Some people test well, and some people test exceptionally well — like Willa Chen, for example. Chen, a 17-year-old high school student from Detroit, recently did the unbelievable: she got a perfect score on not only the PSAT, but the SAT and ACT as well.
According to the ACT, the odds of getting a perfect score on their test are one in 14,000. The odds for a perfect score on the SAT? One in 2,400, says the College Board.
With these amazing scores now under her belt, Chen hopes to attend Princeton University. For now she’ll continue spending time with her school’s Math Olympiad and indulging in some of her favorite pastimes: tap, jazz, and ballet dancing.
This past Sunday, The New York Times published an interesting piece that called into question just how exclusive and honorary invitations for scholar programs truly are. These invites, often presented as awards and “great honors,” are mailed out to middle schoolers and high schoolers across the country each year. As The NYTimes points out, the fancy airs and gold lettering on these letters often lure students into believing they’ve been bestowed with a rare opportunity – which may not be the case.
Though the organizations’ names and conference destinations may differ, they seem to follow a standard form. The student is congratulated on their scholastic achievement/being nominated to the position and invited to partake in a once-in-a-lifetime scholastic conference that will not only introduce them to great minds like themselves, but boost their college applications as well.
Now The NYTimes is telling us what we all suspected: these invites are more marketing techniques than marks of honor. One of the companies, the Congressional Youth Leadership Council, decides who to invite based upon recommendations and mailing lists that it pays for. And if you take into account all of the conferences that they run, including the National Young Leaders Conference in Washington, D.C., you’ll find that approximately 50,000 students attend each year – can that really be considered exclusive?
I remember receiving similar invitations in the mail when I was in high school, but I never signed up thanks to slight skepticism as to their validity and their expensive nature. Still, I feared that I was missing out or handicapping myself in the college race by not having something like “Washington Conference Scholar” on my resume. As it turns out, I had nothing to worry about. I got into one of the most sought after universities in the nation and neither my classmates nor I had one of these conferences under our belts.
So are these supposed scholar conferences all they are cracked up to be? I clearly have my opinion but if you want to form your own, and learn more about the companies that run these conferences as well as what goes on at them, head over to The NYTimes.
And really, if it’s an honor, should you be the one paying for it?
According to a recent survey by Ball State University (Muncie, Indiana), cell phone use – and smartphone use, in particular – is on the rise amongst college students. After speaking with 300 students, researchers found that while 99.7 percent owned a mobile device of some sort, 27 percent owned a smartphone.
For those who are unfamiliar with the term, a smartphone is generally defined as a mobile phone that has its own OS and/or has an e-mail, web browser, and other applications.
“College students are increasingly adopting cell phones – particularly the smartphone – as the core communication and entertainment device for their hectic lifestyles,” said Michael Hanley, the journalism assistant professor who in charge of the mobile communications research program at Ball State. “In the few years since instant messaging (IM) leaped from the computer to the cell phone, a new mobile lifestyle has evolved. And save for studying, the computer is quickly being left behind.”
That’s a bit extreme if you ask me. You can’t assume students are cutting down on their surfing habits at home just because they now rely upon mobile Internet or that one form has overtaken the other; it just means that students’ day-to-day lives require more on-the-go connectivity than in the past. While it used to be easy to wait until you were home to log-on for example, these days many professors e-mail about last-minute assignments and canceled classes making it in your best interest to stay on top of your inbox – especially if you find yourself busy with after-school activities, internships, and the like.
As someone who got a smartphone during her last year of university, I would definitely recommend the tool for any student that finds him/herself on the run and away from the nearest computer terminal or WiFi hotspot. I was able to keep up-to-date with my classmates about group projects, stay in touch with friends, and find out right away if my class was cancelled or my office was closed due to weather. And while it did cut down on some of my surfing time at home, that’s only because I was using my smartphone to check my feeds during my commute.
Used to using YouTube for quick comedic clips, moving music videos, and film from family and friends? Well, it looks like you’ll have to reevaluate your view of the site from now on. While colleges and universities have been uploading clips of their courses and professors for quite some time, April marked the formal introduction of YouTube EDU, a YouTube landing page that puts you in touch with educational videos from schools all over the nation.
While the page looks a bit chaotic at first, it does boast a directory that will link you to the school channel you’re interested in. So far this list includes such top names as Harvard University, Stanford University, and Virginia Tech, with videos covering everything from physics to cooking lessons. It’s definitely worth checking out whether you’re already in college or just starting to consider the possibilities.
The New York Times recently addressed the financial aid climate of college admissions in an article that is quite disturbing to me. Financial aid has always been an issue and great concern for pretty much the entire college-application population. But because of the state of the economy, it is definitely at a low point.
While financial aid is still available to some, it is certainly not as available as it once was. This is, of course, completely understandable. However, in the article, some admissions offices revealed that they are looking to admit applicants who don’t apply for financial aid or those who come from wealthy families:
This year, many of these colleges say they are more inclined to accept students who do not apply for aid, or whom they judge to be less needy based on other factors, like ZIP code or parents’ background.
Although such colleges admit to applying this mindset only to those “students at the margins, the ones who would probably be ‘maybes,’” it’s a scary factor, for sure. Now, in addition to being faced with a million different emotions and issues with affording college, parents must also grapple with knowing that their pleas for aid may affect the acceptance of their children into their college of choice.
Colleges want those students who will be able to pay tuition in full, especially as endowments do not increase. What we have here is rising tuition and an attitude that is blinded by the green monster of the almighty dollar. Now, more than ever, this makes colleges seem more like businesses than institutions designed to better students’ (and the country’s) future.
This is certainly a sign of the times that those with more academic potential but less endowment potential would get rejected from their prestigious dream college. Could this be a trending discriminatory practice?
Lift a paragraph? Steal a sentence? Don’t cite a source? We suggest you call a halt to those shenanigans right now. Not only is it academically unethical (and incredibly lazy) but with new sites like Turnitin on the prowl, your sticky scholastic fingers won’t go unnoticed.
Thanks to this site, all a teacher or professor has to do is log in and upload a questionable student paper in order to find out if it’s an original work or a clear case of plagiarism. According to Turnitin, the site is currently used by more than 450,000 educators and checks over 130,000 papers a day against a database of more than 75 million student papers and pages upon pages of web content. What’s more is that, as teachers continue to upload student papers, the database is steadily increasing with Turnitin expecting to reach 166 million student papers by 2010.
Turnitin hasn’t been without controversy though. As recently as 2008, students brought a lawsuit against the site, saying that it infringed on their papers’ copyrights. The judge, however, ruled against them, classifying Turnitin as providing a “public benefit.”
What do you think? Does Turnitin help the education system or hurt students’ rights?
ETA: Studentactivism points out that a report was recently released about Turnitin’s many false positives. View it here.
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According to a recent survey by Ball State University (Muncie, Indiana), cell phone use – and smartphone use, in particular – is on the rise amongst college students. After speaking with 300 students, researchers found that while 99.7 percent owned a mobile device of some sort, 27 percent owned a smartphone.
The 
questionable student paper in order to find out if it’s an original work or a clear case of plagiarism. According to Turnitin, the site is currently used by more than 450,000 educators and checks over 130,000 papers a day against a database of more than 75 million student papers and pages upon pages of web content. What’s more is that, as teachers continue to upload student papers, the database is steadily increasing with Turnitin expecting to reach 166 million student papers by 2010.