Lately there has been a rush of TV and internet ads for "Art Schools" that are just itching for new applicants. In order to get people to apply, they are offering to judge your artistic talent for free without any effort on your part. You just give them your name, address, email address, and phone number, and in exchange for this personal information to sell, they send you a "free art test".

Now you don't have to guess whether you have artistic talent. Just do this simple test to see if your drawing more closely resembles the Mona Lisa or "Stick Figure and Tree". This is such a brilliant idea, I think it should be picked up elsewhere:

WashU Med School: Free med school test! We mail you a cadaver and you dissect it and mail it back. Half of your grade will be based on whether you damage any internal organs. The other half will be if you look the other way when you find out that the cadaver in question was stolen from a local graveyard.

MIT Computer Science Department: Free Computer Science test! We'll send you a computer and you get 2 days to mess with it. Extra points for the following activities: starting your own illegal file sharing network with it, formatting the hard drive and installing Linux for no apparent reason other than to "stick it to the man", opening up the box and using the parts to build a faster computer that never really works right, but think of the money you saved!

Author Test: Free test to see if you can be a published author! You send us your completed manuscripts, and we rail on your regardless of quality. This way when you become famous you have one more to add to the "people who told me my work sucked, but now I can afford to have them killed" file. Immediate disqualification if your work in any way resembles "fanfiction", takes place in the Star Wars universe, or has its own complex language spoken by the characters.

Posted by: rkc at December 20, 2003 5:51 AM