(a) Students will have to upload or mail their photographs. Their photographs will be imprinted on the admission tickets and the roster of the test center. This will enable quick comparison of the student taking the exam with the photo on the roster.
(b) The college aspirants taking SAT or ACT will have to identify their high schools. The high schools will also receive the scores along with the test-takers’ photograph. Suspicious scores could be easily identified by the high schools.
(c) The test-takers will also have to provide their gender and date of birth. This is to obviate impersonators taking exams on behalf of students with gender neutral names.
(d) Standby test registration is being done away with. If a student’s name is not on the roster of the exam center, he/she will not be allowed to take the test.
(e) Students will have to certify their identity in writing and will have to acknowledge that they are aware of possible prosecution in case of impersonation.

There was also a proposal to forward the students’ photos to the colleges as well. But this has been put on hold owing to fears that the admission process could be unduly swayed by extraneous reasons.

No one is sticking his neck out to say that with the new procedure the process is going to become foolproof but most agree that there will definitely  be a vast improvement over the existing process. That said, the next thing to address is to eliminate collaboration and copying inside test centers so that the admission process becomes absolutely fair.

Barbara Strauch writing in New York times talks about Dr Burke’s research on ‘tots’ or tip-of-the-tongue phenomena and I quote:

One explanation for how this occurs comes from Deborah M. Burke, a professor of psychology at Pomona College in California. Dr. Burke has done research on “tots,” those tip-of-the-tongue times when you know something but can’t quite call it to mind. Dr. Burke’s research shows that such incidents increase in part because neural connections, which receive, process and transmit information, can weaken with disuse or age.

But she also finds that if you are primed with sounds that are close to those you’re trying to remember — say someone talks about cherry pits as you try to recall Brad Pitt’s name — suddenly the lost name will pop into mind. The similarity in sounds can jump-start a limp brain connection.

Unquote

As an aside, we in lexiology have a remedy for ‘tots’ – for the young and the middle aged alike. Stack up your words in ‘Add to My List‘ and retrieve the words  whenever they get stuck on your tongue’s tip.

Barbara goes on say some more good news for the middle aged:

Recently, researchers have found even more positive news. The brain, as it traverses middle age, gets better at recognizing the central idea, the big picture. If kept in good shape, the brain can continue to build pathways that help its owner recognize patterns and, as a consequence, see significance and even solutions much faster than a young person can.

The trick is finding ways to keep brain connections in good condition and to grow more of them.

Unquote

The trick for the middle aged is also to confront the assumptions they have accumulated when they were young. That way the ‘old’ brain of the adult learners, already mature with well-connected pathways, will shake the synapses a bit by contrarian thoughts. Teaching new facts may not be the answer to stem the gradual brain drain. The answer may lie to question ideas and long held beliefs.

I leave the last word to Dr Kathleen Taylor, a professor at St Mary’s College of California, who is quoted by Barbara in New York Times:

“There’s a place for information,” Dr. Taylor says. “We need to know stuff. But we need to move beyond that and challenge our perception of the world. If you always hang around with those you agree with and read things that agree with what you already know, you’re not going to wrestle with your established brain connections.”

But did you know that recent evidence shows that continuously challenging ourselves to gain more facility with language inhibits brain atrophy? Yes, not only that, research suggests that our linguistic abilities even help to prevent Alzheimer’s.

Gamon and Bragdon, both pundits in cognitive sciences, in their book ‘Building Mental Muscle’ write:

A growing body of evidence also supports the idea that a willingness to challenge yourself linguistically helps to maintain your brain cells. In the so-called ‘nun study’ it was found that those nuns who used a relatively complex writing style as young novitiates were much less likely to develop Alzheimer’s later in life than those nuns who wrote in a style marked by simpler, shorter sentences. So a life-long willingness to challenge yourself to grapple with complex linguistic structures may have a preventive effect against Alzheimer’s.

Our short term working memory erodes as we age. It becomes difficult to analyze complex sentences such as Inspite having trained their guns at the pilots’ head, the Captain nevertheless refused to afford the terrorists an opportunity to hijack the plane. ‘Garden path’ sentences become harder to comprehend. A ‘Garden path’ sentence is one that leads you down a garden path in your linear word-by-word parsing. As you reach the end of the sentence you sense that what you have assimilated is utter rubbish and you need to go over it again to obtain better results. For example: The snake slithered under the bench hissed.

Our working memory works on the principle of ‘use it or lose it’ (Gamon and Bragdon, 2003). More and more teenagers are losing the ability to do mental maths because of calculators. A similar thing can happen for your language acuity. Continuously use your brain cells to enhance this acuity or else be prepared to lose it.

It is not alone for the managers and GRE/ GMAT aspirants to work on their word power enhancement (we call this process vocabletics). This is for everyone out there in streets and homes. Improve your word power; not only will you become a great communicator, you will ward off the march of the Alzheimer’s proactively.

Do you have a foreboding that one of your elderly relative is at the cusp of working memory loss? The following tests adapted from Gamon and Bragdon’s book on Build Mental Muscle may help you identify:

1. Explain to your relative that you are going to ask him to repeat a short phrase word for word. Then read the following out loud:

“If you couldn’t cook, I’d drop you quicker than a box of rocks”

One of the following will be the result:

A.  He can’t repeat it correctly.

B. He makes a mistake the first time, but gets it right the second time.

C. He does it perfectly the first time.

2. Mention a common category such as fruits, animals or vegetables, and ask your relative to list as many members of that category as he can in one minute.

One of the following will happen:

A. He can only think of 10 or fewer

B. He can only think of 11 to 15

C. He can think of 16 or more

Based on the results you will be able to deduce whether there are any alarm signals.

Let’s take the case of Time magazine’s May 25, 2009 Asia Pacific edition. In this edition we came across the following thirty six words among others:

celibacy
genocide
alleviates
sybaritic
abstinence
pedophilia
encomiums
filibustered
indictment
alacrity
fester
vigilante
syncretic
subterfuge
détente
burgeoning
coalescing
xenophobia
audacity
sophistry
dissembling
avowals
frenetic
loathe
abattoirs
lacquer
purported
feisty
diabolical
immaculate
repository
bizarre
ghoulish
fondant
ensemble
virtuoso
cadenza

I am sure you are familiar with some of the words given here. While, with a few others you may well guess the meanings from its usage and context. Still, you may well draw a blank with the remaining few.   Remember that this is an Asia Pacific avatar of the magazine published in the US. Research has shown that most people will have difficulty with close to 120 words in the US edition of this magazine. That is why, people inconvenienced by ordinary vocabulary, may well gloss over the Time but may not actually read it.

So, how much are we missing out because our vocabulary happens to be high school level? A large chunk of our world, I would say. If a popular magazine has a few words that you don’t understand, think what you are missing out. Add up the articulation that goes into pedagogical works and treatises. Yes, there is a whole lot that is out of your reach.
‘So how do I improve my vocabulary’, you may ask. Vocabulary building is serious stuff. You have to do it methodically, systematically and with a clear goal and time-line.

Vocabletics, the website that facilitates adaptive learning, will help you with the method and system. The timeline and goal are clearly in your own private domain.

It turns out that the longest word in the English language depends upon what words form part of your investigation. Are you including only such words that are derived naturally from the language’s roots? Are you allowing words that have been formed by coinage and construction? Are you considering place names and technical terms? Now, technical terms can be as long as you want. Also, the units of measurement can even differ. Length can be measured by the number of written letters in a word or the number of phonemes in that word.Here is a table giving out longest words with various criteria of measure:

Longest words in English

Let’s take the longest nontechnical coined word, floccinaucinihilipilification. (I chose this criterion because technical words can be as long as you wish, for eg, zzzzzzyyyyyyxxxxxyyyyyyyyuuuuttttttttppppppp, etc)Do you know what floccinaucinihilipilification means? I didn’t till I found out from wiki. It means ‘estimation of something as worthless’. Well, if a 29 letter word ‘estimates something as worthless’ then the appropriate synonym for such a word would be makeamountainoutaofamolehill.

I am sure you know the shortest word(s) in English. I … a … burrrrp, excuse me, needn’t burp it out.

First, let us a few letters omit
Therefore a few words in size, limit
In silent letters ov’r is a substitute
In contractions it’s in multitudes

And if you have shampoo’d your hair
Do let the ‘e’ disappear
You are correct if you omit the numeral
That’s how I write Indira’s ’84 funeral

Let’s now take the possessive case
Of words that don’t end with an ‘s’
If George’s death brought in the coroner
Men’s room was just round the corner

In names too give not the ‘s’ a miss
Charles’ it isn’t, Charles’s it is
But classical names are exceptions
As Achilles’ heel and Jesus’ crucifixion

In some institution and in some place
-Take Barclays Bank and Toms river case-
We drop the mark of apostrophe here
That is because of usage there

Yet, Woolworth’s Store is another way
But not for long, that I can say
For goodness’ sake where is the ‘s’?
That, my friend, is anyone’s guess

His, hers, its, theirs and ours
All dropped the mark, as has yours
Possessive pronouns are a different lot
Compound nouns are another lot

Duke of Edinburgh’s gaffe was the worst this summer
What he did before Genco Olive Oil’s customer

And if you had a joint company
The last name will hold the possessive key
For if Vinnie and Sonny had some buttonmen
Would be Vinnie and Sonny’s buttonmen then

McDonald’s is already in possessive
Adding an ‘s’ would be surely regressive
So let’s do it with a prepositional phrase
Quarter pounders at McDonald’s is a nice little phrase

Writing 1980’s, CPA’s isn’t quite right
Let the end of 2000s be very bright
Finally, let’s drop the mark from p’s and q’s
And ask about ‘em in the MCQs

-Adapted from ‘Prescriptivist’s Corner: The Catastrophe of Apostrophe’ by Dave Wilton