the Sam Jackson College Experience

There is more qualified suicide-rather-than-college-rejection inducing news to share!

Now, the other day I received the packet of treats which the College Counselling Office had sent out a short while ago. In it was the most recent CCO newsletter, a reminder to do homework on colleges, a nicely formatted college list for our parents, that sort of thing. The best part, though, was a sheet labelled “Grade Distribution List.” !!! This is a lot like the sheets that departments present at faculty meeting each term, where they give the grade breakdown for their courses and overall and things–Wesley Chen would steal those sometimes and then gloat about this fantastic thievery afterwards, having ‘liberated’ the papers from the recycling bin after the closed meetings. Very extreme, Wesley.

Regardless, this pink sheet was infinitely more interesting because of how targeted it was–it was only for the Class of 2007, updated through June 2006. Fantastic bit of data at my fingertips. Now, I won’t publish the entire thing because it might make the CCO very very angry you know, as they were when the Exonian published some numbers taken from the website. Understandably this form and indeed that entire packet did not have the terms of use or privacy policy so expressly defined, I don’t really want to incur the wrath of the administration unnecessarily. I can convey the same awesome power without it. I mean, I can’t publish the actual numbers, obviously. So instead I’ve made (all by myself!) a graphical representation thereof. It’s not a graph, or a chart, obviously, because that would be a representation of the data in a human readable form. No, this is just a vague approximation (I swear to god I didn’t enter it into Excel, really) of the grade distribution.

Um, okay. Now to discuss the ah… “artistic merit” of these nondescript forms. We can call them, for the sake of discussion and plausible deniability, “bars.” No affiliation with a bar graph, mind you. Right–now, on this bit of art here, I was trying to place myself in the world [of PEA class of 2007 grade distribution current through June 2006]. If we divide this picture into thirds, you know, to approximate the golden ratio, I’d see myself right around the third “bar.” It’s pretty funny because that reminds me of something I saw earlier… no clue what might have inspired this artwork, no. It came to me in a vision.

I found myself at 9.5-9.99, in terms of cumulative GPA groupings. For those of you not from Exeter, you may be confused. Exeter works on an 11 point system, unweighted. So an A is an 11, an A- is 10, so forth and so on. To get back to a normal 4.0 system you need only multiply, then, by 4/11ths. Easy and easily mortifying). There were 49 other people in my club with me, and 37 total in the two above it.

I was fairly shocked / surprised to discover that 20% of the grade had marks below 7.9. That’s just something I never really realized. The curve is quite distorted upwards, centered around a B.

A week ago tonight I had atrocious nightmares about bad incoming SAT2 scores, imagining that the scores from the June 3 testing were due out June 20th. This was of course not true which meant that this past Sunday I had the opportunity to have more visions of despair in my dreams! Woo. But I did get my scores on Monday, despite the malcontent which haunted my sleep, and they weren’t terrible. Certainly not as terrible as I might have feared in my dream (The most visceral and frightening image? 54 wrong on the Literature, final score: 0. Very cliché, I know. And not appropriately scored, either!), and more or less in line with what I expected, my scores are okay when looked at pseudo-objectively. The point is that I have unreasonably high standards for myself so this performance doesn’t really meet all my expectations for personal work. I have had a mixed experience with ETS; I took the SAT back in May of my 10th grade year and that was mediocrish, though I guess not horrible for my first time taking the test (2150–an evaluative note: This is 97/97 national / state percentile for critical reading, 93/93 for math, and then god knows what for writing. It was 730/700/720, ick). I plan to retake that this fall. PSAT was a little brighter (and has already been discussed here) though I don’t even know if that is designed by ETS… SAT IIs, though, were a little nicer. If they were added to make a composite SAT I score, I’d have a 2290… blech. I took all three of these SAT IIs at once, on June 3rd, 2006. One or two would have been a nice snack, but three was a little bit much. It started to drag on a little bit. Thankfully they were each all self-contained so it really wasn’t too bad, as far as I was concerned. I think it would be fun sometime to take all 13 tests at once, in a marathon session, if such a thing existed (it does not).

BIO: 770 LIT: 760 and M2C: 760.

My impressions: Biology was very easy, English Literature was very arbitrary and obtuse, and Math was very easy with one or two obnoxious places. The Literature was just hugely, hugely obnoxious. I took the old SAT II Writing when I was applying for Exonian copy editor Lower (read: Sophomore) year at Exeter, and it was really not bad, but the English Literature exam was gruesome because on so many questions (all of them) you had to fit your head into the ETS “retard” box. Interpretation was not open. Just as the 20 minute essays are flawed because of the fact that they are twenty minutes long, so too I feel the literature test is inherently broken because literature can be interpreted different ways, so long as multiple choice isn’t the only format. Whatever.

Shameful and disappointing for me, of course. I do ‘well’ and all I’m left with is an emptiness knowing that I didn’t reach my full potential. Quite depressing. I’ve trackbacked something like 20 other blogs found via Technorati on the subject here, of SAT2 tests, because most of them share what I can only regard as a tragic perspective: they are accepting and in fact pleased with low scores. There are sort of exceptions here and there, “anything below 750 would be unfortunate” type moanings, like those complaints you’ve just read, but for the most part people don’t seem to mind that they’re getting these 610s or whatever the hell low scores they have. I’m not saying that they’re stupid, just that those scores are lower than they could be. Which is true. Average is pretty… average, so even being moderately above average is moderately lame.

Anyways back to my discussion of relativism in standardized testing. The point is that I compare myself not to the national average this or that, or anything like that. I set my baseline somewhere around the 99.5th percentile. I’m not saying that I’m in the top .5 percent, I’m just saying that’s around where the standard lies. For example, my best friend in the entire world, my neighbor Greta Friar, always does much better than me on these tests. We both took the Eng Lit; she got somewhere something like an 800. Maybe she got one wrong, but I think she still got an 800. That was my recollection from the discussion which went “what did you get?” [minutes of filer] “something something 800″ “oh nice” [more on]. She’s very modest about it so it isn’t soul crushing or anything but combine that with the 2370 SAT I and it can be a little bit harrowing. So the point is that when I look at my peers in the higher percentiles even a good performance of mine is transformed into a half-assed or half-hearted one and so it’s pretty bleak in that regard. But it’s all handled on the fly, subconsciously, most of the time. Only rarely do I need to actively think about diluting my achievements in the oceans of others accomplishments; most of the time the job is quite simple.