Porter Wagoner, 1927-2007.

YouTube video, Porter Wagoner and The Willis Brothers - I’ll Fly Away

Some bright morning when this life is over
I’ll fly away
To that home on God’s celestial shore
I’ll fly away

I’ll fly away oh glory
I’ll fly away (in the morning)
When I die hallelujah by and by
I’ll fly away

When the shadows of this life have gone
I’ll fly away
Like a bird from these prison walls I’ll fly
I’ll fly away

Oh how glad and happy when we meet
I’ll fly away
No more cold iron shackles on my feet
I’ll fly away

Just a few more weary days and then
I’ll fly away
To a land where joys will never end
I’ll fly away

I’m watching an NFL game being played in Wembley Stadium, London, England. Whaaaaaaat?

Eduwonk threw out some pith regarding Bill O’Reilly’s comments on the state of American History education:

“There are a lot of reasons that American kids do not know enough history and civics, but predictably Bill O’Reilly has managed to seize on an issue that is not one of them…”

And what did O’Reilly say to get tag-teamed by MM and the Wonk? According to Media Matters:

During the October 24 edition of his Fox News show, Bill O’Reilly asserted: “[I]t seems to me, and the studies indicate, that most teachers — high school and college in the United States — are left-wingers. That they bring in a anti-American viewpoint to the sense that they don’t preach about the nobility of America, they teach about the deficits. Now, I think you have to teach both.” O’Reilly made his comments during the “Culture War” segment of his show, which he introduced by saying, “[W]ith many public schools teaching diversity, tolerance, and self-esteem rather than history, civics, and geography, lots of American kids know little or nothing about their country, including what they owe their country.” O’Reilly then aired a video clip showing students answering questions such as, “What do you think it means to be an American?” After airing the clip, O’Reilly stated: “We went out random. You know, just, we didn’t do any study — just pulled the kids between 13 and 17 with target audience of my book.”

O’Reilly did not indicate which studies show that most high school teachers “are left-wingers” and “bring in a anti-American viewpoint to the sense that they don’t preach about the nobility of America.” He later said, “[Y]ou don’t have to — you can’t whitewash, OK? But when the balance goes to, it’s a bad country — and there’s no question that’s going on in the university system. I don’t know about high school, but I suspect it is as well.”

I love ya, E, but I suppose even Tiger Woods misses a 2-footer occasionally.

The funny thing here is that a staffer from Media Matters took the time today to e-mail me their condemnation of O’Reilly’s stance - I read it, yawned gently and went back to writing. It’s not that the subject isn’t interesting - it’s fascinating and hugely important. The rub? I’ve read both sides of the argument literally hundreds of times each. I didn’t need one more.

[By the way, I appreciate a great deal Media Matters sending me this - thank you. Although it happened to be something I found fallacious, the more press releases and heads-ups I receive, the better. I look forward to more.]

But when I saw the one-sentence presentation of a forgone conclusion on Eduwonk, I had to leave a comment. I wanted to reproduce the comment here so I could link some of the text.

I’ll say this in advance - what’s below is not a partisan comment in any way. It’s about scholarship.

I’m going to defend Mr. O’Reilly here.

He didn’t say it clearly and he relied on anecdotal evidence, but he could have easily supported his argument. I haven’t read a study that measured the political inclinations only of high school history teachers, but there are reams of data about the professoriate’s leanings.

And here’s an interesting Zogby release about the attitudes toward professorial bias:

http://www.zogby.com/news/ReadNews.dbm?ID=1334

We have more than a generation of public school history teachers who were weaned on Howard Zinn et alii - proponents of an individual sort of history. I was checking out an iTunes University class a few weeks ago in which the professor teaching the course [UC Berkeley, female - I’ve forgotten her name but that should be plenty of info. to find the course] explains very well this relatively recent shift in how we approach history.

The texts support his claim, the data leans in his favor and there’s no shortage of testimony from practitioners of history education to corroborate the both of them.

For better or worse, the everyman’s history is not the stuff of great heroes, strong leaders and a clearly-defined national identity. The ‘people’s historians’ who created this tidal wave and are now riding it are incredibly critical of how Americans should view our past and the particular guilt/pride we should feel in the present.

Compare an old US History text like Ridpath’s “History of the United States” [approx. 1905] to the recent “Out of Many: A History of the American People” - if you can say with a straight face that there isn’t a dramatic shift in how we present our country’s history to high school and college students, your will is far stronger than mine.

Again, this isn’t a partisan stance - this is the reality of a shift in the discipline. If you just can’t stomach hearing it from Bill O’Righty, hop on iTunes and listen to that Berkeley leftie prof say virtually the same thing. The only differences is that she’s not indignant about it - she’s quite comfortable with it.

MediaMatters dropped the ball on this one and Eduwonk appears to have picked up the fumble and jogged a few yards toward his own end zone. Anyone reading the MM piece should have questioned it when MM didn’t provide data to refute O’Reilly’s claims. They just portrayed him as a jerk.

I find it a bit funny that MediaMatters asks readers to “Take Action!” in the right sidebar when they themselves can’t be bothered to hit up Google for some data or even to call an academic source for comment.

The point of all this? O’Reilly’s generally saying the correct thing here. If you hate O’Reilly, fine - have at him. But don’t perpetuate an erroneous conclusion about an academic discipline because you’ve got a gripe with the messenger. It’s petty and irresponsible.

Erroneous? Maybe I should’ve used “fatuous…”

Oh, I hope someone laughed at that last line.

Part 2 is a continuation of Analyzing Ten Stupid Ways to Ruin Your College Application, Part 1, a closer look at Jay Mathews’ original article Ten Stupid Ways to Ruin Your College Application.

6. Use your application essay to expand upon how great your grades, scores and activities are.

One college official on Admissions 101 said a common bonehead play is to waste the application essay by telling admissions officers things “we more or less already know or could figure out just from reading other parts of the application.” This is not only boring, but it leaves the impression that your grades, scores and extracurricular activities are all that is interesting about you.

It’s a “bonehead play,” but not necessarily because it makes you appear as though you’re just a transcript.

The approach to an effective college application is the same approach I use when I work with a job seeker. The important concept here is real estate - and real estate is valuable stuff.

When you apply for a job, you get two pieces of real estate: the cover letter and a resume/CV. That’s all. The cover letter is 1 page and the resume is 1-2 pages. If one is applying for an executive or academic position, a CV will take the place of a resume - maybe 3-5 pages.

Either way, that’s not a lot of real estate to sum up one’s candidacy.

A college application can have more parts - a transcript, test scores, a resume, an essay, recommendations, etc. - but you’re still quite limited. You’ve only got a few pages to present yourself, so you can’t waste time and space talking about the same thing more than once.

If you’re a job seeker, rehashing your resume in a cover letter provides little additional value to the hiring manager. What’s the point of saying the same things the application reader can get from your resume?

A college application is no different. You need to take advantage of the real estate - don’t blow it by presenting the same material over and over.

Common sense, yes? Here’s where it gets weird:

College officials will never say this out loud, but one purpose of the college essay is to weed out insufferable people whom no one would want as a roommate. One good strategy is to write about some lovable quirk that reveals a facet of your character and lets you use some self-deprecating humor, essential to any successful college application essay.

They’re unlikely to say that out loud because it’s nearly baseless.

If I were to type out a full explanation of why these two sentences are misguided, my fingertips would wear down to the bone.

Does anyone really believe that admissions committees are so in touch with the personalities of their incoming student bodies that they can read 600 words and decide who will be easy to live with? Sure, if your essay is about how you’re an only child, have never shared a room and refuse to consider the possibility until you’re married, it might reflect badly on your candidacy. But really, worrying about what an application reader might assume about your behavior in a 15′x15′ dorm room after reading your personal statement is absurd.

I’ve read many personal statements that wouldn’t give the reader the slightest inkling about an applicant’s dorm persona. About 10 years ago I read in a book about college application essays a sample essay in which the applicant described a day on a recent vacation. He’d hiked up a large hill - it took several hours and this applicant seemed to be a stranger to physical exertion - and at the summit he took out his lunch.

In that lunch he’d packed a banana. He described in detail how that banana tasted and how he felt eating while it after such a difficult climb. He’d never paid so much attention to such a mundane thing in his life.

It was a wonderful essay that showed his ability to think, demonstrated his writing skill and gave the reader a glimpse into a side of him that didn’t appear on his transcript. I don’t know if the banana-eater was a good roommate, but he did get into Harvard.

But for the sake of humoring Mathews, let’s imagine a move-in day conversation that goes something like this:

John: “Hey, I’m John.”
Steve: “Hey John, I’m Steve. Do you like bananas?”
John: “Do I ever! Harvard selected me in part because they thought my banana-eating prowess would add to the social dynamic of Harvard Yard.”
Steve: “Wow - I love bananas! I can’t imagine living with someone who didn’t. I think we’re going to get along just fiiiiiiine.”

And they lived happily ever after. Well, until John stayed up all night playing Halo 3 when Steve was trying to rest up for his Differential Equations mid-term…

7. Nobody knows you when you are touring a college, so if you want to wear a T-shirt from a rival university or make a cellphone call, go right ahead.

Mathews elaborates:

This is another problem with which I was unfamiliar. I am not entirely convinced that it is an issue, but Connolly and other experts insist it can hurt you. They think tour guides in some cases have the names of the people in their tours and will report unseemly behavior. A college tour guide told Admissions 101 that his supervisors encouraged him to tell them about tour participants who did GOOD things, such as ask insightful questions. So, I suppose, bad news can also get back to the people who are deciding your fate.

I’m not sure why he’s unfamiliar with the erosion of courtesy - anyone who’s been to a movie theater in the last 10 years could write a dissertation on it.

But he and Connolly are right - people notice when you’re rude. And not only that, but you shouldn’t be rude to avoid losing points in the application process. You shouldn’t be rude because, well, it’s rude.

Use common sense. Conduct yourself respectfully for your sake and that of the others touring. At many schools, tour guides/hosts are advanced undergraduates who either volunteer or get paid peanuts for their service. Don’t make their job tougher.

Does it really matter what you wear on a tour? I think such a concern is outrageous and wholly insignificant, but it’s not that tough to avoid putting on a Boston College t-shirt when you’re touring Boston University. But if you want the truth, I find it both naive and offensive to think that a Duke University tour guide is so petty that he docks points on your application because you showed up wearing a UNC hat.

Remember, admissions reps aren’t that dumb and childish. And if they are, do you really want to spend four years there?

8. Let your parents do whatever they need to do to help you get admitted.

Helicopter parents, always hovering, have become a part of modern American folklore. They exist, of course. Students who let mom and dad get too involved are likely to suffer.

Helicopter parent folklore exists because the media loves the concept and the stories are entertaining, but I digress.

Parents need to respect the admissions process as much as students do. If parents and students don’t deviate from the application process, #8 won’t an issue.

Students, especially now, are busy people and sometimes parents have to follow up for them. If you’ve got a question about a college, financial aid or anything else related to applying, a parent can call and ask. Just remember that admissions reps/committees are likely even busier - ask your question, let them do their job by answering and leave it at that.

There’s just no reason to try to lobby aggressively on your child’s behalf. A good application lobbies strongly enough.

9. Colleges are attuned to all the latest fads, so when e-mailing them, it is fine to use text- message abbreviations.

Connolly said: “OMG, this is annoying for us non-texters and IDK why students do this to us adults when we are not their BFF.”

Conduct yourself like a professional at all times. Does that sound overly formal? It shouldn’t - high school seniors are professional students.

And if a student just can’t grasp the concept of behaving like an adult, at least convince them to behave like a veteran of childhood.

10. Don’t proofread your application carefully and don’t bother to check to see if the envelope in which you placed the application or letter of recommendation for College A might actually have the address of College B.

Keep your papers organized and work on applications one at a time. Problem solved.

Proofreading is a necessity. Again, it’s about self-respect and professionalism. If your eye for mistakes isn’t terribly keen, find others - at least 2 - to proofread for you.

I’m reminded of something I wrote months ago about a college counselor who suggests that applicants make mistakes on purpose to show that they’re real human beings.

Dumb. Don’t do that. And if you want to know why, you can browse that old post - it starts halfway through this article.

We’ve taken a closer look at ten ways you may or may not ruin your college application. I’ll leave you with a snippet from that article I just linked - it details a careless blunder that really didn’t have much of an impact on an applicant’s candidacy:

… when I was in high school, a friend of mine applied to SUNY Binghamton. He mailed his application on the deadline during 6th period lunch. After our physics lab the next period, we talked about his essay. He had a copy in his notebook and passed it around. I noticed that in the heading he’d written “Binghampton” - it’s spelled wrong but mimics the pronunciation. He never bothered to check.

He wasn’t a stellar applicant. He spelled the university’s name wrong on his essay. He still got in.

The moral of that story? Relax. This process isn’t as perilous as Mathews and some others make it out to be.

You can subscribe to e-mail news feeds by submitting your address in the left column of this site or you can add Education for the Aughts to your RSS reader.

If you’ve got questions about college admissions or have an interest in having me speak to your class, company or organization, feel free to send an e-mail to mktabor@gmail.com.

Much has been made of the AP’s recent expose of sexual misconduct in the teaching profession. Though I won’t discuss it in this post [and probably not at any length later], I commend it to you in full:

AP: Sexual Misconduct Plagues U.S. Schools

Also, check out Scott Reeder’s report at The Hidden Cost of Tenure. His long-running investigation of misconduct in Illinois schools is one of the finest education journalism pieces I’ve read in years.

Illinois Does Poor Job Dealing With Teacher Misconduct

But I wrote this post to discuss a troubling statement I read on Dave Saba’s blog.

Saba, the President of the American Board for Certification of Teacher Excellence, says that sexual misconduct in the classroom is a byproduct of a shallow talent pool and strained human resources departments.

In The Shallow Pool he writes [emphases mine]:

Here is an analogy for the AP report on sexual misconduct plaguing schools. It is the unfortunate consequence of not having enough applicants for all the job openings in our schools. When the talent pool gets shallow, school districts end up hiring whoever is available. When HR spends the bulk of their time running around filling jobs at the last minute, the wrong people are going to slip through and get into a classroom.

It is going to get worse and that is an outrage. I was presenting at AASPA and met with numerous district HR people. Some are hiring from overseas and end up being immigration lawyers, housing specialists and cultural integrators - which sucks up so much time that they cannot do the rest of their jobs and the teachers don’t work out and leave anyway. Others are venturing far from their state to recruit - costing time and money. For math and science teachers they are lucky to have one qualified applicant for the job and when you only have one applicant you don’t have a choice. They are desperately seeking ways to fill jobs and taking what they can get. Is that what our students deserve? Or do they deserve a teacher selected from many great applicants?

Being desperate creates a perfect situation for some of the people listed in the AP article. We have got to increase the talent pool so that our districts do not end up getting the sludge.

It isn’t negligence by hiring managers and school officials, says Saba. The problem is that HR is forced into that negligence because they aren’t inundated with enough incredible candidates to make their job easy.

This stance is indefensible.

I left the following comment on Saba’s blog. I decided to reproduce it here in part because it is subject to moderation before posting and may never appear on his site. It sums up well my thoughts:

I find several parts of this post to be problematic.

You start by saying that schools are forced to hire suboptimal candidates because the talent pool necessitates it. If true - and that can be argued - it only addresses those who have offended and been disciplined in a former district. That’s only part of the problem. Or would you say that a deeper pool would allow you to avoid the would-be offenders, too?

If HR spends their time “running around filling jobs at the last minute,” that’s a problem with HR and it’s one that can be fixed. Schools aren’t the only organizations who: a) hire and b) are forced to draw from a talent pools that aren’t terribly appealing.

You’ve also implied that HR is forced to do a shoddy job with hiring - if they’re filling jobs quickly at the expense of proper background checks, they’re not just doing a disservice to us all, they’re putting students in harm’s way.

Can you genuinely excuse a district - even if rushed or dealing with a single qualified applicant - for failing to investigate properly a teacher’s professional past? And can you excuse a district who knows of a teacher’s sexual misdeeds and hires him anyway out of professional necessity?

There is no excuse for hiring a teacher with a criminal or school-level disciplinary record pertaining to sexual misconduct.

Absolutely none.

And if you think otherwise, I’ll let you explain to parents that their child is in a classroom every day with a teacher who has been disciplined for sexual misconduct but that the district hired anyway.

You can explain to them that the real problem is a shallow talent pool that strains district resources and results in negligence that puts their children at risk for sexual abuse. You can tell them that it’s unfortunate, regrettable, and if there were just more applicants, you wouldn’t have to hire predators. You can also ask the community for more money to augment staff so you wouldn’t be forced into such irresponsible hiring practices. Accepting the abhorrent, blaming others and asking for more money? An unpopular trifecta indeed.

Again, you can give that presentation communities across the country. I’m not going to do it.

If you find that difficulties with hiring practices result in suboptimal - and in this case dangerous - hires, by all means suggest that state laws get tougher, discipline for offenders is more swift and/or more serious or that graduate/licensing/certification for administrators includes effective HR training. Those would all be sensible solutions.

But don’t justify the negligence of hiring those guilty of sexual misconduct by pointing a finger at the applicant pool. That’s the hiring equivalent of, “Dressing like that, she was asking for it!” and it’s nothing short of shameful.

I don’t think college applicants are dumb.

I don’t think that admissions committees are dumb.

Some other people do.

There’s no shortage of articles and opining about college admissions - we know this. We’re indundated daily with variations on a theme that promise to expose secrets to this, guarantee a smooth process with that, and stack tip upon tip on the fragile education Jenga-tower one is seemingly obligated to build starting in 9th grade.

And, in case that last sentence didn’t remind you of anything, I’ll say it explicitly: there’s a nationwide and industry-wide propensity toward fear-mongering with regards to admissions. A cynic might suggest that if everyone from your high school guidance counselor to New York Times staffers didn’t portray college admissions as an unnavigable maze for which only they had a map, they might be out of a job.

To paraphrase Ambrose Bierce, a cynic is often someone who sees things as they are, not as they ought to be.

Jay Mathews of the Washington Post is a fine education writer - his articles are well-researched and generally sound. In Ten Stupid Ways to Ruin Your College Application, Mathews culls material from his discussion forum and professional acquaintances to lay out a list of things one shouldn’t do when applying to college.

Some of these tips are good, some aren’t - I’d like to take a look at all ten and expand on them. Part 1 looks at questions #1-5; Part 2 at #6-10. It was 3,000+ words, I had to break them up.

The list, unfortunately, is a sarcastic “Who’d be dumb enough to do that?!” attempt at lighthearted-but-informative content, so keep that in mind when I quote material.

1. Rack up as many extra points as you can for “expressed interest” in your favorite colleges.

Mathews et alii suggest that you should show an interest in a school but warn not to go overboard. There’s a list of weird gestures [like sending a shoe to get a “foot in the door”] that one ought not to try.

Common sense works here.

Visit colleges, talk to reps, do the normal things. But the question to ask if you’re considering a non-traditional demonstration of interest is, “Where’s the value? Does it result in me showing more about myself and my candidacy? Does it allow the admissions officer or rep to give me information of value?” Sending a shoe doesn’t elicit anything of value from the college and it doesn’t show anything about you [except that you might be a bit creepy].

Everything you do should generate value from - and preferably for - both parties involved.

2. Don’t worry about your postings on social networking sites — college admissions officers understand your need for individual expression and will probably never look at them.

Mathews frames problematic Myspace and Facebook content in two ways: an embarrassing page can hurt your candidacy if an admissions committee finds it and a mean-spirited kid or teacher can alert a committee to damage you.

What?

Not everybody loves you. Those who don’t could send anonymous notes to your first-choice school suggesting it inspect a certain Web site. There are no rules that say they can’t.

It’s true, but how you live your life and how you want the world to see you is a larger, more important issue of self-respect; what Haverford thinks about your famous alcohol-induced vomiting at the high school musical cast party is the least of your problems if it really is there for everyone to see and judge.

Do some people take a bizarre interest in ensuring your failure? Sure. One of my teachers went out of her way to disparage me in the college admissions process. But so what? Mean-spirited communications with a questionable purpose usually say more about who sends them than the person in question.

Remember: College admissions officers are people, too, and they aren’t dumb.

Relax. There isn’t a bogeyman hiding under every bed.

3. When sending messages to admissions officers, the wilder the e-mail address the better.

I’ve got no issue with this one - it’s right on. Use an e-mail address that consists of your first/last name, initials, or some combination. If anyone would like an invitation to gmail to make a new address, just drop me a line and I’ll send you one.

I wrote about this in June in Sage Advice on E-Mail from a College Admissions Officer*:

When I was working for a non-US government about 7 years ago, I was in charge of pre-screening American resumes submitted for internships. Why? Because I was the only one there who knew all the American colleges and universities [most everyone else just knew the top-tier schools]. I remember the day I read a CV that was impeccable - a prestigious secondary school, a couple years at an Ivy and on pace for summa cum laude, etc. His e-mail address was longsacktheclown@_____.com. I’ve only laughed harder two other times in my life.

If you’ve got a crazy address, the bad news is that it’ll reflect poorly on you. The good news is that you’ll probably make the admissions rep’s day.

4. College interviewers like jokes and exaggerations, so let fire.

First, the interview isn’t that important. Mathews might not read industry reports, but I do. The Philadelphia Inquirer summarizes a recent report by the National Association of College Admission Counseling:

According to the National Association for College Admission Counseling, an applicant’s interview had limited or no importance at two-thirds of 386 four-year institutions surveyed last year for the group’s State of College Admission report. The portion of schools that gave the chat “considerable importance” was 10 percent, down from a high of 15 percent in 1995.

Grades, strength of curriculum and test scores have been the top admission factors for at least 15 years, the August report found. The interview ranked 10th among 15 criteria that schools consider.

Mathews tells a story so odd and irrelevant that I can’t summarize it:

Dan4, a parent posting on Admissions 101, said his son blew his interview for the University of Pennsylvania by letting his sense of humor go too far. He told the interviewer, a woman, that if he got into Penn, he hoped to dump his dirty clothes on his aunt in Philadelphia since one of his personal goals was “to never have to do his own laundry.” I think this is a funny line. But the interviewer didn’t. Dan4’s son didn’t realize how much this had hurt him until a cousin the same age, with the same last name, met with another Penn interviewer who asked pointedly if they were related and if he did his own laundry. The interviewer wasn’t smiling.

So, because Dan4’s kid made an ill-timed comment that wasn’t terribly funny - and said it to a dry, humorless, automaton of an admissions rep - you shouldn’t stray from being the consummate professional who is 17 going on 40.

Or you can just be yourself.

Again, we all need to present ourselves as competent, self-respecting professionals - even if our profession is being a high school student. It’s common sense and is based on the self-respect I mentioned earlier. But to suggest that students should walk on eggshells to avoid the weirdest sensibilities of a nightmare interviewer causes unnecessary stress. Stop that, Jay.

This interviewer stinks - there’s no better way to put it. You might get an interviewer you wish you knew in your daily life and you might get an interviewer who will inspire a quirky story that’ll entertain until the end of time. That isn’t up to you. The best thing approach is to be yourself, conduct yourself appropriately and leave it at that.

Interviews are about letting a rep know who you are, finding out about a school and seeing how those two fit together. If you play a game to manipulate an interview one way or the other, you won’t get a lot out of it.

5. Load up your application with as many activities as you can think of and don’t mention anything that makes you look bad.

This tip touches on two different things - how we view/present our positive attributes and how forthcoming we should be about our negative ones.

Mathews writes:

Connolly said one student put on his application “I spend time lifting weights to improve my abs.” This is dumb. Colleges want to see two activities to which you have applied much energy and passion. They don’t want to see a lot of little stuff.

No, they want to see who you are - and you want them to see who you are. Mathews just thinks you should only show what portrays you as Rhodes-Scholar-meets-cheerleader.

Energetic, motivated and demonstrating a seriousness of purpose is a great combination - that’s no myth. The myth is that you can’t be into seemingly-boring things and still meet all three of those conditions.

It’s really about how you view what you do and how you present it. The dumb part isn’t that the applicant lifts weights and works on his abs, it’s that he presents it as lifting weights to work on his abs. I’d present it as a commitment to health and an interest in exercise science/kinesiology.

This isn’t about spin; there’s no need to make stuff up. But usually a boring description comes not from an inability to draw value from an activity - not that activity’s inherent worthlessness.

In How to Approach a Gap in College Admissions Applications, I wrote about a student interested in online gambling who was ill-advised. The admissions consultant saw him as a degenerate; I saw a kid who, whether he recognized it or not, understood statistics, probability and applied concepts as difficult as Bayesian decision-making. I e-mailed that consultant to offer her an opportunity to detail her approach to the problem - she didn’t respond.

Having said that, not every activity is worth describing in detail or even listing. The question to ask here is, again, “Does it provide value?”

In Getting into College Without Advanced Placement / AP Classes, I wrote about a student who wasn’t a “joiner”:

There’s no shortage of SADD members, student council representatives and dance committee volunteers applying to good schools. In a way, those applicants can come across as incredibly similar to one another. If there’s one thing that makes an admissions officer at a large research university yawn, it’s the garden-variety “joiner.” I’d likely be more interested in a student who read in her spare time than one who participated in application-padding clubs; the answer to, “What do you read and why do you spend so much time doing it?” is going to be more interesting and expository than to, “So, why did you want to plan the prom?”

Simply put, this girl isn’t necessarily harmed by not having a laundry list of activities. No one has to be.

And the negative aspects of an application? That’s an easy one. Be honest about them. Be forthcoming about what happened, what you’ve done to remedy it and/or learn from it and how you’ve moved on. Take responsibility for your actions and make the best of it. Really, what more can you do?

Continue to Analyzing Ten Stupid Ways to Ruin Your College Application, Part 2.

… and so have the leaves.

Here’s a personal photo from yesteryear - I think the only difference between then and now is the beard.

That’s a question raised by a recent lawsuit filed by a former Florida A&M University [FAMU] Law student. Clayton Hallford’s suit against the school describes a very interesting situation in which an open book final exam for a class contained questions reproduced directly from prep guides.

Some students had the commercially-available guides, others didn’t - therein lies the problem of fairness.

It’s only a small portion of a complex suit in which the test grading was changed in a way that significantly harmed his grade and led to his dismissal, but it’s an important question: Can we just reproduce questions at our own convenience?

I’m not a lawyer, so proceed at your own risk.

The short answer is “no.”

First - questions in a review book are the intellectual property of the author and/or publisher. There’s no question about that. I don’t have the review books the article mentions, but on the publisher’s page there should be a statement about needing permission to use any of the contents..

I pulled a review book off my shelf to use as an example. It’s a Barron’s AP European History book that says:

“No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by photostat, microfilm, xerography, or any other means, or incorporated into any information retrieval system, electronic or manual, without the written permission of the copyright owner.”

I’ve never once seen a review book that failed to have a statement like that. Using the questions on a test is reproduction of the content.

Content may be reproduced under the auspices of “Fair Use,” a set of principles that direct how we can and can’t use another’s intellectual property. Fair use is at the core of blogging; though the St. Petersburg Times wrote the article to which I linked above, I can legally reproduce snippets on my site for the purpose of analysis. And even if I were to write a 400 page critique of Harry Potter literature - one in which I would necessarily use many [and potentially lengthy] passages from the books - I wouldn’t need JK Rowling’s permission.

Fair use is pretty much common sense for anyone who has the slightest bit of respect for others’ work and a commitment to professionalism.

Publishers of texts and review books pay dearly for questions to be written. I came across an ad this week from a publisher looking for teachers to write social studies test questions; they pay $8.50 per question. Considerable investment of time and money go into developing a test-prep book. Cherry-picking a publisher’s efforts to more conveniently generate a test combines laziness, plagiarism [I doubt a citation was given after the question] and copyright violation.

The publishing company of the books in question would likely support this opinion. If asked, I’m certain that they’d say they needed to give written consent for an instructor to reproduce questions from books but they would acknowledge that it is probably a common practice.

It’s a very difficult thing to police, especially because it’s tough to quantify the damage of the tort [as opposed to, say, copying the book and reselling it]. Publishers differ with respect to how they process requests to use material; some have a rubric for charging, others just give permission to use questions at no charge when a request is properly filed.

Reproducing questions from review books happens frequently in New York. We have state-issued curricula for most all high school subjects with a statewide final exam. Barron’s publishes review books for these state exams and it is very common for teachers to make unit tests from questions taken directly from the review books. No one really complains [other than that it suggests a classroom teacher is “teaching to the test,”], but I find it highly unprofessional and unnecessary at the post-secondary and especially law school level.

At the least, the unauthorized reproduction of test questions speaks volumes about an instructor’s efforts with a course. A good teacher not only doesn’t need to do this, but also generates questions that are highly correlated with the curriculum he’s taught throughout the semester. In the case of FAMU Law’s Professor Wallace Rudolph’s Torts II exam, it would be interesting to compare the course syllabus with the table of contents of those books.

So, the conclusion is that it’s almost certainly in violation of copyright law [the irony here that it happened at a law school is not lost] and is an embarrassing admission of the professor’s inadequacy.

Unfortunately, Rudolph’s method of authoring exams isn’t rare in the education business. At least he’s not teaching intellectual property law or ethics.

FAMU Law - especially Dean Pernell - take note. It’s about time you paid a bit more attention to the efforts of your professors.