In Ancient Rome, young men from good patrician families had to demonstrate their manly virtue by serving in a successful military campaign before returning to Rome to take political office. Now it seems that American teenagers need to perform community service before entering a prestigious university. From For High Schoolers, Summer Is Time To Polish Resumes:
Forget about the lazy, hazy days of summer.As soon as classes are over for the year at John Jay High School in Cross River, N.Y., 16-year-old Jamie Cohen is off to Senegal where she’ll work with AIDS victims for four weeks. Armed with her research, she’ll then head to Yale University to present an AIDS ‘plan of action’ to other teens, as part of a program put on by a travel company. When she applies to colleges 18 months from now, Ms. Cohen says the experience ‘will definitely help. I’ll do an essay around it.’
I’ve read that the SAT has been “recalibrated” so that older scores are about 100 points lower than modern scores. That may explain this phenomenon:
California’s Pomona College says one-third of the students it accepted for next fall scored the maximum 800 on either the verbal or math part of the SAT admissions tests.