Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau for May 12, 2023

Cricket is wasting her time at Walden and with Zipper.

800-combined. Nice play, Zipper.

Any moment he’ll say something stupid that will bury his chances with her!!!

I think you got 800 combined for getting your name correct.

It’s too bad that so many of Walden’s alumni were able to reproduce.

Time management is not an obvious skill taught at Walden.

He should change his name to Zippo to commemorate his future G.P.A. …..PLUS then they can both be named after kinds of lighters

I’ve just realised she has that “Rachael cut”

“I’ve got a gazillion relatives who went to Walden”

Aside from Zonker, have we heard of any of them?

kids today don’t even know what that score means.

Zipper has found true love.

I took the ACT test for college, and CLEP, but I never really understood the value of the numbers. I’ve heard some people quote their exam scores as though it makes them special. I really don’t know what it means. I assume the higher the better.

Ah! And there the similarities end.

I think Cricket faded out pretty quick,but I’m already for bringing her back to 2023 Colorado—-all marijuana and no play makes Zipper a lonely boy

Where’s that Sunday strip where Zipper runs into Cricket, who has now graduated from law school?

I’ve seen enough medieval Italian farces to know how this plays out. Leave now, Zipper! She’s your cousin!

A perfect score is 1600 because there are two parts. 800 sounds like Walden quality.

She sounds like a crazy stalker, but apparently isn’t according to comments that I have read here. Didn’t know that she existed until now.

Do we (or did we, since these are re-runs) have any idea of Cricket’s alumni ancestors?

As I recall from—gad!—sixty years ago, the SATs were set so that, for each of the Language and Math sections, scores ran from 200 to 800, with a mean of 400? 500? 600? People would sometimes use a score that added these two components. However, the copyright on this strip seems to be 1998, and there had been some changes between the sixties and the nineties, so I’m not sure of the details. It seems that Zipper got a combined score of 800 (not stellar), and Cricket got a 800 in one or another (unspecified) component, which would be stellar.

I never took either the ACT or SAT. Missouri had their own test that they gave in high school that could be used for entrance into state schools. I also took the PSAT, where I was a Commended student. That means, “You did really well, enough to get a raft of brochures from colleges, but NO money.”

I thought I heard something a few years ago about how the scoring of the SAT was going to change, something like 1000 was perfect instead of 800 on each portion. I just took them cold, on a hot day in July 1970 and did pretty well. I think some kids took them several times trying to get higher scores, but I thought mine was fine as is and it was easily good enough to get into the college I wanted. I still have my “results” paper among books on a shelf here in the room I’m typing this in.