Nash Community College Placement Test: Fill & Download for Free

If you mean a recommendation from your college, then the answer is maybe.John Forbes Nash Jr. attended Carnegie Mellon University. When he graduated, his professor and adviser Richard Duffin wrote a single sentence in his recommendation letter:“He is a mathematical genius.”I’m sure Nash was a great student in his undergraduate years. But he was accepted to Harvard and Princeton, ultimately accepting his offer at Princeton. He won the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 1994. His research spans among a variety of different rigorous mathematical topics. His ability to solve classical mathematical problems and relate them to economic theory was a field that hadn’t been touched yet.He was far ahead of his time.So, yes, a recommendation definitely can get you into any school you’d like. The thing is that John Nash wasn’t getting a recommendation from any school and he wasn’t being recommended by just anyone. Richard Duffin, who recommended him, was a physicist with contributions to electrical transmission theory and computer programming. He was somebody with a plethora of publications over a wide span of time:1949: (with Raoul Bott) "Impedance synthesis without the use of transformers", Journal of Applied Physics.1952: (with A. C. Schaeffer) Duffin, R. J.; Schaeffer, A. C. (1952). "A class of nonharmonic Fourier series". Trans. Amer. Math. Soc.1953: (with R. Bott) Bott, R.; Duffin, R. J. (1953). "On the algebra of networks". Transactions of the American Mathematical Society.1956: Duffin, R. J. (1956). "Exponential decays in nonlinear networks". Proc. Amer. Math. Soc.1959: Duffin, R. J. (1959). "An analysis of the Wang algebra of networks". Trans. Amer. Math. Soc.1962: Duffin, R. J. (1962). "The reciprocal of a Fourier series". Proceedings of the American Mathematical Society.1967: (with Elmor Peterson and Clarence M. Zener) Geometric Programming, John Wiley & Sons1974: Duffin, R. J. (1974). "Some problems of mathematics and science". Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society.When someone as established as this sees a 20 year old kid with that much potential, it does more than raise eyebrows of an admissions committee. His recommendation goes a long way.If we are talking about high school going into college, then I’d say no. Again, the same case applies to high school students, but this is a set of possibilities within that former set that’s even rarer to occur.Also, there is far more variability among schools. A kid from a school handing out amazing grades to anybody is not going to stand out. Similar to state colleges where GPAs may be far more inflated, high schools suffer from the same issue.Here are some stats:The average GPA accepted into Berkeley was about 3.91. The average GPA accepted to a local state school near me (CSUN) is about 3.35. The difference is not that meaningful, actually. The GPA difference would remind you that they’re both competitive schools.Now let’s look at their SAT differences:AndHere is the percentile rubric for those scores:For Berkeley, you’d need to sore somewhere in the 94th percentile or up if you want to get in with an equal shot as everyone else. At the 75th percentile, kids are scoring 1480. This translates to the top 1% of scorers on the test. The 1030 for CSUN translates to something like the 45th percentile of SAT scorers. This means that over half of the students taking the test score better. Even kids accepted at the 75th percentile, with a score of 1130, roughly translates to the 55th percentile of scorers on the test.Some points:Why would the SAT difference be so vast when the GPA communicates that students attending both schools are equally competitive?How much should we trust the GPA a school gives to its students?Do recommendations matter, especially when a school is infamous for handing out easy grades but fails at preparing the students for the SAT?How good is the SAT as a metric for academic success?I have a few thoughts. I think grade inflation is a reality people refuse to accept. In my high school, for example, many kids would beg teachers to give them great grades in Advanced Placement courses, only to have those kids later fail the actual test at the end of the year. I think a lot of essential, core high school learning has gone the way to placate a system that allows job security and less headache. This is doing damage, and part of that damage is that it gives kids a sense of security that isn’t real. If you aren’t actually learning anything, I think it’d be much better to be told that reality early than it would be in your 20s when you can’t find work.We shouldn’t trust the GPA a high school hands out. It is a fairly meaningless statistic. Between Advanced Placement grades boosting a kids GPA to 5.0 and the ill-received grades, a lot of colleges need to develop a better metric to gauge a student’s worthiness. Unfortunately, this also means letting go of recommendations, unless they are from established faculty or sometimes coaches in special circumstances.The SAT or the ACT isn’t perfect. I find people arguing that they don’t even matter. However, the same people who argue it doesn’t matter don’t offer a solution. I wouldn’t suggest bashing a test solely on the grounds that you didn’t do well. Almost nobody scores well on these tests, and that is the point. It is you, under pressure, to answer questions in a specified time period. Maybe, just maybe, in the future we can adopt a better system to gauge someone’s abilities in a more holistic way. At this point, I find that both these tests satisfy a lot of what colleges look for in an applicant.If you score well on it and continue to live your life the way you’d intend to otherwise, that is your best bet on earning acceptance at a selective college. Believe it or not, the admissions teams look at what you’re writing. I ran Cross Country and Track for my entire high school career. I learned to love that sport like nothing else. I also earned a perfect score on my SAT. I did that while I was homeless, living out of a car in my last year of high school. My grades were not perfect. I couldn’t compete with the kids at my school brown-nosing teachers. I didn’t have money and I didn’t have time. Between running hundred mile weeks to get my mile time down to the low four minute range and studying for the SAT and my AP tests, leisurely speaking to teachers wasn’t in my agenda. My GPA out of high school was probably about 3.5.I got into every school I applied. I chose to go to community college.Two years after that, I got accepted into Berkeley (again).Figure out your passion. Start studying for the SAT early. Think about what makes you important and why the admissions team should consider you. Stories matter, but only when the hard work and statistics help to support your case..There are a million people from a million schools with degrees that don’t matter today. The highly selective undergraduate schools of a decade ago are still extremely competitive today. There is a reason for that.