Off Campus

Given that highly selective colleges are reinstating test requirements (now that they have enough data to evaluate their “COVID experiment”); and given that even during COVID, test optional schools never stopped accepting significantly more students who submitted test scores than those who opted out (at a 2-3X rate); their message is clear: GPAs and personal essays are not enough. Standardized tests can help predict whether a student will thrive at any given college.

Why?

To earn what counts now as a competitive score, students must find ways to grow capacities quite different from those needed to earn A’s in high school. And these capacities, colleges deem, are essential for their students to thrive both on campus and off.

Here are a couple of reasons for this.

  1. Rather than testing a student’s capacity to get work done before she goes to bed, these tests test her capacity to work carefully and accurately over an extended— but limited—period of time. (This is useful, since nobody wants their student to spend 24/7 in the school library, and thereby miss out on all the other opportunities for growth—emotional, social, institutional, professional—that university life offers.)

  2. Rather than test a student’s ability to manage her stress on a final exam worth twenty percent of her grade—in one particular class, in one particular semester, in one particular year—, these tests evaluate her capacity to manage the higher stress levels she will feel on a test whose results are almost equal in importance to her entire high school GPA, (This, too, is useful. One’s ability to handle stress correlates with one’s ability to grow any capacity.)

Students without these skills may very well graduate college with golden, instagramable “high honors” tassels hanging from their caps. But if that is all, then it will have been a replay of high school, and a tragic forfeiture of a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

College can be so much more than an extension of high school, but for this to happen, they have to be inspired, and I don’t mean just intellectually. In other words, they have to balance academics with fun.

If fun is not a part of the calculus for a successful launch, you are doing it wrong. As my favorite STEM tutor, Wes Carroll, likes to tell his families:

“When we do finally send someone to Mars, it will be because we used the moon’s orbit as a slingshot.”

The parent’s Mars is but the student’s moon.

What will Mars look like to our kids? Well, if we of a certain generation humbled ourselves, we likely will never know.

But how boring life would be if we knew in advance everything that was important to us.