the Sam Jackson College Experience

Some of you may be familiar with the concept of naked parties popular at college campuses across the nation but perhaps especially Yale; in any event, I thought I would attach a relevant email sent to the freshman class about something its anonymous author purports to be the first Pundit-sponsored prankish naked party of the year. I was out all afternoon participating in a fun Trumbull-freshmen-only scavenger hunt across campus, and came back to find this:

Dear Freshmen,

Some of you were visited several nights ago by upperclassmen who delivered to your suites invitations to “The Masquerade.” The invitations read:

“You and one guest are cordially invited by a distinguished group of peers to attend the Masquerade on Saturday, the Fifteenth of September. Please arrive in formal attire at the gates to the Hall of Graduate Studies at nine thirty post merediem. Tell no one and do not be late. Non Ducor, Duco.”

An image of the invitation, for your reference, is attached. Some of you may be under the impression that you have been tapped for something, or invited to a gathering hosted by a secret society, such as the Yale Society for the Exploration of Campus Secrets (YSECS).

Sadly, this is not the case. Your ‘hosts’ are the Pundits, the infamous Senior pranking society.

Should you choose to go to the gates of the HGS this evening, here is what will happen:

1) You will be led to an off-campus location by the Pundits.

2) There will be a party there.

3) Before very long, and at a certain cue, the Pundits will take off all of their clothes.

4) You will feel rather awkward, unless you’re into that sort of thing.

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Today was the first day of classes at Yale, and I decided it was time to finally start getting back into the blogging spirit. What better way to start than a proclamation of my love for this new place?

I don’t know that I can sufficiently articulate my supreme delight and excitement for the next four years here at Yale. Based on the last 10 days this place and these people are proving to be amazing and awesome in every respect possible. Aside from the fact that I have the smallest suite at Yale, sharing my small room with someone 6′ 9″ (that is not hyperbole) , everything is better than I ever imagined.

The upside of the ultra-cramped room is of course that I am forced out of the room to get out and do things, socialize, study in other places, etc. Excepting those times, like right now, when I’m blogging from my room…

The list of reasons why Yale is so excellent would be obscenely long, as everywhere I look I find new reasons to be in love with this place. The classes today? Superb. I liked most of my professors that I was shopping today and was even impressed with the ones that I wasn’t so fond of (personality differences?). All the courses looked interesting, though the French that I was shopping turned out to be too easy, but my very cool professor there recommended me some other very neat courses to take which I will shop post haste.

I have some more fantastic courses to look at tomorrow, too. The only problem where classes are concerned seems to be a lack of time to take all the ones that I want.

I will try to make more posts in the coming days about specific interesting / super fun things that are happening / have happened; there are almost too many to keep track. I wish Yale had a Wesleying equivalent; maybe I will have to think up a clever name and start one. In the meantime, my adventures continue!

Just a quick mention to get out this scary / funny word out: Our friends at ePrep wrote way back in February that SAT tests were being recycled, and no, I don’t mean the paper. FairTest Examiner wrote in April about the same issue:

The College Board cancelled the January 28, 2007 SAT scores of 900 Koreans because some students previously had access to the questions. The reason test items circulated in advance is that the exam was identical to the SAT administered in December 2005.

 

Though the December 2005 SAT was not made public under “Truth in Testing” provisions, which apply to questions and answers from only four of the seven SAT administrations each year, students post items from every exam on the Internet. In addition, some coaching schools have run sophisticated operations to collect entire exams, either by sending in teams of test-takers to memorize the exam or by obtaining entire forms.

 

The College Board offered no reason to believe that the prior-exposure problem was confined to one Asian nation.

Other thoughts: it must suck to be one of those test-question memorizers. I tend to remember the ones I think I missed, which haunt me until I get my scores… at which point they continue to haunt me.

Wait, it gets better. The College Board explanation for the repeated test?

The College Board, which owns the SAT, and its contractor, the Educational Testing Service, justified the test recycling practice by claiming that it costs “probably $350,000″ to create each new exam. But 326,000 students took the January SAT, paying a base registration fee of $41.50. That means test-makers took in more than $13 million at this administration. Given that huge revenue stream and the fat surpluses historically enjoyed by the College Board and ETS), the companies had no credible financial excuse for cutting corners.

The lesson from all this? Taking those practice tests could be even better than you first expected!

Oh, by the way, that official online College Board SAT prep course is still 100% free, check out my post on it from last year.

First I got the NetID, then I went into Webmail (interestingly called Horde, I discovered–apt given the number of new Yalies about the log in) and, having set a password, I sent first a test email, then a blanket ‘hello world look at me’ to friends and family from the new @yale.edu address. What’s the third thing to do, then? Join the Yale Facebook group. Not particularly proud, but it had to be done sometime.

@__@

Alexa Harrington over at EducatedNation refers us to a SF Examiner story about a San Francisco psych class which decided to have a competition with their rejection letters, ranking them for superlatives like “Least original rejection” and “Least number of words you need to read before you know you are being rejected.”

The story concludes by offering some tips on how to soften the blow for students; the whole read is funny and novel, but this last part struck me as particularly keen. Patrick Mattimore writes:

Students have crafted psychological tips colleges might adopt instead of telling applicants about the other “talented and highly qualified” students they rejected or the fact that the admissions office is comforted in knowing that “you will have many other fine choices” of colleges. Assuaging the colleges’ guilt is not what the process is about.

The best student sensitivity suggestion this year advised admissions’ offices to adopt the relationship break-up line, “it’s not you, it’s us.” The recipient of “He’s a deny” sent a raft of improvement suggestions to Reed and concluded his five pages of suggestions by letting the school know that they should feel “free to send apology or ‘he’s an admit’” letter. He got the apology only.

No mention of Yale, though Harvard was included for “most obsequious while maintaining utter insincerity.” Kudos to them, I suppose.