Students brought to book

Adults don’t have to think much. We do the same thing most days, so we can do a lot of it while thinking of something else, or of nothing.

But the kids have to think, because there’s new information coming in all the time, and they get tested.

Our daughter Katie is a high school junior. If you have, or are, a junior, you know that means the SATs.

The only SAT prep I recall from my own junior year was being told to show up on Saturday morning with two No. 2 pencils and to expect the test to kill a large part of the day.

Since then, there has been an increase in kids without much of a corresponding increase in colleges and universities, and the SAT has become an industry.

Teenagers go to special SAT prep classes. They attend boot camps, where they take practice tests in a cold room so they’ll find the actual test less arduous. They take on extra study to maximize their scores.

But Katie and the rest of you juniors are caught in an ironic switch the adults have set up without intending to. College admissions people know you’re cramming for the SAT, so if you get a high score they give it less weight than they would if it were achieved cold, so to speak. On the other hand, they don’t give any credit at all for a low score, so you pretty much need the high score whether they’re unimpressed with it or not.

So you’ll take the SAT more than once, to feature your best score.

And you’ll take the ACT. And AP tests, which you take at school, and the subject tests ? I don’t even know where you take those. Presumably you’ve been maintaining a strong GPA as well as community service, and participation in athletics so the admissions people won’t think you’re a Poindexter.

Your college counselor recommends applying to about eight schools, so on your time off you’ll be visiting campuses.

My parents took me on a college tour, too. Well, a two-college tour. We visited the Naval Academy, because my uncle was an officer in the Dental Corps and had some pull. But I didn’t want to go into the Navy, so we visited Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois, and I said fine, I’ll go here. I just got so tired of all that visiting.

Our young lady won’t get away with that kind of apathy. We’re seeing five campuses on Easter week alone. Then it’s back for testing.

Nowadays Katie hasn’t much spare time, but when she does get a break she likes to revisit the days when she didn’t have to be so relentlessly alert. Last weekend she watched DVDs of some old “Monkees” episodes. One look and you can see they never went to SAT boot camp.