Hempstead, NY Vol.76 | Issue 20
The Hofstra
Chr nicle
Thursday
March 17, 2011
Keeping the Hofstra Community informed since 1935
Alumnus Alan Colmes speaks of success in career By Taylor Paraboschi STAFF WRITER
“Sometimes you just have to go with the flow,” said radio and television personality Alan Colmes when describing his successful career in the broadcasting business Wednesday evening. In an event sponsored by the Communications Department and as a part of The University’s anniversary celebration, the charismatic alum returned to his alma mater to deliver some helpful advice to a packed audience. “Find your niche. In ten years you won’t be doing what you thought you would.” Before he was a syndicated radio host and one of the few liberals working at Fox News, Colmes became interested in radio when he received a tape recorder as a Hanukkah gift at 15 years old. “I used to record songs and then play them over the phone for my friends,” he said. His first unpaid job came shortly
after when he called around to local Long Island stations and landed a position announcing the weather at The University’s radio station, WRHU. “Every Sunday, once an hour for three hours,” said Colmes, adding that he once made his parents leave their vacation early so that he could be back in time for his segment. He eventually graduated to a Saturday afternoon talk show at WRHU where he had the opportunity to talk and play records for 3 hours. His ambitions and passion for talk radio continued on to college, where he attended Ithaca College for two years before transferring to Hofstra. At Ithaca, he landed his first paid radio job during the summer, filling in for other radio hosts. The job only lasted one summer, however it proved helpful for his future. “We’re not going to use you next summer, we found someone better. This prepared me to work at Fox [News],” Colmes
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Ryan Broderick/The Chronicle
Alum Alan Colmes spoke on campus about his success of working in the broadcasting business. Colmes worked for WRHU announcing the weather while at Hofstra.
GRE Exam to be longer and scored differently By Ben Suazo SPORTS COPY EDITOR
After July 31, graduating students taking the GRE (Graduate Record Exam) will face an exam that is longer and noticeably modified. Lee Weiss, director of graduate programs at Kaplan Test Prep, responded to an email about the changes and said these changes were modeled to attract acceptance from more business programs that currently prefer the GMAT (Graduate Management Admission Test). The new GRE will replace a 200 to 800 point score/10 point
increment scale with a 130 to 170 point score/1 point increment. Additionally, the new test is estimated to last an hour longer than the current GRE—“so this is increasingly a test of endurance,” Weiss said. Students who recall the SAT update in 2005, which removed analogies from the reading comprehension section, will notice a trend in the GRE’s decision to remove its analogy questions as well. An update to the GRE will also feature a ‘”strengthen/ weaken” question type, already found on the GMAT, which asks
the test-taker to identify a strength or weakness in an argument’s claims. “In recent years, the GRE has successfully convinced many business schools that the GRE can be a viable alternative to the GMAT for admissions,” Weiss said, indicating why the GRE took an interest in the GMAT’s question-types. “To persuade more business schools to accept the GRE, the test-maker [ETS, Exam Testing Services—an organization that administers many common examinations] is making the GRE more like the GMAT.”
Men’s Lacrosse
Perhaps the most drastic change to the GRE is a reorganization of its adaptive question format. While the previous exam supplies more difficult questions based on each question answered correctly, the new exam gets more challenging based on performance in an entire section. Test-takers can now mark and skip questions within a section to revisit them later, as well as change other answers. Weiss warns against the dangers of such freedom, however. “Cognition studies tell us that your first answer is often correct—
this new format will have lots of test-takers second-guessing themselves,” he said. Registration is now open for the new GRE, to be administered on and after August 1. Students should note that the updated exam could be taken once every 60 days and up to five times in a year. Weiss says that a preview of the new test can be found at testchange.com or kaplanpracticetest.com. Blog posts by teachers and advisors about the new GRE are also recommended by Weiss, and can be found at KaplanGRE. com/blog.
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