nova_cat

C-SPAN tends to be just "stick a camera there and let it roll", which is about as unbiased as you can get, short of bringing up the notion that choosing when and where to place a camera indicates bias as well.

Personally, I'm a big fan of C-SPAN, just because it shows the workings of our federal lawmaking bodies, at least as they occur on the floor.

The Thrawn Trilogy (and the TIE Fighter videogame as a result) pretty much cemented my enthusiasm for Star Wars growing up. I adored that Thrawn was an intelligent, calculating, and relatively non-impulsive villain. In a world full of grand-speechifying, illogically evil badguys, Thrawn is impressively out of place. Fantastic, fantastic stuff. Thank you so much for your work!

I am skeptical of your claim that the real problem here is for-profit test prep companies and not the standardized tests themselves. I think it's pretty well-known that the SAT and ACT are not good predictors of undergraduate success, nor are they particularly relevant to or good at measuring skills students learn in school and will apply going forward. The same is true of most, if not all, graduate admissions tests. Test prep is an obvious response to this problem of a test designed to be as obnoxiously disconnected and obtuse as possible.

Why are you advocating for leveling the playing field of test prep instead of advocating for the end of standardized admissions tests? Doing the latter obviates the test prep industry entirely, and problem solved. Shouldn't we be encouraging schools to follow the current trend of going "test-optional"?

At least in my experience, the reason high schoolers "put in the work for a good test result" is that their parents are right there to supervise them and make them practice and study. Those same parents might be paying for college, but they're not on campus, monitoring their kids' use of time.

At least, I hope they're not.

I just wanted to say that BattleTech (and MechWarrior, by extension) is part of my childhood and an integral piece of my nerd-ery. I mean, look at my username!

But seriously, I just wanted to say how amazingly awesome you are and how much you made my life as a kid fantastic because of the stuff you did at FASA. Thank you!