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I will be giving a presentation in a couple of weeks about the new SAT and the difficult decision that current 10th graders need to make about whether to start early and study for the current version of the test or wait until the rollout of the new SAT in March of 2016.

The information is below:

SAT Presentation
The SAT is changing and the timing of the change presents current 10th graders with a choice: they either need to start their SAT prep early (ideally this summer) and take the current version of the test or wait until the new version of the test debuts in March of next year. But students who wait too long to start thinking about these things will either begin too late to take the current version of the SAT or will begin in time to take the current version of the test once but then not have time to retake it and will then face the undesirable consequence of having to study for a completely different format of the test.

The talk is aimed at current 10th graders and their parents but there will be useful information for 9th and 11th graders and their parents as well.  My presentation will discuss these issues and will specifically cover the following:

• The Timeline of the SAT Rollout and Planning the Right Study Schedule
• Differences Between the Current SAT and the New SAT
• The SAT vs. the ACT: How to Choose Which Test
• Choosing the Right Test Prep Option
• Advice on Self-Study Options (Including the Best Books & Online Resources Available)

When: Wednesday April 29th at 730pm
Where: The Reconstructionist Synagogue of the North Shore (1001 Plandome Road in Plandome)
How Much: Free!!!

This is the third in my series aimed at trying to decrease the level of stress that many students feel regarding the SAT, ACT, and the college admissions process. For the previous posts click HERE and HERE.

In this post I would like to discuss something more general that I had actually planned to bring up in a later post, but the recent publication of an opinion piece in the NY Times by writer Frank Bruni has compelled me to discuss the issue now (Bruni’s piece was very popular and for a few days was the most emailed story in the NY Times). Whereas my previous posts were more about the SAT and ACT themselves, this post will be more about college itself: why does one go to college, what should one look to get out of college, which college is the right college to choose, and how important is it to attend one of the “elite” colleges?

Especially here in New York there is a tremendous emphasis placed on going to the “right” college and many kids get thrust at a very young age into the high stress, high stakes game of trying to prepare for acceptance to the elite schools. In the aforementioned article Frank Bruni tends to make the case that it doesn’t matter very much what college you attend. I think that view is a little bit extreme and distorted so I don’t want to pretend that it doesn’t matter at all (part of his point is just that so few of the people who we as a society view as hugely “successful” went to one of the “elite” colleges). Having gone to Yale I can say that a degree from one of the very top schools certainly opens some doors in life. That said, I think that that effect is limited to the top 10 schools or so. Having a degree from, say, Notre Dame or UVA (both top 25 schools in the latest US News and World Report Rankings) does not necessarily give you an advantage over having a degree from a lower ranked school, say an Indiana or one of the better SUNY schools (in fact in NY most people recognize the top SUNY schools like Binghamton as being excellent schools that provide a top notch education).

One of Bruni’s points is that it matters less and less what school you went to the further you get from college. What matters more is how you perform in college and more importantly what you do after college. When you are 30 years old and looking for a job, your work experience is much more important that what school you graduated from. And when you are 35 or 40 or 45 your alma mater is virtually insignificant.

Another issue to raise in the discussion is what do you hope to get out of college? Bruni makes the point that college should be viewed as an opportunity, a chance to expand your horizons, try new things, perhaps move away from home, etc. Why choose to go to a school that many of the people you know are going to or that is extremely popular within your community? College really is a unique opportunity in the sense that is a liberating time when you don’t have a ton of responsibility – many people don’t get that chance again in life (after college they take a job, have kids, and then never again get to experience the freedom and possibility that college represents). So to fixate on the big-name schools that most people focus on is really to limit your horizons and possibly miss taking advantage of an opportunity that may only come along once in your life.

Furthermore, college should obviously be about learning and thriving, but that does not necessarily happen best at the top schools. Many would argue that the small liberal arts schools (like Williams and Vassar) provide the best education because the classes are very small and the focus is really on undergraduate education (many of the bigger schools, by comparison, place an emphasis on graduate education). Yet many of these small liberal arts schools are not on the radar screen of high school students because they are not the big-name schools that many people have heard of.

College is largely what you make of it. Again, I wouldn’t dispute that if you go to Harvard or Yale you may always be able to use that very fact to impress people regardless of how you perform at those schools. But that really only applies to the top 5 or 10 schools if it even applies at all. And sometimes it is better to be a big fish in a small pond rather than a small fish in a big pond. Once you are at college you have a wealth of opportunities in front of you and you might find that you have more opportunities (and less competition perhaps) in a smaller or slightly less well-known school. It is pretty hard to be on a professor’s radar screen at a place like Harvard, where everyone is trying to get on the professor’s radar screen and where all of the students are extremely bright (anecdotally, when I was at Yale I took a seminar on Nazi Germany and there was a student in the class who chose to read all of the books in German even though he was a native-English speaker….I mean, come on!!!). And if you stand out at the school you attend that makes it much easier to catapult into whatever you choose to do when you finish college.

There is one more thing to consider that can really have a great impact on which colleges you get accepted to and which one you choose to attend. Certain schools tend to be very popular among applicants from a certain region and this makes it exceedingly difficult to get into those schools. When I was in high school on Long Island that school was University of North Carolina. For an in-state candidate the school was probably difficult but not impossible to get into, but from Long Island it was almost impossible to get in because so many people applied there and they were only going to accept a certain number of out-of-state candidates and from among that pool only a very small percentage from Long Island. On the flip side, however, there are schools that are really not popular among applicants from a certain region and some of these colleges are top schools. Again when I was in high school my brother was admitted to Vanderbilt, generally considered the Harvard of the South, even though he wasn’t admitted to any other schools of that caliber. The reason is that at the time not many people from Long Island applied there. So there are really excellent, top-notch schools that are relatively easier to get into from a certain areas – one just needs to stop following the herd and obsessing over the handful of schools that are popular within one’s crowd.

Getting back to the original purpose of this post, if you are competing for one of the very few spots at the very top schools (schools that have acceptance rates of around 5%) you are necessarily setting yourself up for a high stress game. If instead you take a step back and try to think about college from a novel perspective and open your mind to all of the possibilities out there, you are likely to reduce your level of stress and be a happier person. And I am in the business of making people happy.

For anyone new to the posts in this series feel free to go back to the first post to get a little background about what is going on here…..

Below is the link for the article that was the subject of the 4th installment of the series:

http://www.historytoday.com/fern-riddell/curiouser-and-curiouser-case-lewis-carroll

Before I get into the questions themselves, let me first point out that one of the things that makes this passage so difficult is that there are multiple viewpoints being expressed and its almost as if there are layers of opinions that need to be peeled back like an onion. A similar thing happens on very difficult SAT passages so this is something that you should be prepared for.

On this particular passage, there is the author who is expressing her opinion about the viewpoint of a filmmaker who is herself expressing a viewpoint about another author: Lewis Carroll. Both the filmmaker and the author of this passage refer to other authors who themselves have an opinion of Lewis Carroll. And to make matters even worse, you have authors (like Karoline Leach and Jenny Woolf) who draw upon previous authors who wrote about Lewis Carroll (the author). I had to throw that last “the author” in there because its almost comical, but really it’s helpful to view it as an onion where on the outside you have the author who wrote the passage and then the authors (and filmmakers) to whom she is referring and then at the inner most layer you have Lewis Carroll who is obviously the focus of all of the other author’s attention.

SAT passages won’t be quite as hard as this one, but they will occasionally express multiple viewpoints in a similar way, so it is good to get exposed to this sort of passage.

Now, on to the questions…

1) What is the author’s purpose in the passage?

The author’s purpose is to criticize the recent documentary and its makers for their treatment of the issue of Carroll’s alleged pedophilia. The author believes that the evidence does not support the view that he had an inappropriate relationship with children and accuses the filmmakers of distorting the truth for the sake of being sensational.

As with many articles the title itself gives a good indication of where the author is headed and although the blurbs that precede real SAT passages don’t always give quite as much information, they often hint at the author’s purpose.

2) What can we infer about the opinion that Karoline Leach and Jenny Woolf have of Carroll’s relationship with children?

This is a really difficult question because the paragraph that first mentions them is really confusing and talks about multiple viewpoints (as I explained above)!!! You have to try to unravel the paragraph, but the author says that Leach and Woolf “exposed” the reliance on the biographers who (with good intentions) reduced the age of the children with whom Carroll had a relationship (the unintended consequence of this was that people were MORE apt to believe that his relationship with them was inappropriate). So because these authors tried to “expose our reliance” on these biographers they were trying to show that the children weren’t as young as we were led to believe and that he therefore probably did NOT have an inappropriate relationship with them. That is really, really difficult.

The other key, however, is that 2 paragraphs down the author mentions Jenny Woolf again and cites the fact that in her book Woolf brings forward information to show that Carroll donated money to causes that helped exploited children. She also mentions that the producers of the documentary seemed to have ignored this information (this gets at the next question). But from this we can infer that Woolf defends Carroll in her book and that she (and by association Leach) do not believe that Carroll was a pedophile.

3) What does the author imply in her statement about Professor Robert Douglas-Fairhurst?

This is another tough question. As per my explanation above, the author faults the producers of the documentary for not mentioning the evidence revealed in Woolf’s book that would support the view that Carroll was not a pedophile even though it was “was well known to the programme’s consultant, Professor Robert Douglas-Fairhurst.” There is nothing really to suggest that the professor himself withheld that insight from the filmmakers. The author of the passage is, overall, faulting the filmmakers for offering a skewed and inaccurate portrayal, so it seems that she is suggesting here that since the professor was aware of the research, its not that the filmmakers themselves would have been unaware of it – they just chose not to present it because it would conflict with their view.

4) In context, what does the expression “shoe-horning” (in the first sentence of the second-to-last paragraph) most probably mean?

It helps a lot here to know what a shore horn is and to be able to picture how it is used!!! But the context also provides clues because the author says that the “sudden” shoe-horning in of the photograph at the very end “smacks a little of desperation.” Its sounds like the author is kind of squeezing in or quickly dropping or wedging in something that doesn’t really fit or is out of place. Again it helps to be able to picture a shoe-horn but in this context it means to push or squeeze something into a place where it doesn’t really fit.

5) In context, what does the word “scant” (last sentence of the article) mean?

This question is not completely SAT-like because vocab-in-context questions almost always test a secondary or tertiary definition of a word that can be gleaned from the context and that does not match the obvious definition that you might think of if the word was not placed in any context. In this case, however, scant is being used in its primary way: it means a very small amount or an insufficient amount. Still, even if you didn’t know what the word means you could have gleaned it from the context because the author is overall faulting the filmmakers for presenting a biased view and basically argues that the evidence does not support their perspective. So you could guess that their view is based on “non-existent” evidence or something like that.

6) What is the author implying by saying (in the last paragraph) that, “Popular culture is dangerously good at historical myth making”?

Again, the author is accusing the filmmakers of painting an inaccurate portrayal of Carroll for the sake of being sensational and making a splash. For example, she says, “The idea that the third most quoted literary work in the world, behind only Shakespeare and the Bible, was authored by a man harbouring a dangerous intent towards his young friends is obviously an attractive prospect for television.” So she seems to believe that the “history” of Lewis Carroll is being distorted for the sake of making a TV show that will be popular with audiences and draw a lot of viewers. So trying to appeal to “popular culture” will often lead to turning historical facts into inaccurate “myths.” Anyway, that is the author’s view.

This was a very hard passage….I wanted to pick a very difficult one just to challenge people a bit. I will not make the next one as hard as this…..I promise. Stay tuned for the next installment.