So now high schoolers have to learn about Snooki and Kim Kardashian to get into Harvard or Yale.
Someone at the College Board must think so.
That would be the person who wrote the essay question for Saturday’s SAT college admissions test which, shocked students say, was, “Do we benefit from forms of entertainment that show so-called ‘reality,’ or are such shows harmful?”
Say what?
– Joanna Molloy, N.Y. Daily News.
Here’s something about me I’m not sure I’ve mentioned here: I worked as an SAT verbal and writing instructor for seven years. I started as a freshman in college at a DC-area SAT prep company called Capital Educators. After I graduated, I put up signs around my hometown and landed a few private students. One of the first — due way more to her own hard work than anything I had to say — went up 170 points from her PSAT verbal. Word got out and business blew up. I wound up with a ton of students, enough that I could schedule 12 hours of tutoring (all in my parents’ dining room) on Sunday and six straight on Monday afternoon and earn enough money to pay for my rent and food in Brooklyn.
Long story short, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the SAT. And I don’t care for it.
It’s a stupid test that puts a ton of pressure on teenagers. It’s way too long, and the results have very little to do with a student’s ability to think critically, carry on interesting conversations and function in life. The SAT tests your ability to take the SAT, and, to a lesser extent, your parents’ willingness to shell out cash for SAT prep. I understand why it exists and why colleges rely on it to guide admissions decisions, but there’s just no way you can convince me it’s a fair assessment of anything.
And the essay section is worst of all. Back when I took the test — get off my lawn! — it was only two sections, Math and Verbal, and if you wanted to test your writing you took the SAT 2 (the thrilling sequel) on some other day. For those of you my age and older: There’s now a third section of the SAT and it includes an essay. The prompt is usually something rather general and stupid. They’ll give you a maxim or a quote and you’ll have to support it or counter it using examples from history, art or life.
Presumably creative, interesting responses score well, but it’s not easy to teach an apathetic high school kid to be creative and interesting in weekly one-hour sessions. So people like me teach students to write to a very boring formula that, if grammatically clean and peppered with vocabulary words, is practically guaranteed a good score: A brief introduction restating the question, a list of the examples that will be used to make the argument, the argument itself — using one paragraph each for each of those examples — then a summarizing conclusion.
So maybe someone at the College Board got sick of reading those essays and decided to have a little fun with 1/3 of this year’s high school juniors. Put ’em on their toes, make them actually think a little.
Because to me, that question is about a billion times more interesting than 90% of the boring nonsense they trot out. Media literacy should be an important facet of today’s education, and high-school students damn well should be encouraged to think critically about the role and impact of reality TV, not to mention the now-very-gray definition of the word “reality.”
And the truth is, no matter how Joanna Molloy wants to present it, answering the question requires little more than a cursory knowledge of reality television. If you’re a reader, you could easily argue that reality TV is merely entertainment, and draw parallels to the novels of Jane Austen — many of which are thematically not terribly dissimilar from “Keeping Up with the Kardashians.” Or, if you’re into history, you could explain how basically every single new form of entertainment has brought with it protests about its decency, and point out that the cinema hasn’t yet cast the world into widespread moral turpitude.
I don’t know. Seems like there are a ton of ways to play it and very few of them demand religious dedication to watching “The Jersey Shore.” I’m guessing the bulk of the students complaining about the question are well enough aware of reality television to form a cogent, creative argument about the subject, but would much prefer to stick to a lazy formula than consider an interesting and relevant topic. And if I were running a college, that’s not really the type of student I’d be looking for.
Tedquarters 