Thursday, October 23, 2008
Fairtest is an organization that claims to be against standardized testing. The organization publishes a list of 775 College & Universities that do not require the SAT or ACT. Sounds impressive right? However, all it takes is a quick analysis to establish that the list is pretty flimsy. The list sounds considerably less impressive when you look more closely.
Many of those on the list are affiliates of for-profit educational institutions and repetitions abound:
23 of the listed schools are associated with the DeVry name.
32 of of them are ITT
21 of them are branches of Davenport University
4 of them are Johnson & Wales the cooking schools
10 of them are branches of Florida Metropolitan
They clearly pumped up the list a little here. To make matters worse, 56 of those listed are not actually test optional at all, requiring applicants to “submit COMPASS, CPAT, TABE, WAIS, Stanford Achievement Test, ASSET and/or college entrance exam if not submitting SAT/ACT scores.”
For many of the Art Schools and Cooking Schools listed, it’s not clear why they would ever have required an academic admissions test. It’s disingenuous to claim associate schools like these with a ‘growing test optional movement’ when they most likely never used the SAT or ACT in the first place!
There’s also no notion of the scale within within this list, many of the schools have small enrollments. For example, there are 23 Yeshiva (Orthodox Jewish religious schools.) These are highly specialized institutions with small enrollments – 25-200 students. It’s a misrepresentation to pump up the list with such schools.
There’s also no information provided on the selectivity of the schools. A less selective school does not need to use an admissions test if they are already admitting 90%-100% of candidates. I did a quick scan and found many schools that would let anybody in. It’s just not that profound a statement to say that schools that are admitting on essentially non-academic criteria or have open door policies are ‘going test optional’ when in fact they’ve never needed to use an admissions test and their admissions policies are antithetical to the use of an admissions test. This may be realistic for many of these schools, but it is not realistic for colleges and universities that need to select the best candidates for a limited number of slots.
You can make up your own mind by taking a look at the list.
Thursday, October 9, 2008
If Central Park is supposed to be closed to traffic in the evening, why do I always see at least 15 cars on the drives while I am there every night?
Tuesday, September 23, 2008
How the whole sheband unravelled, starting with the Fed rate cut way back when.
I am very interested to see where this story goes: Adam Savage of Mythbusters, while speaking at a conference, revealed that the producers considered doing a show revealing the flaws of the RFID tags in credit cards. Apparently the lawyers got Discovery to back down from even producing the show. Credit card companies don’t want you to know how flawed and insecure the embedded RFID tags really are. Anybody can read them with readily available equipment. Some of the issues are presented at RSA Laboratories.
Thursday, August 21, 2008
The Times has a piece on disclosure of salaries and the good points and bad points. More interesting than the article is a referenced site called Glassdoor.com where one could disclose their salary in exchange for information about other people’s salaries. The site has the obvious issue that the salaries are self-reported. There are also clearly some issues about salary vs. bonus compensation.
I should mention that there is a good forum on RCN (as well as other internet service providers and cable providers) at Broadband Reports.
RCN has raised their rates yet again, with only the most meager increases in service over the last year. I really like the HD channels that they added in the last year, but it’s not enough to justify the $24/month increase in charges that just appeared on my bill. RCN has just about the worst on-demand service I’ve seen. It’s very poor picture quality, not HD, the interface is dodgy, and the selections are few. I realized I’ve been suffering the poor value for far too long and decided to cancel my cable service.
I should have known that it would be a real pain to cancel; RCN’s customer service has declined significantly since I first signed on with them. I spent an hour on the phone to cancel. On the upside, my monthly bill is going to decrease more than $100. I was surprised that they made no effort either to retain me or to determine why I was cancelling the service. Perhaps they are focusing on the telecom side of the business?
Anyway, I’m going to see if I can live without the cable for a little while. I’m open to suggestions on other services (internet or traditional) that I could use to get my TV fix once in a while.
Wednesday, August 6, 2008
It seems that Mr. Fortuny will be getting some more publicity, this time of the unwanted variety. 10 Zen Monkey’s reports that Jason Fortuny is being sued by one of the victims of his “Craig’s List Experiment.”
Fortuny is as always unrepentant:
I’m sure there are dozens of rfjason-haters cheering right now. Are you excited? Are you? Huh, are you? Are you, are you? Yeah? You’re excited? You want me rub your tummy? Ohhhh, you’re such a sweet hater. Yes you are. Yes you are!
Feel the hate Jason. You probably will win the case, but I hope it wastes a lot of your time and money, just as it should.
I rarely see a truly fat man running for exercise. It occurs to me that either:
- Fat men don’t run
- Men who run aren’t fat
Clearly more fat men should run.
The UWS loses its (only?) decent record store in September when’s Kim’s closes.