Getting your child into college is no easy matter. Your offspring’s prospective future alma mater wants to know that your kid is up for the challenge; that they’re ready, willing and able to commit. They want proof. They want to see your credit report.
Not really.
College administrators are certain you’ll pay because without a decent education your children will never achieve that one thing you most desire for them; a place of their own. So you’ll do anything necessary — up to and including grand larceny, wire fraud and participation in risky pharmaceutical experiments — to raise the cash you need to put your kids through school.
These administrators are less certain about your child’s scholastic abilities. To make sure that they’re not admitting chowder-headed Neanderthals, colleges have strict admissions standards which place special emphasis on ACT scores.
The ACT is a standardized test which assesses students’ skills in Mathematics, Reading, English, Science, the Daily Double, the Video Daily Double, and Final Jeopardy. Contestants … I mean, students, who do well can win valuable prizes including admission to Ivy League schools and lucrative scholarship offers.
From start to finish, the test takes about four hours — unless you include the three months of prep that begin the moment your student signs up. After all, there’s a lot riding on this. You do remember that part about “a place of their own”, don’t you?
Knowing that, you’ll do what every parent does. You’ll go out and invest approximately half-a-month’s salary in ACT study guides. Fortunately these are easy to locate; all major booksellers now devote approximately twenty-six-point-nine percent of their shelf space to “college readiness” texts. The remaining space is given over to investing guides (eight-point-two percent), political rants (thirty-one-point-four percent), thrillers which try to copy The DaVinci Code, but don’t really succeed (nineteen-point-one percent), rewrites of Pride and Prejudice (six-point-seven percent) and Stephanie Meyer’s novels (sixty-two-point-eleven percent).
When choosing a study guide, remember this important fact: It doesn’t really matter which one you buy. They all have the same weakness — they only work if your child actually reads them.
I don’t mean to brag, but I hit upon a pretty clever ritual to help my son prepare for the test. Every night after dinner I said “Go upstairs and study for the ACT.”
He complained. I told him it was important. He said it was dull. I said I didn’t care. He said it was tough and I should try it and so I found myself taking a practice test with math questions like:
Two men with a combined weight of six-hundred and twenty-five pounds sit on opposite sides of a teeter-totter. Assuming they are evenly balanced, which of them had the grande burrito for lunch?
A) The one on the left
B) The one on the right
C) How should I know?
D) Where did they find a teeter-totter that could support that much weight?
The science section asked about something called “the fluid catalytic cracking unit” (I chose answer ‘C’; it makes shoes for orphans). The English section challenged me to rewrite sentences by picking new words and phrases to replace words and phrases which they had conveniently underlined in the original text. If they were so unhappy with the original text, why didn’t they just rewrite it in the first place? And, to be honest, I fell asleep during the Reading part.
When I finished I came to two important realizations; 1) it’s a good thing I’ve already graduated from college, because I’d never get in now and 2) if I wanted my son to have a place of his own he was really going to have to hit the books.
He studied, got a decent score, and was admitted to his first choice school.
I’m relieved about that, but I’m not convinced that the test really proves he’s prepared for college. As far as I can see, the ACT has as much to do with readiness for college as childbirth has to do with readiness for parenthood.
For me, the real challenge of college wasn’t the coursework, it was attendance. Once I was out of the house and on my own, I discovered an untapped talent for rationalization. If the U.S. had an Olympic Excuse-making Team I’d have been a Michael-Phelps-class multiple medal winner.
The instant my alarm clock went off, the hyper-developed rationalization center in my brain shifted into high gear. Time to get up. Don’t feel very focused. No point in going if I won’t understand the lecture. A few more minutes’ sleep won’t hurt. In fact, it’ll help. I’ll wake up more clearheaded and ready to go. More sleep is a good thing!
Lulled by that happy thought I’d drift off until the snooze alarm kicked in and the cycle repeated. By the time I finally roused myself, I’d missed class completely. Through the careful and repeated use of this defense mechanism I ended my Freshman year with a less-than-stellar GPA and a letter from the Dean extolling the virtues of manual labor as a career path for someone with my obvious academic gifts.
If the good folks at the ACT really wanted to see if students were ready for college they’d ask questions like this:
It’s three a.m. and you have an exam in your eight a.m. Calculus class. You’re still awake because:
A) Who needs sleep?
B) This is the only time you get the X-Box in the common room to yourself.
C) You’re studying for the exam because you didn’t have time earlier because of the Full House marathon on TV Land.
D) What do you mean I’m awake? I’d be getting a good night’s sleep to be ready for the test.
Fifty or sixty questions like this would really tell you if a student was actually ready for college. The only other thing an Admissions Officer would need is a copy of their parent’s credit score.
