Entrance Exam

The new congressional entrance exam: Applicants must demonstrate proven skills in both draft and overdraft dodging. Balanced patriots need not apply! FREDRIC STRAHL, Granada Hills

TEMPE, Ariz. -- He remembers what he ordered: a chicken wrap. They were together at a Cheesecake Factory. He was 18 and on his night off from setting tables and serving food at the local country club. It was his first date with the woman who would become his wife. He says he already knew that. "Our first kiss was in the elevator," Albert Pujols says with a grin, and the big slugger isn't so intimidating right now. She spoke English and he spoke Spanish, making it interesting when she tried to find just the right words to tell him she had a three-month-old baby at home with Down syndrome.

School officials have changed the entrance exam for prestigious Gretchen Whitney High School in Cerritos because of concerns in recent years that some students had seen test questions early. Each January, multiple choice exams are administered to about 1,500 sixth-graders in the ABC Unified School District to determine their academic skill levels.

KOTA, India - The fourth of seven children of illiterate parents, Mohammad Ahmad grew up on his family's two-acre farm with barely enough to eat. Now that farm, which supports two dozen people in his extended family, is being used as collateral for a chance to score big here in India's cram school capital. For up to 19 hours a day, seven days a week, the 17-year-old studies, attends classes and takes mock tests, preparing for India's ultra-competitive engineering entrance exam. In this second-tier city of dusty storefronts and belching rickshaws, Ahmad and the tens of thousands of other students embody a nation's hunger for upward mobility, social respect and a role in the new India.

Delon Washington, the USC freshman tailback whose college entrance exam score was challenged last month, is expected to retake the test within a week. Washington, who gained 109 yards in the Trojans' season-opening 24-17 victory over Washington, was given time to prepare before retaking the American College Testing (ACT) exam, a source said. Washington's score was challenged by the ACT because of an unusual increase between his first and second test scores.

Melissa Raffalow furiously highlights a sheet of vocabulary builders in anxious streams of yellow. Sitting in a small Sherman Oaks classroom, she presses hard on her clipboard and writes "STUDY" on the page of Latinate words, underlining it. The man who handed the word list to Melissa and 14 other students on a recent afternoon ticks off the tricks that he says will help them get into a good school. If you don't know an answer, guess, Guy Strickland advises the class.

Every year, hundreds of thousands of high school seniors go through a rite of passage by taking the Scholastic Aptitude Test or the American College Test exams to gain admission into the college or university of their choice. The vast majority of students pass without a hitch and go on to collegiate life. But two groups seem to come to the public's attention: the students who ace the tests and the athletes who fail to meet minimum requirements.

KOTA, India - The fourth of seven children of illiterate parents, Mohammad Ahmad grew up on his family's two-acre farm with barely enough to eat. Now that farm, which supports two dozen people in his extended family, is being used as collateral for a chance to score big here in India's cram school capital. For up to 19 hours a day, seven days a week, the 17-year-old studies, attends classes and takes mock tests, preparing for India's ultra-competitive engineering entrance exam. In this second-tier city of dusty storefronts and belching rickshaws, Ahmad and the tens of thousands of other students embody a nation's hunger for upward mobility, social respect and a role in the new India.

TEMPE, Ariz. -- He remembers what he ordered: a chicken wrap. They were together at a Cheesecake Factory. He was 18 and on his night off from setting tables and serving food at the local country club. It was his first date with the woman who would become his wife. He says he already knew that. "Our first kiss was in the elevator," Albert Pujols says with a grin, and the big slugger isn't so intimidating right now. She spoke English and he spoke Spanish, making it interesting when she tried to find just the right words to tell him she had a three-month-old baby at home with Down syndrome.

If it's reasonable to require high school seniors to pass an exit exam, isn't it reasonable to require eighth-graders to pass an entrance exam? JAY CROSBY Oxnard

Talk about worlds colliding: Imagine what would happen if a Hollywood comedy writer started thinking up questions for the SAT. Silly thought, right? Well, try these: 1. At a Saks Fifth Avenue store, Winona Ryder examines four distinct blouses, five distinct dresses and two distinct handbags. How many different combinations of items can she shoplift if she takes exactly one blouse, two dresses and a handbag? 2. Yo mamma so _______, when you mail her a letter, you need two ZIP Codes.

On a recent Sunday morning, a determined Spencer Cutrow spent three hours hunched over an admission exam designed to test his reading, math and reasoning skills, with its outcome likely to help determine how he will spend the rest of his academic career. But Spencer, 10, is anticipating middle school, not college.

The nation's high school class of 2005 posted a record-high score on the math portion of the SAT, but displayed a lack of progress on the verbal part of the widely used college-entrance examination, test officials said Tuesday. As a whole, students who graduated this spring and were entering college this fall averaged 520 on the math portion and 508 on the verbal, on a scale from 200 to 800 possible points per section. The math was up two points from the year before and the verbal was the same.

Junior Taylor remembers the play well: a basic reverse, on which he took the ball running to his right, then cut sharply to his left as the defense was shifting. He split two defenders and dashed 49 yards to the end zone. The touchdown gave UCLA a 7-0 lead and the Bruins defeated Colorado State, 30-19. It was the 2002 season opener and Taylor's first carry. But the play remains fresh in his mind for another reason: It was a moment he thought might never come.

The goal was as old as the hills, the technology as new as the latest cellphone. China has been rattled by disclosures that students taking nationwide college entrance exams last month in Henan province left the hall early, raced to a makeshift cheating command center and used computers to relay the answers to students back in the hall via cellular text messages.

Re "High School Exit Exam Faces Delay," June 14: Am I the only parent who is appalled that so many students are unable to pass these tests? Instead of blaming the exam, parents should be hounding their schools about the level of education their children are receiving. My son, an African American, passed the English exam his freshman year and the math portion his sophomore year. He passed not only because of the schools he attends but because we as his parents have read to him and worked with him after school for years.

See if I have this right now. I'm supposed to vote for giving a subsidy (the voucher plan) to parents who can afford a $10,800 tuition to Harvard-Westlake (with two entrance requirements: an academic entrance exam and financial ability) and reduce the amount of money available to the public schools (with no entrance exam). And this is under the guise of free enterprise. Rigghhtt! JAMES H. BURR Tujunga

Downey's California: --I have been busy trying to think up a name for our new National Football League franchise, now that bossman Ken Behring of the Team Formerly Known As Seahawks has decided to let Seattle hang onto its name, logo and uniforms. This means Seattle can keep that angry-bird emblem that looks like the gargoyle on top of the Chrysler Building in New York. It also means Los Angeles can dump the name Seahawks, which makes me really sad, because I had a pet seahawk as a boy.

Melissa Raffalow furiously highlights a sheet of vocabulary builders in anxious streams of yellow. Sitting in a small Sherman Oaks classroom, she presses hard on her clipboard and writes "STUDY" on the page of Latinate words, underlining it. The man who handed the word list to Melissa and 14 other students on a recent afternoon ticks off the tricks that he says will help them get into a good school. If you don't know an answer, guess, Guy Strickland advises the class.

Mike Directo, a 17-year-old senior at Hart High School in Newhall, calmly retrieved a letter from his mailbox this week that contained his SAT score. He did not stay calm for long. "I let out a scream," he said. Mike received a perfect score of 1,600, placing him in elite company. Only 79 out of 283,723 students who took the SAT last year in California received perfect scores, said Kevin Gonzalez, a spokesman for the Educational Testing Service, which administers the college entrance exam.