<p>wow. what an eye-opening article! thanks for sharing!</p>
<p>I was reading a book once when a scene like this came in, of two men watching a game show on television, kindda like slumdog millionaire. The guy on screen answered several knowledge questions correctly and was on his way to making a whole lot of money:
man 1 (watching tv); you know how much I would pay that guy to work for me?
man 2 (also watching tv): ?
man 1: 300 dollars max, not for a week, not for a month or even a year. for a lifetime. actually thats too much. I’d pay him 90$ then tell him to go die. All he’d be of use to me would be a human encyclopedia, and I can buy an encylopedia for 90$ anyway.</p>
<p>after reading that story i paused and thought of just how much time I’m wasting in school. In my HS, the exams are mostly very basic mcq qs that you can answer by reading the txt book just once. They’re all very straigh-forward and involve no thinking whatsoever. The essay questions we sometimes have are pretty easy too…and basically involve just sumarising a couple of pages you would have blindly memorised from the textbook.
Unfortunately many educational institutions follow that system of basically devouring a text and then getting what you know on paper rather than innovating.
What disturbs me about Ivies is that as people get caught up in the whim of getting the best possible grades and scores they can, they turn themselves into that 90$ encyclobedia…okay SAT/AP study guide…more like…true, the ECs and essay part of the application need innovation but the academic part counts more.
Ivy or no Ivy I wouldn’t want to turn myself into an encyclopedia.
True thirst for knowledge is demonstrated by these six siblings, who probably just did their best in school because they were intrested in it rather than focus on perfect scores or memorising every single sentence of a textbook inorder to maintain a 4.0.</p>