<p>Lord Jeffs? Umm, maybe I take back what I said about these schools not being for the elite. Sheesh, that’s something I did not know. I though Violets for NYU and Banana slugs for UCSC were bad. </p>
<p>I been told that the Eph stands for something else in terms of Williams. When it is called that “ephing school”, it is not Ephelia or Ephraim that is on anyone’s minds.</p>
<p>But it’s a long e, not a short e.</p>
<p>mini: I am half kidding. And of course you have good things to say about Amherst. The whole thing is silly, like camp color war. I kind of had my tongue-in-cheek. Yes, Lord Jeffs is awful and controversial. Many say he gave pox infected blankets to Native Americans, and it certainly isn’t appropriate for a coed school. But it is what it is.</p>
<p>wow, this is a really tough issue. I dont think that there are any simple solutions. Its unfortunate the way this is happening, yet it seems all but impossible to think of a solution which will not upset some people.</p>
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<p>Actually it’s more like 450 students per year, out of 1.5 million, that get a one-sitting 2400. Each year the total continues to edge up, perhaps in some case because of retakes. I personally think that exceptionally bright kids just have more familiarity with standardized test expectations than did students a generation or two ago. Schools administer practice tests and pre-tests (the PSAT and the ACT Plan in 10th and the ACT something-or-other in 9th). That leads to very little once-sacrificed time during the actual exam, just trying to figure out the odd ways in which some question types are constructed.</p>
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<p>Really? My sons are both right-brained learners, the younger one extremely so. The older one got a 35 on his ACT at age 13. The younger one got a 36.0 on his ACT last year first sitting as a sophomore, then got a 240 on his PSAT and a second 36.0 ACT (because his school required all students to retake it junior year). No difficulty with these tests for my right-brain learners.</p>
<p>On the other hand, K-12 classroom instruction and GPA is heavily biased toward left-brained learners. Timed writing tests are horrible for these kids, who store ideas mentally as pictures or as matrices of interwoven ideas; they can write superb papers with unique, often brilliant, insights but it takes them far longer than their left-brained classmates to extract a running narrative from mental pictures and idea-links.</p>
<p>Class participation is another problem area. These kids have trouble responding rapidly to questions and the more general the question, the harder it is to answer quickly, because there are just SO MANY ways to consider sequencing the answer! Yet should the teacher ask the relationship between two very different and seemingly unrelated topics, the right-brain kid’s hand will instantly shoot up because the “path” to the answer is a lone one and thus obvious: A leads to C leads to G and therefore J is the only answer that makes sense!</p>