Lessons of the RU Screw

If you had only attended Rutgers University, and then decided to take a course or two at a community college, you would experience a moment of serene decompression. This is your body's natural reaction to not receiving the RU screw. The RU screw is more pervasive than you would ever guess. By your senior year you have probably internalized the very mechanism.

Take math for example. Math, specifically algebra, was a pyramid scam. If you didn't forget it soon, you were probably teaching it to the next victim. For money no less. It should have been shut down by the government.

In the summer before my senior year I decided it was time to take the math placement test.

Tradition dictates that you do this before starting your first semester, but that is a bad move. If you bomb the math, your GPA suffers. If you don't take it, you can maintain a higher GPA quite easily until after you apply to graduate school.

I thought it was best to wait until the last possible moment move when you're dealing with unjust institutions.

On the first day of class at Mercer County Community College, I quickly found a parking spot in their corn field sized parking lot.

The only thing I had planned for that day was to take the math placement test so I could enrol in a class. If I missed the first day of class, so much the better.

At the testing center there was no line. A small crowd had formed around the perimeter of the counter. Occasionally a hand would deliver a yellow form and a voice would patiently explain that "you need to fill this out first."

I, being a Rutgers man, refused to compete. The girl to my left was accompanied, and dwarfed, by her mother. The mother had come to advocate. "Yes, hello, this is my daughter, she needs to take the complete placement test and she needs the paper version, a couple pencils and a calculator."

Not even at Rutgers would she have received such star treatment. This wasn't Princeton. If you wanted special treatment, you had to connive.

The woman behind the counter calmly handed out another yellow form to the daughter. "She'll have to fill this out first." Then she turned to me.

"Is it even possible," I asked, "to take the math placement test today?"

"Oh," she said, "I'll have to check with my supervisor. There is a thirty dollar fee."

I looked at the crowd, then back at her. "Maybe it would be best if I can catch up with that after?" Of course, I had no interest in supporting the math regime.

"Good idea," she said. "Just make sure to stop by here on your way out." At Mercer, they think they have you over a barrel. Being the reasonable people that they are, they even feel sorry about it.

The supervisor walked me into the testing chamber, past the daughter who had stood next to me in line. She was all alone at a big table, taking the test. She had no calculator and only one pencil.

Soon the supervisor sat me down at a computer and explained the test to me. He even showed me how to find the computer's calculator.

About five minutes later, I scored into basic computation, and was skating the crowd at the front desk as if I had never been there before. I walked out the door with the same thirty dollars I had when I'd walked in.

Some might have considered this an act of stealing. I thought it was a noble gesture. I stuck it to math as best I could without being incredibly naive.

At Rutgers, I never could have made such a dent.