The Neurosis of Twilight Sparkle and University Admissions Candidates · 7:14pm Mar 9th, 2017
Last week Chris wrote a very thorough review of The Brightest and the Best on his One Man's Pony Ramblings blog. It was very nice to read a detailed analysis of this story from the perspective of another writer with experience of the fun and games of testing students. One point he raised, which echoes past comments about that story, is that Twilight's ‘hyper-competence’ seemed a little unrealistic—it was pushing the bounds of credibility that she could be both as super-powered as the examiners described, and not realise that they saw her this way.
A fair comment. It is tempting to just brush it aside and say yes—maybe I got a bit carried away writing the hyperbolic dialogue where the teachers describe how she excelled in test after test, while she was fretting that she wasn’t good enough. But maybe there is something a bit more interesting here about the subtle differences between our personal interpretations of that little lavender unicorn which we all feel we know so well.
It is clear from the way she tells her cutie mark story that she felt that getting a place at Celestia’s school depended on the seemingly impossible task of being able to hatch the dragon’s egg. Yet, as many have pointed out, it is highly unlikely that this was a universally applied admissions criterion given the apparent absence of other school fillies with pet dragons. This has led to all sorts of elaborate Kobayashi-Maru-style fan theories about what was going on. To me, the examiners were just seeing how far they could push a top student. This is what an examiner will do, as watching a candidate complete every test does not let you fully judge their potential, only to set a lower limit. It’s more interesting to keep asking progressively harder questions until they get stuck. That’s how we do it for admissions interviews at Oxford.
One consequence of this is that it is not uncommon for students to leave an interview with a mistaken idea of how it went. Over confident students may feel it went well because they weren’t asked anything very difficult. While nervous, insecure youngsters may feel they messed it up as they were given a series of ever more challenging problems and in the end they couldn’t keep up.
Through the first three seasons, Twilight repeatedly demonstrates a neurotic insecurity. From the utter terror at the prospect of being late with an assignment in Lesson Zero, to the anxiety fuelled exam-preparation at the start of The Crystal Empire. Twilight is racked by feelings of self-doubt and the fear that she is only one step away from being sent back to magic kindergarten. Is it so unrealistic that filly Twilight would feel the same way on her test day?
Keep in mind that admissions days are often emotionally charged times. Some candidates find the whole process quite intimidating. On entering the imposing university buildings, they start to question whether this is where they really belong and are stricken with self-doubt. If their story has a happy ending, then once they go into an interview and get talking about their favourite school subject, they realise that this is what they love, and forget that they were nervous. Sadly not every story has a happy ending.
Of course other students, typically those from posh private schools, will swagger in, completely relaxed and at home in such an environment, and proceed to reveal how little they really know. Seriously I once had a student who, with a broad smile and complete confident, explained to me how the reason we have the seasons is because the Earth’s orbit is elliptical so it is further from the sun in the winter. (I suppose that must sound like a plausible theory if you have forgotten that summer in Europe happens at the same time as winter in Australia). Of course not all kids from posh schools are like this. Some of them are genuinely fantastic.
And occasionally you meet a candidate who takes you by surprise. Some years ago, I was asked to do a Skype interview for a student from South Asia. Skype interviews with students for whom English is a second language are often difficult, so we tend to just give them a series of maths or physics problems and let them figure it out on a bit of paper and tell it to us. Typically they might get through two or three problems in an interview.
This candidate gave us the correct answer to everything we asked in a few minutes. We got through the list of prepared questions before half time, and then moved on to the more complex problems, which we usually only asked to candidates we interviewed in person (where we could watch what they wrote down and help them). This guy needed no help… Then we had to try to remember the questions we asked the previous year… In the end we were just making them up with increasing desperation. At least it didn’t take any time to decide what mark to give him.
Another intriguing post as always. I confess I lean more towards your interpretation than Chris's but I've been in Twi's position once or twice before.
Sounds about right to me, nice analysis.
Well, the Earth's orbit is slightly elliptical, but that is not the reason for winter. Note, this image does exaggerate the distance:
upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f0/Seasons1.svg/600px-Seasons1.svg.png
Ah yes, good old adaptive tests. I remember my questions getting easier and easier when I applied to Cambridge University and thinking, "well, I definitely didn't get in." On the other hand, my GRE test got bloody hard in the end, which was how I knew I'd aced it. It's kind of weird to wrap your head around the concept at first, but once you do, it's both nice and possibly disheartening to get near-immediate feedback on how well you'r'e doing,
And now I'm imagining the IRL equivalent of that scene with Twilight and the egg, where the examiners run out of math problems to give to the student and just start throwing Millennium Problems at them. And then there's a flash of rainbow colored magic and P vs. NP is magically solved.
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So does that suggest that Northern Summers might be colder than Southern Summers (and Southern Winters colder than Northern Winters) since the sun is closer/farther during those times on average, or is the effect negligible compared to all the other factors?
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The distance between the earth and the sun only varies by 4 million kilometers, 3.1 million miles, so while there is an effect, it is not much of one.
Speaking as a prospective university student, I concur.
Also, AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA SEPTEMBER IS GETTING CLOSER
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A lot of us have. I found it interesting that Lauren Faust remarked that as a girl she felt she was most like Twilight (and a bit like Fluttershy), which reminded me of JK Rowling's comment that Hermione was like herself, with a lot of insecurity and a great fear of failure.
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That gives me another question to ask my students. A quick calculation of the effective temperature says it changes by about 5 degrees from aphelion to perihelion. But this fluctuation will be damped by the atmosphere. A full answer would need a full simulations of the atmosphere and oceans. According to wikipedia: Southern Hemisphere climates tend to be slightly milder than those at similar latitudes in the Northern Hemisphere, except in the Antarctic which is colder than the Arctic. This is because the Southern Hemisphere has significantly more ocean and much less land; water heats up and cools down more slowly than land.
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Stay calm. You got this.
4449462 I SO DO NOT GOT THIS
I am reminded of my own youth, and the SAT test that I thought was so insanely hard. Turns out I actually aced one of the sections, and hit the 98th percentile in two others. If I hadn't missed the fact that the math section had *two* pages instead of one, it would have been scholarship city. (So yes, I rolled a 1 in Math. Sigh. It's a dump stat. Really.)
The important thing to remember when reading/writing comedy: Rule of Funny > Reality. The brighter and more neurotic Twilight is in this story, the funnier it gets. That's one of the things that bugs me when TD does a review of something I thought was really funny, because after all, they live in a world filled with colorful talking horses where the sun and moon are lifted into place every day by magic. Don't take it so seriously.
I've enjoyed the 'egg' concept perhaps a bit too much. After all, I implied that Twilight Sparkle actually *created* Spike out of a ceramic egg in the Tutor series, and that Twilight herself laid one (or at least *thinks* she laid one) in another.
This was a cool tale, thanks!
4449462 Huh, did not think about the ocean's effect. That's interesting.
I seem to recall that some astronomers thought the sun might be closer in (northern hemisphere) summer for awhile... before the southern hemisphere was explored.
4449407 Wait is that how the general GRE works? The subject one was pen-and-paper when I took it. The math section of the general GRE was possibly easier than the SAT one. The english section, on the other hand... who the heck uses some of those words?
4449592 Well that sucks. Personally I had an issue with the time limit. I tend to be meticulous on the free-response questions, so I ran out of time. I mean I still did well, but I felt like I should have been able to get a perfect score on that. (...and yes I realize how that sounds).
While on the math subject SAT, I spent a long time on a particular problem then found out none of the answers were correct. It dealth with an accelerating ferris wheel and the test didn't realize, as I figured out eventually, that the wheel comes back down, thus increasing the amount of time a car spends below the halfway line. And it did effect 2 of the printed significant digits, so it wasn't like it was negligible.
...Why yes, I do hold a bit of a grudge against concepts like tests. :P
Regardless, I have not read the story, but from this post at least I tend to agree with your viewpoint. I didn't have oral exams like that on admission I think but there was some of that on the candidacy orals. Especially the one I failed... there was just too much to study and I guessed wrong on what would be asked. The second time I got a more specific list.
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The paper GREs are not adaptive, for obvious reasons. The computer-based general GRE is, though. Fun fact: they're adaptive from section to section, independent of the subject of the previous section. That means if you aced the math section and next section is English, you get harder English questions. Likewise, if a math section follows an English section, its difficulty changes according to how well you did on the English section.
I feel like both math and English were around the same difficulty as the SATs; math never went beyond Grade 10 level and both tests had a bunch of obscure words.
I'm with 4449398, and I've also been in poor Twi's position a number of times…
The first test in one of my physics classes began with "given these three proofs, derive the wave equation." I hope I still have that test somewhere, because in thirty-ish minutes I pulled off perhaps my greatest physics test triumph in answering that question correctly. I'm still amazed that I earned that degree…
I also consider The Brightest and the Best semi-inspirational for one my own recent stories; which story is an exercise left up to the reader
4450118 Well that explains the yo-yo difficulty I suppose.
It might have just been me doing too well on the math sections, but when I took the general GRE the vocabulary and questions for the English sections were MUCH harder than on the SAT. It might also have been that I took the SAT much longer ago... the test has changed a few times since then.