Making gross generalizations is usually a recipe for disaster, and though you might think that the director of admissions at Oxford University might know better than to make some broad, sweeping pronouncement about how girls’ guts are way more indecisive than boys’ guts, you’d be wrong, prey to the very same sort of… » 8/18/13 4:30pm 8/18/13 4:30pm

Pop quiz: Are you smarter than an eighth grader in 1912? » 7/29/13 11:30pm 7/29/13 11:30pm

Thanks to the persuasive powers of the Providence Student Union, a cohort of Rhode Island legislators, city officials, professors, and just plain old people locked themselves in a library for several hours and tortured themselves by taking a standardized test. Fingers cramped. Temples throbbed. Egos crumbled. It was… » 3/17/13 5:30pm 3/17/13 5:30pm

There are a lot of immature behaviors and credulous misconceptions that people, over the peripatetic course of their childhood and adolescence are bound to outgrow. We hope. For instance, this made up person I know who definitely is not me used to walk around in a bathrobe with his forearms folded over each other… » 12/12/12 11:15pm 12/12/12 11:15pm

The SAT. What a nightmare. Crammed into a claustrophobic room with other bleary-eyed high school seniors, all stinky with teenage-hormone-sweat and CK One. It's surprising anyone can pass those things, period. I'm pretty sure I wrote my name wrong the first time I took it. Well, it looks like more and more students… » 11/30/12 9:30am 11/30/12 9:30am

Colleges place heavy emphasis on test scores in their highly competitive admissions processes. Where you go to college determines what sort of ilk you rub elbows with while doing kegstands, who will hire you, how much money you will make, and your success and happiness forever and always, and poor test scorers are… » 10/26/11 12:10pm 10/26/11 12:10pm

"I think people are just basically curious about their own mortality. If you ask people what they worry about, most people would say they are worried about dying." » 5/16/11 5:04pm 5/16/11 5:04pm

In a new study, girls who walked to school did better on tests than girls who got there by car. But lazy students take heart: caffeine and sugar also up test scores. » 12/09/10 9:38am 12/09/10 9:38am