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    It always had an English test that was multiple choice and a Maths test, and an essay element was added relatively recently. Each of these is scored separately.

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      I think they ditched the writing part. I could be wrong, but I thought I heard that.

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        Originally posted by Bruno View Post
        The private schools are essentially college prep schools, i.e. the demand for them is fundamentally driven by the elite university end goal. So I would still say that it's the latter (in tandem with capitalism) that's causing the distortion.
        They’re all part of the same racket.

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          Ditching the writing part? Wow. I find it kinda mad that a multiple choice exam can decide yer future at that age. Ditto maths/science questions that don't allow for showing your working. There's surely some credit to be given if there is a logical process that brought you to the wrong conclusion.

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            There is a movement to ditch the essay, but that hasn't happened yet.

            The tests are not as outcome-determinative as people think. Quite a few schools no longer require them, in part because intensive coaching of affluent kids has distorted the results..

            There is obviously no reason for "consultants" of this ilk to educate parents on that point.

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              What age do people do them?

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                Junior and Senior year of High School, so 17 and 18 for most people.

                You can take them as many times as you are willing to pay for (though they are only administered once a month or so).

                As Reed says, the size of the racket beggars belief, even for those of us who survived it.

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                  There’s also the PSAT offered earlier in high school. That’s how I and about dozen of my classmates got to be a “National Merit Scholarship Finalist.” I got $2,000 out of it and my picture in the paper. I peaked too young.

                  In my day, when there was no essay, you could also take a few SAT II tests, one of which included an essay. A lot of competitive schools ask for an admissions essay - a whole other pile of gameable bullshit - and other writing samples. I did all that.

                  The problem with making them part of the regular SAT is finding people who can read all those millions of essays. That’s a lot more expensive than machines that read the #2 pencil marks on the ScanTron sheet.

                  My understanding is that because they can’t spend much time on each one, they use a rigid formula for what their looking for and it probably isn’t really what sophisticated critics would think of as good writing.

                  It’s all way more out of control than it was in my day. The expectations for extracurricular bullshit are especially onerous, in my view.

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                    The extracurricular bullshit would scare the shite out of an antisocial soul like me. When I knew college Americans slumming it in Europe twenty years back, there were a whole bunch of amiable Cal State idiots who were all about the easy charm and with rich (but not mega rich) parents, who had been volunteering their ass off in high school, but whose altruistic concerns dropped off a cliff once ensconced in frat or sorority. I'd guess almost all of em are Trumpist Christians now. Not bad people, but wearying. They wouldn't have stood a chance at getting Highers/A Levels for the equivalent Brit 3rd level colleges.

                    Well maybe they would have anyways, cos their parents would have been rich enough to send them to U.K. prep schools. Their stupidity was just more obvious than the posh U.K. types.
                    Last edited by Lang Spoon; 15-03-2019, 02:45.

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                      The folk I met from Brown but, unspeakable.

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                        The Russian Mat (Swearing language) is very funny indeed. That overpriced hoody above should have said (In Cyrillic) Poshal na Hoiy. I guess the designer is slapping his or her forehead and exclaiming "Pizdjetz!" right about now ;-)

                        Replying to a post 2 pages ago....

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                          Originally posted by Max Payne View Post
                          The Russian Mat (Swearing language) is very funny indeed. That overpriced hoody above should have said (In Cyrillic) Poshal na Hoiy. I guess the designer is slapping his or her forehead and exclaiming "Pizdjetz!" right about now ;-)

                          Replying to a post 2 pages ago....
                          I don't think designer is slapping anything: "иди нахуй" 625000/1410000 results, "пошёл нахуй" 11000/211000 results @yandex.ru / google.com. If there was problem most likely very first word would be: "Блядь!" and "Пиздец ..." after it.

                          Also "go to the horrible cheesy diseased dick" translation is very, very wrong: "Иди нахуй - 1) обычно так говорящий указывает на неуместность претензий, требований, просьб от кого-либо, предлагая тому переместиться в любое место, находящееся за пределами личного пространства говорящего; 2) таким образом говорящий так показывает своё сильнейшее желание прекратить любую связь или взаимодействие с кем-то или чем-то."

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                            Originally posted by Lang Spoon View Post
                            The extracurricular bullshit would scare the shite out of an antisocial soul like me. When I knew college Americans slumming it in Europe twenty years back, there were a whole bunch of amiable Cal State idiots who were all about the easy charm and with rich (but not mega rich) parents, who had been volunteering their ass off in high school, but whose altruistic concerns dropped off a cliff once ensconced in frat or sorority. I'd guess almost all of em are Trumpist Christians now. Not bad people, but wearying. They wouldn't have stood a chance at getting Highers/A Levels for the equivalent Brit 3rd level colleges.

                            Well maybe they would have anyways, cos their parents would have been rich enough to send them to U.K. prep schools. Their stupidity was just more obvious than the posh U.K. types.
                            Hard to say. If our system were more like the UK system, maybe they'd get their shit together earlier. To some extent, everyone is just responding to the incentives and opportunities presented to them.

                            I don't know if this is as true now as it used to be, but it's pretty easy to at least get into the front door of a big state university and/or small not-super-prestigious liberal arts college. Because of that, lots of people (or at least, a bunch I can think of anecdotally) don't try too hard in high school because it doesn't seem worth it since they know they're destined for the big state school regardless.

                            But I also know a bunch of people who didn't try to hard in high school, or struggled for other reasons, who eventually got some kind of a BA in something from somewhere somehow and then managed to work hard enough to turn that into a career and/or graduate degree and do fairly "impressive" things down the road. Or, at least, that's how it used to be. That might turn out to be a temporary post-WW2 anomaly in US history and opportunity like that is shrinking. I'm not sure. The upside of not having children is that I don't have to think about that all the time.

                            I don't know if a system, like the UK's, with such high-stakes testing that funnels people into specific fields so early is necessarily better than our system as far as that goes, because they are not as forgiving. Or, at least, that's how it looks from over here. They might be more equitable, though. Or, at least, used to be. Now that the UK, for example, is charging fees, it might not be as accessible and/or headed in the wrong direction. Our resident Higher Education expert can weigh in.

                            On the other hand, a lot of people who just coasted through high school do go on coasting effortlessly. As Bruno said, sometimes they can even into a prestigious university and then just keep coasting for the rest of their lives. If one is really intent on doing that - as some of the students caught up in this crime apparently are - one's job prospects are certainly going to be a lot better with an undeserved degree from Yale or USC than a half-ass effort at Towson or Shippensburg. But - and maybe this isn't actually true any more - a full-ass effort from one of those non-competitive schools followed by sustained effort afterward has taken people as far or further than their peers who coasted on charm, money, sports, or minor celebrity through a fancier place. It might not lead to quite as much money - or anywhere near as much money - but at least they're a lot less likely to turn into a complete asshole.

                            Obviously, the best chance to "go far" - as UA demonstrates - is to be talented and care a lot and work hard and get good marks beginning as early as you can and then get some prestigious credentials, if you can. (Assuming it doesn't make you miserable in the process, which it often does. (see link))


                            Last edited by Hot Pepsi; 15-03-2019, 17:50.

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                              AND be lucky.

                              It is very, very, difficult to eliminate an element of chance from all of this. In fact, that was the precise thing that some of these parents were willing to pay more than a million dollars to eliminate with respect to the relatively simple question of their child getting into the university of their choice.

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                                Yes, luck too. People will pay a lot to eliminate that.

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                                  It will no doubt surprise no one to hear that Jordan Peterson thinks the great thing about SATs is they can't be gamed.

                                  genius sees things differently fer sure.

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                                    FFS

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                                      Leading on from the fraudulent college entry stories, the NYT has this piece about the lengths that parents are willing to go to for their adult offspring. The instant WTF tidbit for me was the revelation that 42% of parents give romantic or relationship advice to their grown children. i would have dropped the phone or run to the bathroom to take a long cold shower.

                                      But the fundamental WTF thing – and here i unmask myself as a non-breeder – is the line: "It's really hard for parents to understand why you wouldn't do anything you could to assist your children." If this is true, it confirms that i do not get parenting. The degree of self-sacrifice that 'helicopter parenting' seems to require is alien and disturbing to me. i can't believe these micromanaging parents are making themselves – let alone their children – any less anxious. Many of them must have shrinks already so why aren't the shrinks pointing out the amount of projection going on here, all the frustrated hopes and lost opportunities that poison middle age, the sordidness of pushing one's own child to become a status symbol for their parents? Nobody will be happy in this situation, surely.

                                      It's remarkable that the idea of education, at least for girls, seems to have swung so far in this direction in the space of a couple of generations. In my era there would be a couple of kids per class with pushy parents, and they would suffer for it, both from the pressure they were under and from their peers' disapproval. It still came across as a bit shabby, a bit pathetic to have your parents running around on your behalf – and to what end? We went to school to learn morals and manners and nice smiles; some of us might become nurses or schoolteachers for a while, a couple of us might take vows God willing, but if anyone should aim higher than that, they'd have to get there on their own. The teachers were not competent, most parents were out of the loop completely. The families i knew no longer actively prevented their young from going to sixth form or even university, as they might have done a generation or two previously, but for the parents those institutions seemed to exist in another dimension, and they responded, i think, by retreating from our world and declining to take further interest in our education. My dad paid for me to do a degree, but he didn't ask what i would be studying. i don't think he ever knew. My mother's only concern while i was at university was that i should visit her cousin who lived nearby and a priest who i had peed on when he had tried to hold me. (i shouldn't need to add that i was a baby when this happened, although in those dark times...)

                                      i know there were nobs wheedling their kids into Oxbridge and preparatory schools submitting their pupils for examinations from the age of zip, and i'm sure the old-boy network began to function, for those who had a network, once we began looking for work. But i was privately educated for most of my childhood and the way it seemed to go was that parents wholly delegated their children's education to the school, which, in turn, floated more in the way of moral-spiritual uplift at us than it did educational substance or practical 'pastoral' guidance – which was hardly surprising given that the teachers (especially the lay teachers) would never have ended up fussing over messy handwriting or graceless stitching in a twee little town in the middle of nowhere if they'd had any life skills, and that it suited everyone concerned to prioritise giving us a chance to play the flute rather than messing around with dangerous ideas that might shrivel our uterus up.

                                      And the thought of my parents, or any of my friends' parents, preparing a job interview on our behalf is beyond implausible. i doubt either of my parents ever wrote a cv. My mother did get me a summer job one year, through the church, in the post room of a factory, where i was surrounded for six weeks by hoarse-voiced middle-aged women making filthy jokes about the foremen and, more traumatically, by wall-to-wall Capital Gold. Perhaps that kind of parenting would have counted as helicopter 28 years ago. Now it feels more like a flimsy drone from Argos.

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                                        As a parent, I disagree with the fundamental premise of the article.

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                                          Quote:
                                          Research has shown that children of hyper-involved parents are ... less self-reliant...
                                          Really? That's surprising!

                                          I know we've done this before, but I'm still flabbergasted at:
                                          Would contact a child's employer if he or she had an issue at work 11%
                                          I can't imagine what I would say to the parent of an employee should they contact me. Though I am now thinking of asking my Mom or Dad to give my boss a call. I think it would take to long to explain to them why on Earth I would want them to do that to be worth the amusement, though.

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                                            In a separate WTF, Gambino boss Frank Cali was murdered a few days ago.

                                            First time New York has seen a mob hit like this in 30 years.

                                            It’s just remarkable to me that this is a thing that still exists in the real world in the 21st century.

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                                              We discussed that briefly here.

                                              There has been an arrest.

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                                                Google 'mob' and 'Hamilton' and you'll see that it happens right here in Ontario all the time. Hamilton / Stoney Creek and also Woodbridge are hotbeds for Canada's Italian mob, and hits still happen there with surprising regularity.

                                                (Here's one from six weeks ago. Totally missed it at the time.)

                                                https://www.thespec.com/news-story/9...ain-brow-home/
                                                Last edited by WOM; 17-03-2019, 11:47.

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                                                  Originally posted by laverte View Post
                                                  But the fundamental WTF thing – and here i unmask myself as a non-breeder – is the line: "It's really hard for parents to understand why you wouldn't do anything you could to assist your children." If this is true, it confirms that i do not get parenting.
                                                  It's not like the parenting problem had ever been solved or fully understood. We're in a phase of more intensive parenting that's a byproduct of greater overall privilege and material comfort (relative to a hundred years ago) in a society whose central ethic is competition against others. If you leave young adults to their own devices, they will reliably make mistakes, even if (with very few exceptions) you were as good a parent as can reasonably be expected. It's hard for many parents to passively watch that happen. They by and large should, of course, but it's not surprising that many don't.

                                                  One of the biggest and most repeated young-adult mistakes is marrying and having kids with the wrong person. I have no problem with 20-somethings getting relationship advice from their parents (assuming it's wise advice).

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                                                    [URL]https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/1107299059247788035?s=21[/URL]

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