Analysis of “The Overachievers” Essay

College use season can be the most nerve-racking period of time for any racy schoolhouse disciple. The combination of rue for not doing better in school, doubt in your own chances of admission, and the maintenance of rejection is enough to break even the most stable students. Author Alexandra Robbins, however, realized that the stress of college admission starts puff up before, as well as lingers well after, the actual application period. Through her observations, she concludes that the current education system is transforming students into GPA-obsessed, minute beings, and that the stresses of applying to a so-called prestigious university ache a multitude of forbid placement effects.Her first argument concerns how colleges and the entire application system as a whole is systematically turning flesh and blood students into hardly sets of song. She explains how students nowa mean solar days are only concerned about three meter racket their SAT rack up, their GPAs, and their class ranks. She goes on to explain that the obsession with these three numbers is causing students to lose sight of what high school is really meant for acquire a sufficient learning experience while preparing oneself for the trials of college life. Instead, high school has become a mad dash for the silk hat chances of being genuine into colleges. This trait is exemplified in AP Frank who, forcefully urged by his mother, took all 17 AP classes Whitman high have to offer, an inconceivable workload that required he skim his lunch period everyday.Going off on a tangent, Robbins in any case makes a point about the no child left git policy and severely criticizes it for forcing teachers to focus more on test scores rather than actually teaching. Early in the book, Robbins personifies her aversion to turning students into numbers in the form of college admissions counselors. She believes that this group of people is the epitome of why the application systems are so flawed, a nd first puts forth this idea by introducing the referee to Julies college counselor, Vera. Vera is so obsessed about her personal image and is so convinced that Julie will never be accepted into her dream college base solely on her grades and test scores that she drops Julie as a client.Robbins encourage argument that makes multiple appearances throughout the course of the book is the assertion that the high amounts of stress experiences by high school students today is actually deadly. In the quest to be accepted into a prestigious college, students today a tide over workloads that at times is too much, causing them to intellectually snap. In this case, an unsufferable workload is put onto AP Frank by his oppressive mother, which Robbins states is quite viridity in East Asian countries, but not all the overachievers have had their workload put onto them. Audrey, the perceived Perfectionist doesnt necessarily have as many reasons to be stressed as some of her classmates, but her mental state of having to do everything perfectly causes her to be under unnecessary stress.For example, it wasnt mandatory that she spend all of her weekends and free time constructing the perfect bridge for her physics class, but her tendency to always want to be the best made it so. She spent time in which she could have been relaxing or decompressing on working vigorously. The resulting stress has been known to cause student suicide rates to rise around the world. Back at home, Julie overly feels the effects as she notices that her hair has begun to fall out. She dismisses it as merely the side effects of her academically demanding life, but what she fails to realize is that stress-induced symptoms are the first signs of hard permanent damage and an increased likelihood that she will one day mentally break.Overall, Robbins points out increasingly detrimental flaws in our current education system, such as turning students into data and burdening them with potentially fatal workloads. She as well presents the information in a sense that allows the ref to connect with the students of Whitman gritty on an emotional level, which, in the long run, better help the reader understand the severity of the situation.