class cuts

Moonie Makes Waves

A campus leader for the Collegiate Association for the Research of Principals (CARP), an affiliate of the Rev. Sun Myung Moon's Unification Movement, is attempting to form a chapter at Jesuit-run Boston College, according to The Heights, the campus daily.

CARP representative Sean Fenton, a BC sophomore, is heading the efforts to bring the "moonies" to BC. Fenton will meet with BC administrators next week to discuss the creation of a CARP chapter.

BC Community Affairs Director Larry Barton told the Heights that he is "very concerned" about the prospect of "moonies" at BC. "Some students can be very vulnerable to this kind of group, and they can be very convincing."

BC Chaplain John A. Dineen told the Heights, "The situation is definitely something to be wary of." He added, "Some of these people, like Sean, seem fine. Yet at the same time, you hear stories about people all over the country who have been brainwashed by these people and end up leaving their homes."

"My parents freaked out when I joined the movement," Fenton told the Heights. "But I've always been close with my family, and I've kept in touch with them." SEX

College Women Hold Off Longer

Independent, college-educated women appear to become sexually active later than other women, the Associated Press reported last week, because college-educated women are less likely to seek security through a man.

That's the conclusion of two experts on human sexuality, who used personal information and comments supplied by 34,000 readers of New Women magazine. "Most of these more successful women had sex on a first date because they wanted to," the experts said. "A smaller proportion had sex with a man against their better judgment because they feared rejection if they refused him."

Overall, the study found that most women had slept with someone on a first date, and that most women first made love between the ages of 16 and 19.

The research was conducted by Helen Singer Kaplan, director of the human sexuality program at New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center, and her associate, William Bernhard. SATs

Score Surge Stalls

High school seniors in the Class of 1986 averaged no better on the Scholastic Aptitude Test than students a year earlier, the Associated Press reported this week.

The average combined score on the two-part exam was 906--475 on the math section, 431 on the verbal--unchanged from the previous year, according to the College Board, which administers the test. The test is scored on a scale of 200 to 800, with 1600 being a perfect combined score.

Average scores levelled off in 1986, following a record nine-point combined gain a year earlier.

The big 1985 gain, along with modest increases since 1980 when SAT scores sank to an all-time low of 890, had been widely hailed as evidence that current education reform efforts were starting to pay off in better student performance.

Before that, the 17-year plunge from a peak of 980 in 1963 to the 1980 low was regarded as proof of the decline of the nation's schools.

To the dismay of many educators, the SAT has achieved a statistical majesty similar to the Dow Jones industrial average or the Gross National Product. The public tends to regard the SAT as a single number capable of summing up the health, or lack of it, of the nation's schools.

College Board President George H. Hanford cautioned in an interview against reading too much into a one-year pause in the SAT's upward progress.

"One year's results aren't significant. What is significant is what happens over time. Last year's increases were pretty good. What is significant is that scores haven't gone down in a while," he said.

South Dakota, where only three percent of seniors take the test, posted the highest average combined score of 1098--567 math, 531 verbal. South Carolina had the lowest average--431 math, 395 verbal, 826 combined--but 49 percent took the exam.

Meanwhile, the American College Testing Program in Iowa City, which sponsors that rival ACT college admissions exam, reported that the approximately one million students taking that test improved their average composite score by 0.2 to 18.8, the highest level in a decade. The four-part exam, scored on a scale of 1-35, is the predominant test in 28 states, mostly in the West and Midwest. ACT President Oluf M. Davidsen attributed the improvement to stiffer high school graduation requirements being enacted in many states. RUTGERS

Kegless Homecoming Makes Mess

A ban on kegs at Rutgers Homecoming tailgate parties did not produce less drinking last weekend, but merely increased litter, according to The Daily Targum, the campus newpaper.

High-spirited partiers faced a dearth of trash containers, and the result was unsightly trash surrounding drunken carousers.

"Fans will drink no matter what regulations are imposed--excepting of course, a ban on alcohol," a Targum editorial stated. "We recommend that [Rutgers officials] provide extra bags and trashs cans to help clean up the mess thay have helped to cause."