By Sarah Vander Schaaff What does it take to get into college? For that matter, preschool? Two recent stories in The New York Times address changes in the admissions process for some schools and both look at efforts to take the focus off standardized tests. First, there was the attention-grabbing headline: “Private Schools are Expected to Drop a Dreaded Entrance Test.” The test, as the story states, is “commonly known as the E.R.B.” and the organization that is dropping it when a contract expires next spring is the Independent School Admissions Association of Greater New York, which represents 130 schools. E.R.B. is shorthand for many things. Officially, it stands for Educational Records Bureau, a company founded in 1927. Today the… Read More

By Sarah Vander Schaaff As parents, we often talk about peer pressure, but how often to we talk about the effects of pluralistic ignorance? It doesn’t roll off the tongue, does it? But, it’s worth knowing about and perhaps even adding to our conversations. I didn’t know anything about pluralistic ignorance until I heard an evolutionary biologist speaking on the radio last week. He was discussing the “hook-up” culture of young people. An individual may not particularly think “hooking-up” is the type of relationship pattern he wants to have, the biologist said, but pluralistic ignorance drives him to conform to what’s perceived as the norm others have embraced. How many individuals within the group actually like the norm? That’s the… Read More

By Sarah Vander Schaaff I was amazed to read that Stanford’s six Massively Open On-line Courses, or MOOC’s, reached over 300,000 people. But it wasn’t until last week that I realized the MOOC, or a future incarnation of it, would most likely be part of my daughters’ experiences, even if they weren’t pursuing something in the field of Computer Science in college. I remember when a new thing called the “Ethernet” was going to be installed in my college dorm room. But as many have said, MOOC’s not only expand knowledge, they can cut down the cost of it, an idea no parent can completely scoff at unless spending more than $300,000 for a four year private college education in… Read More

By Sarah Vander Schaaff I didn’t go to Harvard, so I don’t often spend my afternoons perusing Harvard Magazine, but it’s sometimes nice to have a friend or colleague share the news of her esteemed alumni publication. In this case, it was a story “Investigating Academic Misconduct” that caught my interest. We’d all heard some of the details of the recent episode, but this story had an inside perspective. The world could hardly conceal its schadenfreude at the scandal that involved more than half of a large Government class last spring. More than a hundred students, it seemed, had cheated on a take-home exam, their written answers so similar they were suspected of collaborating on their compositions. But the article… Read More

By Sarah Vander Schaaff Imagine you had a child in high school who faced this choice: take a history class taught by a school legend, the kind who challenges her students to be deeper thinkers and better writers and is known for being a tough grader. Or, take the same class taught by a competent teacher who just happens to be known for giving a lot of A’s. Any seasoned parent would stop me there. “How do we know the first teacher is a tough grader?” That’s a good question because it speaks to the very nature of grades: they are personal. But as we all know, in practice, they cease to be. Grades may or may not accurately reflect… Read More