(Boston Globe) By James S. Murphy– I HOLD A PhD in English from the University of California, Berkeley. I’ve taught students to write at Emory, Berkeley, and Harvard and picked up three teaching awards along the way. I have published more than two dozen pieces in national publications, including The Atlantic and Vanity Fair. In May, […]
Read More »(Education Week) By Walt Gardner– Although the new SAT makes the essay optional, almost two-thirds of test takers in the spring went for it (“How a teacher bombed the SATs,” The Boston Globe, Jul. 14). The essays were rated by two scorers on the basis of reading, writing, and analysis. The scores were added up for […]
Read More »(Pleasanton Weekly) By Elizabeth LaScala “If 10% of applicants are accepted to the most selective schools to which I apply, doesn’t that mean I will have a better than 1 in 10 chance of getting into any one of them if I apply to all of them?” Many college applicants would like to think this […]
Read More »(Metro US) By Alizah Salario–When Sheila Akbar, director of education at test prep company Signet Education, took a practice exam for new SAT, one passage threw her off. In the reading section, students were asked to analyze a letter exchange between two women in the 1830s arguing about whether they should become involved in the abolitionist […]
Read More »(Forbes) By Willard Dix–Let me be direct about this topic: Over-emphasizing the ACT and/or SAT at the expense of other necessary college application components like academic achievement, doesn’t make sense. It’s far more productive for college admission and personal development to approach school and education as an ongoing enterprise instead of as the make-or-break proposition that college […]
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