figure out how long to make the break between sections. My usual definitive source, College Confidential was inconsistent: some kids swore the pauses were supposed to be just 2-minutes, while others mentioned multiple 5-minute rest periods. We went for the kinder, gentler five-minute breaks…which added an hour to the exam schedule.

- The boys had no interest in cheating, but they were very interested in chatting.  They felt a need to analyze and ridicule the exam. 

- Even if you're not taking the test, four hours is L-O-N-G.  I stayed in the room, playing Scrabble online, surfing the internet and writing Christmas cards for the guy who delivers our NY Times.  Sort of felt as if I were in a plane with Wifi.  On a cross-country flight. 

- I'm not sure if the stamina necessary for this test is anything related to the skill-set you need for college.  When will one ever again be required to write an essay about creativity, then figure out the area of the shaded portion of a triangle, then find missplaced commas…all in a tightly-structured time period? 

And those wacky exam creators are all over the map: first, getting rid of my favorite part – the analogies, then making the exam several hours longer in order to include an "experimental section," which doesn't even count.  (The boys did not take that part today – would have been 25 extra minutes).  That darn college board can't even remain consistent about what SAT stands for.  Back in the day it was Scholastic Aptitude Test.  Then in the '80s, it became the Scholastic Achievement Test, even though the questions remained relatively the same.  And now it's just plain SAT, no longer an acronym, but a word unto itself as in  "I SAT for four hours taking a brutal exam, and its biased results could define my whole future."

Thanks to MOBYC (Mom of Brilliant Yale Chemist) for this piece from the Chronicle of Higher Education. It's about a college grad, referred to as "The Shadow Scholar" who's making $66k a year writing papers for college students.  He even does 75-page assignments for kids who are barely literate enough to send a legible text, people who send him thanks you's with profound messages such as "thanx so much for uhelp ican going to graduate to now."

http://chronicle.com/article/The-Shadow-Scholar/125329/

The Shadow Scholar can stretch a 40-word paragraph into four pages.  His biggest customer bases are  nursing students and "lazy rich kids."  And he has perfected the use of stock academic phrases like the following (fill in the blanks):

"A close consideration of the events which occurred in ____ during the ____ demonstrate that ____ had entered into a phase of widespread cultural, social, and economic change that would define ____ for decades to come."

If I were a professor, I must admit that I would not be thrilled to have to read hundreds of 75-page papers.  In fact, I can barely get through my book club book every month.  So I might even be tempted to hire somebody to read the 75-page papers written by random ghostwriters who had never attended my class.  With this in mind, the Neurotic Parent Institute has commissioned a study to find out whether a new crop of "Shadow Professors" has emerged. 

In the meantime, the Institute is also pondering why any professor in his or her right mind would assign a 75-page paper.  Why would anyone possibly want to encourage kids, who lack clarity of thought to begin with, to ramble on forever?  Kickbacks from Shadow Scholars, perhaps?