<p>According to CC, Asian American parents are Academic Performance Cult fascists who raise their kids with an iron fist and demand straight A's and every Honors/AP class known to the human race plus a few more. (I say that this is a stereotype. After all, many people in Idaho own guns but most aren't militia kooks. Not all Caucasians in the South wave Confederate flags and wear white-hooded outfits.) What are you all trying to do, convince me that my parents were born in outer space and not China?</p>
<p>Is the hardcore Academic Performance Cult worship so universal among Asian American families? There were plenty of times my parents (usually my mother) criticized me, but I can't remember any of the criticisms EVER being about grades, not even the time I got a D in gym in 3rd grade or my then-lowest GPAs ever in junior high school (3.0-3.6 in all but one quarter). They were always proud of my academic performance. They didn't even doubt me as an undergraduate student, when I developed a very blatantly shoddy attitude towards my studies. In fact, I was disappointed by their nonchalant attitude because I was in a rebellious mood for the first time ever in my life. (I'm surprised I graduated with my BSEE at UIUC with a GPA of 4.13 on a 5-point scale.)</p>
<p>Some background:
1. I graduated from high school 14 years ago. My parents were born in the 1930s in mainland China and left in the late 1940s. My father went to school in Taiwan and then in the USA. My mother moved to Hong Kong, then Australia, and then the USA.
2. I grew up in southwest suburban Chicago, where there were very few Asian Americans. Was my experience different because I was cut off from the mainstream Asian American culture during my day-to-day life? I know that Asian Americans are a much more significant percentage of the population in the major metropolitan areas of California and the east coast. For all I know, the average Asian American who grew up in Arkansas only earned a C+ GPA, but Asian Americans in Arkansas aren't a significant percentage of any population and would thus be invisible in any survey or study.
3. I was the youngest of three, and I earned better grades than my older siblings (brother is 7 years older, sister is 10 years older). Maybe my parents were older and mellower by the time I reached school age, or maybe their expectations were based on my older siblings.</p>
<p>If I ever have kids and shove the Academic Performance Cult Kool-Aid down their throats, PLEASE call the DCFS to take my kids away and send me on a hunting trip with Darth Cheney.</p>
<p>You have coined the term "Academic Performance Cult" and are apparently quite taken with it, because you keep starting threads about it. If you graduated 14 years ago, don't you think it's time you got over it and moved on?</p>
<p>You're right. Instead of trying to use my experience and perspective to help people, I should just go to freerepublic.com. I'll be SO loved and influential when I post "Ann Coulter sucks" and "George W. Bush gave the Supreme Court free lapdances".</p>
<p>"Instead of trying to use my experience and perspective to help people"</p>
<p>You have no experience and shallow perspective. You talk and write as if it is an epedemic, but in reality it is not. It may be similar to folks pushing their kids to excel in sports or dance or some other physical activity. One reason it gets attention is that academic spremacy is not as valued as physical spremacy. Anther possible reason might be that it threatens one's own self esteem. If you meet a sports spuperstar, you are not threatened by him. If you meet an academic genius, you may feel that you or your child is inferior.</p>
<p>And there is more than one reason for Asian behavior. Don't worry too much. The society and kids themselves will resolve the issue. </p>
<p>According to SAT proponents, SAT scores show academic potential and are a common denominator for comparing students from different high schools.</p>
<p>I did well on the SAT and GRE because I studied the vocabulary and used the sample real exams to practice the techniques from the <em>Cracking the System</em> books and <em>Up Your Score</em>. For the GRE, I also learned how to handle the bizarre computer-adaptive format, which was completely unlike any other test I took before or since. In order to do well on the SAT and GRE, I had to act more like James Bond than Albert Einstein. I didn't need to draw on any of my advanced knowledge - it was a matter of racing through the questions with lightning speed while evading the booby traps.</p>
<p>According to SAT proponents, my academic potential would have been less had I NEVER learned the Joe Bloggs Rule, the Create-Your-Own-Ruler Trick, how to work backwards, the importance of plugging in bizarre numbers on Quantitative Comparisons, the SATish/GREish vocabulary, etc. According to the SAT proponents, learning all these things (which did NOTHING to reinforce previous academic work or prepare me for later academic work) greatly improved my academic potential. Even today, I can't see how any of this helped me with anything other than earning brownie points from bureaucrats.</p>
<p>The alternative implication of SAT proponents is that what I did constituting cheating. According to this twisted logic, reading the class textbook and reviewing the notes is cheating, and nobody should ever study because that gives an unfair advantage to those who supposedly have less academic potential. Taking this pro-SAT implication to the extreme means that everyone should be required to take all tests blindfolded and with both hands tied behind their backs.</p>
<p>Another argument for the SAT is that it provides a way to compare an A from Easy Street High School to a C from Hard Knocks High School. However, the SAT doesn't cover any advanced material and isn't based on the high school curiculum. The SAT II and AP exams are the way to make such comparisons, because these tests (unlike the SAT I) are based on actual high school subject matter. The students at Easy Street High School should be earning AP and SAT II scores that lag behind their GPAs while the students at Hard Knocks High School should be earning AP and SAT II scores that outdistance their GPAs.</p>
<p>So my three questions to the SAT proponents are:
1. How did learning the ETS tricks improve my academic potential given that they've been of no use outside the world of ETS?
2. If what I did to prepare for the SAT and GRE was cheating, then what's the difference between studying and cheating?
3. Why is the SAT I needed for comparing students from different schools given that there are SAT II and AP exams that test students on the content of actual high school subject matter? (EDITED)</p>
<p>Yes, I know that colleges look at AP scores and SAT II tests, but what do the SAT I scores show that SAT II and AP scores do not?</p>
<p>The tricks I used for the SAT and GRE included creating a ruler by writing marks on one pencil with another pencil, working backward from the answer choices, studying the Princeton Review Hit Parade words, highlighting trigger words in the reading passages, filling in the blanks in sentence completions before looking at the answer choices, working backwards (analogies, Quantitative Comparisons, antonyms), and using the Joe Bloggs Rule to eliminate wrong answers and bypass booby traps? What did all this have to do with my academic potential? Would I have had reduced academic potential without these slick tricks?</p>
<p>If you agree that the slick tricks were irrelevant to the academic potential the SAT and GRE were supposed to measure, then that implies that I cheated. But how could that constitute cheating given that I broke none of the rules? If the tactics I used were cheating, then what's the difference between studying and cheating?</p>