June 2008

It's depressing that I have a whole blog category called "Cheating," but there you go.

From BusinessWeek:

More than 1,000 prospective MBA students who paid $30 to use a now-defunct Web site to get a sneak peak at live questions from the Graduate Management Admissions Test (GMAT) before taking the exam may have their scores canceled in coming weeks. For many, their B-school dreams may be effectively over.

On June 20, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia granted the test's publisher, the Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC), a $2.3 million judgment against the operator of the site, Scoretop.com. GMAC has seized the site's domain name and shut down the site, and is analyzing a hard drive containing payment information.

GMAC said any students found to have used the Scoretop site will have their test scores canceled, the schools that received them will be notified, and the student will not be permitted to take the test again. Since most top B-schools require the GMAT, the students will have little chance of enrolling. "This is illegal," said Judy Phair, GMAC's vice-president for communications. "We have a hard drive, and we're going to be analyzing it. If you used the site and paid your $30 to cheat, your scores will be canceled. They're in big trouble."

Read the rest of the article here.

The front page of today's Boston Globe has a story about how July is just around the corner, but "a startling number of incoming freshmen are still torn over their college plans," and "some waitlisted students still hold out hope they will get into their top-choice school, while others who have already been accepted are not sure they can afford theirs." Multiple deposits are alive and well, no doubt.

As painful as it is, some of this soul-searching should have happened earlier in the process, and better late than never. It's healthy to be questioning whether $50,000 a year makes sense to attend some colleges.

More on the hell of waitlists here and here, and on bling-bling college tuitions here and here and here.

A short TV interview I had done on the subject aired today -- watch it here.

Always the innovator in one of the most sclerotic and hidebound industries on the planet, Northwestern Law School will be offering a 2-year JD, as reported in today's Chicago Tribune.

Even more exciting is that the 2-year JD students will be the first to take newly required classes in accounting, finance, and statistics. I have long told rising 1Ls that the best class they can take while in law school is financial accounting. You shouldn't even be sitting on a local PTA board without being able to read a financial statement, let alone work as a lawyer.

From the article:

"We don't intend to put out a generation of accountants or business analysts, but we do hope to put into the workplace alumni who have a better grounding in the kinds of issues that they will face from their client's perspective," said Mascherin, a Northwestern alumna and member of one of the focus groups that helped shape the new curriculum. "Clients don't like lawyers who can spout legal analysis but can't do strategic analysis."

Expect lots of sniping from other top law schools. Unlike other top schools, though, Northwestern requires work experience, and someone who has already been out in the working world will have a much clearer and more targeted idea about what he wants out of his legal training than your typical college senior. In any event, the market for legal talent will soon tell us how graduates of the 2-year program stack up against their 3-year counterparts.

I say: Northwestern rocks.

It's an interesting day when a fifty-something federal judge commits the same sins as the Say Everything generation. Remember this awesome article from New York magazine a while back?

Kids today. They have no sense of shame. They have no sense of privacy. They are show-offs, fame whores, pornographic little loons who post their diaries, their phone numbers, their stupid poetry—for God’s sake, their dirty photos!—online. They have virtual friends instead of real ones. They talk in illiterate instant messages. They are interested only in attention—and yet they have zero attention span, flitting like hummingbirds from one virtual stage to another.

Turns out, the Hon. Alex Kozinski, chief judge of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, got busted posting his own dirty pictures online. He's no technophobic octogenarian, either. He's very tech-savvy, so it's a weird mistake coming from him. Password protection just isn't that hard.

The timing, for my modest purposes, couldn't be better. This past season, a number of applicants have written me because they've gotten into a spot of trouble after posting things online that they shouldn't have. Sure, they use cutesy handles to hide their identities on discussion boards, but as Prof. Brian Leiter reminded us in the wake of the AutoAdmit discussion board scandal (see here and here), posters are just two subpoenas away from having their identities exposed.

Will Kozinski survive this scandal? Yeah, probably. He's a bigwig. Mere mortals generally don't.

Learn from Judge Kozinski, young grasshoppers. (And from Whole Foods CEO John Mackey.) Don't assume you have any real privacy online. You don't.

Edited to add: Updates here and here.

Our college counselor Christine reports from Silicon Valley:

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“I would give my left testicle for my son to get into Harvard.”

Appalling? Absolutely. Actually said? You bet.

Madeline Levine, a psychologist in Marin County, California and author of The Price of Privilege: How Parental Pressure and Material Advantage are Creating a Generation of Disconnected, Unhappy Kids, shared this quote from a patient’s father during a recent talk I attended in Palo Alto, California. Her point was clear – the stress wealthy communities put on kids is inappropriate and unhealthy. In some cases it is even killing them.

As the parent of three little ones, I left the talk feeling almost ill. Levine pointed out the skyrocketing suicide rates among young teen girls, how school, homework, and structured activities fill up 16 hours and more a day for your average high schooler, and how the craziness of traveling sports teams for kids starts as young as 7 and 8 years old.

Kids like those Levine treats used to have it made. They had involved parents, comfortable homes, and lived free from financial concerns. In the last decade, though, these upper-middle class teens have shown shockingly high rates of mental illness. It used to be that depressed kids looked depressed – poor hygiene, sucky grades, behavioral problems in school. Now the kids in Levine’s office have acceptances to Stanford and Princeton in hand. They look like they have it all together – until they lift their shirt sleeves and you see the cutting marks.

My read on this – based on reading Levine’s book and on spending the last 8 years parenting in Silicon Valley – is that more and more parents in elite communities view their children as products to be perfected. Sending a kid to the Ivy League is like having your initial public offering outperform all market expectations.

None of this is to say that aspiring to raise kids who are academically successful is bad in and of itself. My own progeny are the IPOs of two Ivy League-educated parents. It wouldn’t surprise me if they were academically able enough to attend elite schools someday. I certainly won’t discourage them. Levine’s point is that the problem comes when the child’s identity – and that of their parents – revolves completely around achieving that dream. If they want to be a lifeguard, a pirate, and a lawnmower man (my kids' current aspirations at 7, 5, and 2), I feel like my job is to help them be the best they can be. Well….maybe not the pirate.

Many of the things Levine recommended to save our kids I am already doing – trying to ensure that my kids get good sleep, trying to lay off the pressure. I just wonder how to maintain this when it seems like I am a fish swimming upstream. It’s hard to not worry that your kid is missing out when everyone else is spending the summer at tutoring centers and language immersion camps and you know yours will be eating popsicles and playing in the backyard sprinklers.

The only positive? More than 1,000 Palo Alto area parents turned out for Levine’s speech. Perhaps we can start a trend.