Your Personal Information

Ever wonder why there are so many personal questions to answer when signing up for a college entrance exam?

You are told over and over again to practice Internet safety. You're reminded by parents, teachers, and me to never provide too much personal information online. Then, as you attempt to register for the SAT or the ACT you find yourself filling out page after page of personal information. What's that about?

First of all, you can rest assured that those web sites are safe. But it still feels a little strange to provide any organization with pages of facts about yourself, like your favorite classes, your grades, your extracurricular activities, your hopes and dreams for the future. Don't you wonder why they want to know this?

The answer is that they truly are attempting to gather as much information as they can because colleges around the world want to reach students with special interests. For example, there may be a college in Alaska that offers courses in animal tracking skills. Somewhere in the world there's an animal-loving student who would love to learn this skill--so the testing agencies offer a way for school and student to find each other.

It works like this: The testing agencies ask nosy questions and you answer them. Then the testing agencies provide the information to colleges around the world. They provide specialized lists of students with certain interests, lists of students with geographical preferences in schools, lists of students who participate in certain sports, and so forth. This is why you receive so much mail from colleges.

This system can work well, but you should know that you don't have to provide all that information if you don't really want to. In most cases you can simply skip the questions and hit the submit button.