I have come to the conclusion that the College Board - an organization which has caused me a great deal of grief - has a very warped view of what aspects of our culture potential college students should and should not be familiar with.

On the critical reading section of the SAT, the questions seem to require test takers to have familiarity with all sorts of English literature from nearly every century. One practice test I took, for instance, had a question that went something like this:

Lord Driveldrum was unable to take delivery of his oolong tea because the ---------- was sick in Lincolnshire.

The correct answer was "stevedore" - a person employed, or a contractor engaged, at a dock to load and unload cargo from ships, according to Oxford - which I managed to guess after eliminating the other four choices. But, unless the test taker happens to be familiar with all of the other options, he or she would have to be incredibly familiar with 18th century British literature to correctly answer the question with any certainty.

On the other hand, the College Board seems to think that prospective undergraduates do not need any familiarity with watershed pieces of literature. The most recent SAT, which I took Sunday, had a story that made an allusion to Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. But for one reason or another, the College Board felt it needed to add an asterisk to inform test-takers that Captain Nemo was a character in Verne's novel.

It makes absolutely no sense to hold students to such an arbitrary cultural standard. If the College Board wants to ensure that students have some sort of familiarity with our culture, then they should stop explaining such obvious allusions. If, on the other hand, the College Board wants to make the test accessible to as many people as possible, they should remove every obscure cultural reference in the test.

My opinion of the College Board diminishes by the second.