You aced the SAT and just won a full scholarship to your dream school. Or you just finished college summa cum laude and clinched a prestigious job with salary to match. Done and diplomaed, you are a graduate about to confidently make your way into the world. You are so deluded.Homer E. Moyer Jr knows what you don’t: that you’re probably far less prepared than you think. He’s a credited Washington lawyer, but his workday title is secondary here. More significantly, he’s the father of four grown or nearly grown children and author of The RAT.In this season of pomp and circumstance, The RAT — the Real-World Aptitude Test — could make you wonder if you’re truly ready to leave home. Scored on the same 200 to 800 scale as the SAT, that often dreaded counterpart, Moyer’s exam focusses on information that helps a person manoeuver through life — skills and smarts that he characterises as things worth knowing, things to give you an edge.The battery of questions in the book cover 30 diverse and challenging subjects from domestic skills and electricity to gambling and the fine arts. But Moyer does more than give his test takers the Q’s (in the form of multiple choice, true-or-false, fill-in-the-blank and even performance-related exercises requiring such props as an iron or an egg). His 353-page paperback primer also provides the A’s, in great detail, with secondary sources and multiple websites to pique the curious. As a bonus, it’s suffused with humour.‘‘From the perspective of the test taker,’’ he writes in his introduction, ‘‘the RAT is vastly superior and far friendlier (than the SAT). The RAT may be taken in the comfort of your own home; you make take as long as you like to finish; and, if you like, you can take it a second or third time without the answers having changed. ‘‘Most important, the answers are given in the back. And whatever your score, it will not be mailed in an official-looking envelope to employers or colleges with whom you may soon be interviewing.’’The RAT, which landed on store shelves in time for spring commencements, isn’t Moyer’s first book. But he says writing the others was not nearly as entertaining. ‘‘I had a lot of fun doing this,’’ he says. He started the book nearly eight years ago as a lighthearted gift for his daughter Bronwen, then a senior at Sidwell Friends School here. As graduation approached, Moyer and his wife pondered how well their first born was going to fare away from the nest. The gift became a project that took on a life of its own as family and friends suggested different areas of inquiry. Chapters were dropped and added — by then, Bronwen was halfway through college and Max, the second child, was graduating from high school — and Moyer began testing the work in progress on various audiences. Several more years and a few rejection letters later — by now, son Eli was in college and Kaia Joye, the youngest, in high school — Capital Books in suburban Dulles, Va., agreed to publish it and, potentially, a series of real-world aptitude tests. ‘‘You could have a kitchen RAT, a new parents RAT, the travel RAT,’’ Moyer said. For the moment, though, there is only one, selling for $19.95. At Moyer’s alma mater, Emory University in Atlanta, the alumni association is considering using The RAT in a non-credit class called ‘‘Life 101,’’ which is popular with seniors and recent graduates. ‘‘We’ll either use it as a supplement or a text for the course,’’ says Bob Pennington, vice president for alumni affairs and development.(LATWP)
