If you’re the uptight student who is dead-set on Harvard so you can get a high-paying paper-shuffling job and buy your first Mercedes at age 21, stop reading this now. I realize the word ranking is like crack for people like you and I’m sorry I tricked you into clicking on the link that led you here. This post will not tell you anything you care about.
The Princeton Review rankings are great for students who want to find a university they will be happy at. Every year, Princeton Review …Continue

What do Harvard students have that makes them better? What do they get out of their education that can make them rich? Make them future business leaders of America? According to Daniel Wallace, Class of 2008, the best thing a Harvard student has is the secret of how to get into Harvard. His website, GetIntoHarvard.net, sells a 56-page guide called Get into Harvard for $27.
Wallace claims that not only did he get into Harvard, but he has:
read over tons of books, over 1,000 blog posts, too many forum entries to …Continue

College Intention lets you know what Americans go through to get into university. It’s the blog of a high-school student on his journey to get into college. And it’s a good resource for how the college admissions process works, what colleges look for, tips on getting in, and reassurance that someone else is going through the same things you are.
I especially liked the post, Dear college: Please Send Sleeping Pills In Your Guidebooks, Thanks on psychiatric counseling for families to deal with the stress of university admissions. I cannot …Continue

One year ago, this blog was just starting and at the time I was focused a lot more on universities, whereas I seem to have shifted more and more towards English language learning. It was very useful to go back and look at my first posts and be reminded that I planned this blog to serve both ESL learners and international students.
Three posts that really stand out, I think, are my first post on university rankings: Rankings Part One: General Problems where I discuss the problem with relying soley …Continue

Just a quick post to tell you about some fun things I found.
The first one is Movie Review FAQs, a nice little site that gives you the basics on films so you can decide if you want to see it or not. I think it’s a good resource, especially for ESL learners who want to use films to practice listening.
The second one is a post on Translating Letters of Recommendation. Very funny, but also very apt. Be careful when you read letters of rec written for you, because colleges …Continue

Campus Squeeze, “a site dedicated to making the whole college experience much, much less serious than it should be,” has published their list of the 20 Most Beautiful College Campuses and the 20 Ugliest in the US. The methodology has been questioned as the reviewers apparently didn’t actually visit any of these schools and are only going by website pictures. Some may regard such a survey as ridiculous and unnecessary but there is something to be said for a university campus being pleasant and comfortable. It makes studying easier. And …Continue

This article is part of a series on rankings. Part 1 talked about critiques of the US News ratings. Part 2 talked about the methodology of the US New rankings and Part 3 offered alternatives for finding the university or program of your dreams without rankings.
This article will look at the methodology of the Shanghai Jiao Tong University rankings, which rate universities all over the world and show that the ratings are based on information that for the most part is of no use to students.
A lot of talk is …Continue

I somehow missed the scandal over the new US News rankings which came out in August of this year. My views on these rankings have been made pretty clear.
First of all participation in the survey they send college and university administrators is falling to 51% return rate from 58% last year. And even 58% is pretty low, indicating that many people do not consider the rankings to be a high priority. The reputation survey asks university presidents, deans, and admissions officials to rank other universities based on their reputation. It …Continue

The ETS TOEFL newsletter popped in my inbox today, and there was a short article that I thought might be of interest to some students on Applying to MBA programs. It’s just some common sense advice but for foreign students where the process is so different, it’s worth listening to. For example in Kazakhstan, starting to look for schools a year ahead of time is not common but in the US it is. Which means that admissions officials assume you have been thinking about business school (or university or another …Continue

If there’s a sign of the times in college admissions, it may be this: Steven Roy Goodman, an independent college counselor, tells clients to make a small mistake somewhere in their application on purpose.
“Sometimes it’s a typo,” he says. “I don’t want my students to sound like robots. It’s pretty easy to fall into that trap of trying to do everything perfectly and there’s no spark left.”
This advice to deliberately make a mistake in your application comes from a story on ABC News, Colleges Seek ‘Authenticity’ in Hopefuls. Controversial advice, …Continue

A new project by ETS, the makers of the TOEFL, GRE, and SAT exams, will attempt to measure candidates for graduate school in a more accurate way, by standardizing measures of subjective merit.
One of the biggest problems graduate programs face is just that: getting the ultimately subjective information they need about a candidate’s personality, academic qualifications and ability to study in a way that is easy to evaluate. The GRE test is one measure of academic ability and skill but that is only part of what a graduate program needs …Continue

Inside Higher Ed is reporting on a settlement in the SAT Errors suit. On the October 2005 test, a number of test takers claimed that their test scores were incorrect, and filed a class-action suit against ETS, the creator of the SAT and other standardized tests like the TOEFL, GRE, MCAT and GMAT as well as NCS Pearson, which scores the SAT.
Last week, the lawyers representing around 4 400 test-takers and ETS and Pearson settled and the test centers have agreed to pay 285 million dollars. The victims can either …Continue

What is the difference between the IELTS and TOEFL? Which one should you take? This article will try to help you make that decision and give a brief intro to each test.
Admissions
The IELTS test is administrated by the British Councils, the University of Cambridge, and IELTS Australia. That is to say, it is associated with the British government and traditionally was used by British universities, as well as New Zealand and Australian universities to determine the language capability of foreign students. TOEFL is administered by ETS, a US-based non-profit and …Continue

This post is part of a series of articles I wrote on rankings, which starts here
It’s not just me that thinks rankings are not a useful tool for selecting a university. On April 2, , The Education Conservancy, a US non-profit, sent a letter to college presidents asking them not to participate in the U.S. News rankings.
The Education Conservancy cites the lack of accuracy, lack of important criteria such as whether students are actually learning anything, and the fact that the “rankings game” distracts from the main purpose …Continue

This article is part of a series on university rankings. Part One dealt with some general problems with the concept of rankings. Part Two looked at the methodology of the rankings and some problems with it. Now we look at moving beyond rankings.
What Do We Without Rankings?
Remember that every student is different. what you think makes a good school may not be what others think. So the first thing to do is make a list of everything that you want in your university. You might consider:

Location
: Do you want …Continue