Isegoria

I’m amused that Dirty School Toilets a Risk to European Children paints the problem as one European kids face:

School toilets in Britain and Sweden are so dirty, smelly and dangerous that many students avoid using them throughout the day, increasing their risk for problems such as urinary tract infections, a new report shows.
[...]
More than half of boys and one in three girls in the UK said they avoided the toilets while at school, blaming poor conditions and fear of bullying. In Sweden, one in four children said they stayed away from the toilets for similar reasons.

Sounds like the school toilets I remember. In particular:

In the UK, 21% of toilets were not flushed in the morning, and 69% not flushed later in the day. Broken taps and lack of hot water were also found. In Sweden, the researchers said seven out of eight school toilets smelt of urine, six had no soap and six were not adequately cleaned.

I don’t think prison toilets are as bad as school toilets.

As Colleges Use ‘Wink’ Letters To Snare Top Students Early points out, competition between schools for top applicants is getting fierce:

In increasing numbers, colleges are wooing their top choices with notes of praise and hints of acceptance letters and scholarship money to come. The idea is to win their affections by getting them some good news before the competition does. This courtship, which can take place up to several months before formal acceptance letters hit students’ mailboxes, comes in various forms: everything from “likely” letters — which tell students that they’re likely to get admitted — to “love” letters, or handwritten notes from admissions offices complimenting a student’s essay or some other aspect of the application.

I love the way Dartmouth is using these “likely” letters:

Most Ivy League schools generally send out such letters only when pursuing an athlete who may be getting sports scholarships from non-Ivy institutions. In fact, all the Ivies are bound by a rule that requires them to mail out their acceptance letters no earlier than April 2. Dartmouth says its “likely” letters aren’t a violation because they don’t outright admit the applicant, they just hint at it.

“It’s not an acceptance; it just hints at an acceptance.” Riiiggght.

Before Taking the SAT, Read These Few Tips reminds us that it’s SAT season again. The “politically correct” test-design process intrigues me:

Trial and Error

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Questions the College Board rejected because specific groups of students missed them disproportionately:

1. In a certain area of the ocean, two tectonic plates have been moving apart at the rate of 1/2 inch per year. At this rate, in how many years will the distance between the plates be widened by an additional 100 feet?
A) 17
B) 34
C) 200
D) 600
E) 2,400

Group: Women and African Americans

2. Guzzle : beverage:
A) dine : dinner
B) gorge : glutton
C) taste : flavor
D) nibble : snack
E) wolf : food

Group: Hispanics

(Answers: 1. E; 2. E)

Questions go through a half-dozen reviews before being included in the SAT to remove, for example, gender references, specialized words like “spreadsheet” and any question on which one ethnic group or gender scores particularly lower than another.

Then there’s the issue of “scale drift”:

Wasn’t the test dumbed down recently? The College Board pales at that suggestion. Rather, it says, the scale was “re-centered” in 1994 because of “scale drift.” The original scale was set in 1941, when about 10,000 students took the test. By 1990, there were two million test takers, including record numbers of immigrants, minorities and low-income students. The average score is supposed to be 500, but two-thirds of students were scoring below that.

In 1995, the College Board adjusted the scale, making 500 the average once again. So that results could be compared from year to year, it added 70 points to the verbal scores and as many as 30 points to the math scores of everyone who had taken the SAT in the past. Mr. O’Reilly calls the re-centering a “one-time fix,” even though the average score is now above 500. Those extra points are student achievement, the College Board insists.

Student achievement. Riiiiiggghhhht.