“This one is great!
It’s a little bit gimmicky, especially at the outset, with the book resembling a multiple choice test, but the gimmick pretty quickly evolves into making the book even more interesting.
You get stuff like, “You became a writer because,”
A) Your dad hates you
B) To make your dad proud
C) Because you can’t get along in an office
(this is paraphrasing, not the exact text)
Then you get into these three longer anecdotes with some “reading comprehension” questions at the end, and the questions and the stories work great together.
There’s some more context to this, I guess, where people from Chile had to take this test to get into college, and the book is structured to mirror that test, but you don’t need to know shit about that to read the book. I didn’t. As long as you’re vaguely familiar with the whole multiple choice test thing, which, if you’re not, what the fuck?
We used to take the MEAP test, I think, which was from Michigan. Why? I don’t know, I guess there was nobody in Colorado who could make a standardized test.
I mean, in some ways, it seems smart. Why make another test? Who needs it? It’s gonna be the same shit, right?
It seems like there’s a lot of debate these days about whether or not standardized tests should exist but also whether they’re a scourge on humanity. I sort of think they’re…fine? Like, maybe they’re not the best way to figure out if people are smart, but also, doing a long test you have to study a lot for is not a bad way to determine whether someone is going to be successful in college, a place where you study a lot for long tests?
It sort of seems like there’s a lot of talk about “We should come up with some other standard,” but then maybe that’d mean there should be some other way to do college?
Kind of like, when applying for an MFA program, you submit a manuscript, and that seems reasonable because submitting manuscripts is what you’re going to be doing in your MFA program.
Multiple choice tests might not be good, but also, they’re what you’re going to be doing a lot of in college.
Maybe college is for suckers!? I went, two different times for two different degrees! And it was fine. Not a total ripoff, but also not as big a deal as the colleges seemed to think it was.
How’s THAT for a hot take on college? “It’s not that great, and it’s not that bad.” “