A practice held over since World War II, 14% of colleges still require a swimming test to graduate. Today’s Boston Globe has a hilarious article about poor Stephanie Yeh of MIT who pushed off the requirement until her senior year:
Seven days before the test, Stephanie Yeh stood in her sorority house and cried.She makes it in the end, calling it “the hardest test I’ve ever taken at MIT.”
An electrical engineering and computer science major, she was set to graduate near the top of her MIT class next month and start a six-figure job as a Wall Street analyst.
Just one test, terrifying to her, remained. She, like scores of undergraduates at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, had been putting it off for nearly four years. But Yeh and the others have to pass this exam to graduate.
She had to swim 100 yards, four lengths of a pool, without stopping.
The problem: Yeh never learned how to swim.
1 comment:
Cornell required one... no biggie. Pretty much everyone finished it during their freshman year. I know of a few folks who "passed" and didn't know how to swim. When one group was going, they snuck over to the showers, got themselves wet, then walked over to the person who was taking down names and student ID#s when everyone who just swam was in line to check in.
Post a Comment