Test Scores. AP, GED, CLEP, ACT, SAT, Accuplacer, Qualtrics, CASAS, LOPE, GRE, MCAT, MAT, LSAT, etc and etc. If you have attended public school and even thought about attending college, most likely taken one or more of these tests used to help determine eligibility for entrance, scholarships, and placement into beginning college courses. Back in April 1977 when I was a high school junior we all took the ACT test one time. Quite a bit depended on those scores. I was able to test high enough that along with my high school GPA, I was admitted to and awarded a one year scholarship to the University of my choice. These test scores are a pretty big deal, and in some families a lot of time, money and effort is spent helping children to earn high test scores on the college entrance exams.
At the community college, we don't use the test scores as a criteria to determine whether or not a student is admitted to the college. Any potential student who had earned a high school diploma or equivalent qualifies for admission to the college. Test scores are however, important for determining the eligibility for certain scholarships, and especially for placement into beginning level Math, English, History, and Science classes. There has long been debate about the accuracy of testing determining a student's potential ability to succeed in college, but currently most colleges and universities still required placement testing of some sort or another. During the pandemic many schools have done away with using test scores from entrance exams to determine admissions, but most still require some testing to determine placement into different courses. It is what it is. Do you want to go to school and earn a degree? You'll most likely be required to take and submit your test scores.
Technology. Every changing, we need to always be learning to keep up with technology. Back in the day, I made my way through college using the land line phone on the kitchen wall shared between myself and my roommates. I had a small manual blue typewriter that was a gift from my parents (I still have it, but haven't found a replacement ribbon for it for years). My first computer class involved learning code and using a keypunch machine to create the cards necessary to run your programs. You then took the cards in and paid to have them run on the mainframe computer, and would receive a paper printout of the results of how your program worked, or failed. Before I graduated, the new apple PC's were available in new computer labs where you could type and print out the required papers for your various classes. In the dorms we had a shared television set for the entire floor, and in my apartments, sometimes I had a roommate who owned a TV, often I did not. Towards the end of my college career, VCR's were becoming a thing, and we could rent them and a movie or two, split the costs between a group of friends, and have a wonderful movie night with the movies of our choice! Such progress!
Today most every student (not all of course) has a myriad of devices. Laptops of all varieties, smart phones, tablets, access to computer labs, smart TV's. You could possibly get by using a smart phone, but it wouldn't be very convenient for writing and submitting papers, but probably possible.
I remember writing a paper back in elementary school about what I would like to invent when I grew up. My invention was a machine that could create books from scratch, from nothing. As an adult I wrote a paper about how that invention had pretty much become reality with the advent of e-publishing and digital books, widely available everywhere now. And of course today, the big technology breakthrough is AI, where chatbots can write and create intelligent writing, fiction, truth (mostly) and even working computer software without us even lifting much more than a finger or two to give a brief description of our desired result. Can we even imagine what comes next? I'm sure someone is thinking about it already . . . .
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