1. Define: American Dream, merit, meritocracy, elite, ruling class, SAT, GPA, Ivy League, Princeton University, social capital, cultural capital.
2. Who is the main character of the story?
3. How does he describe his high school experience?
4. How did he get into Princeton University?
5. What does the author mean when he says:

As a natural-born child of the meritocracy, I'd been amassing momentum my whole life, entering spelling bees, vying for forensics medals, running my mouth in mock United Nations meetings and model state governments and student congresses, and I knew only one direction: forward, onward. I lived for prizes, praise, distinctions, and I gave no thought to any goal higher or broader than my next report card. Learning was secondary; promotion was primary. 

6. How was his social life at Princeton in his first year there? Who were his roommates?
7. Describe the Champagne bottle incident? What does it say about his knowledge of the ruling class?
8. Describe the common area furniture incident? How does he begin to feel? What is he learning about a place like Princeton.
9. Why did Walter focus on the key words like “ambiguity” and “heuristic”
10. Who did Walter hangout with after his roomamtes? What did he realize about the social setting at Princeton?
11. Why would Walter relate to V?
12. Explain the following quote:

13. This was the system's great flaw, and it enraged us. A pure meritocracy, we'd discovered, can only promote; it can't legitimize. It can confer success but can't grant knighthood. For that it needs a class beyond itself: the high-born genealogical peerage that aptitude testing was created to supplant with a cast of brainy up-and-comers. But we still needed to impress them: the WASP New Englanders with weekend coke habits, well-worn deck shoes, and vaguely leftish politics devised in reaction to their parents' conservatism, to which they'd slowly return as they aged. 

14. After the party incident, V said "What assholes." And Walter responded "We're just as bad," What had happened to Walter that night?

15. Walter experiences a metamorphosis, what was it? How did it serve him in navigating Princeton?

16. Explain the context and meaning of the following quotes: 

    I'd learned that by showing up early to say hello and chat with them, staying late to ask them extra questions, and dropping in during office hours to drink their stale coffee and let them bum my cigarettes (they had always just quit smoking, it seemed, but without conviction), I could pull down Bs, at least. If I also showed signs of having read their books (particularly if the course did not require me to), I could manage As. 

    Toward midnight we sat down under a tree—a benevolent presence that seemed to offer shelter from the sinister brilliance all around us—and reached the conclusion that Princeton was a portal for arrogant, Luciferian energies bent on the overthrow of God and Nature. We vowed to fight back. Scooping up clods of mud, we smeared it on our faces and then danced like druids, at last attracting attention from a guard whose flashlight beam swarmed with photons the size of snowflakes. He asked us what we were doing. "Repenting," we said. 

    The LSD turned the trip into an odyssey of spectral laughing faces in the sky and dark, miasmic whirlpools underfoot. When I finally lay down in my room, I asked myself why I'd been chosen for this elaborate humiliation, and concluded that the answer lay in the success of a play on, of all subjects, 1960s pop art that I'd written and staged. I burned with shame for obeying Leslie's orders and blamed the drugs for my craven passivity, though I knew deep down that the problem was ambition. The drugs I could give up, but not the ambition.  

    I armed myself with a cheese cube on a napkin and a glass of red wine and strode into the fray, looking for someone important to impress, but my rivals had gotten a jump on me and wouldn't make space in the tight perimeters around the professors and business people tasked with assessing our leadership potential. I noticed that none of the other candidates were drinking their wine; they were using their glasses as props. I looked down at my empty goblet. Caught out again. 

    Seeing my rivals up close unsettled me. Back when I took the SATs, the contest had been impersonal, statistical, waged against an anonymous national peer group. This time the competition was all too personal—about a dozen of us remained. One short-haired young woman in a dark suit was holding forth on national health-care policy to a man who kept looking past her at a prettier girl whose panty lines were discernible through her skirt.

    My rivals scanned my face for clues: how had my interview changed the odds for them? I gave them more information than they deserved, hoping to win their favor for the future. Someday one of them might run the country, and I wanted to be remembered as a good sport.

    "You're safe," I told them all. "I screwed it up."

    They couldn't help smiling. Then one girl hugged me. "You really shouldn't consider it a loss," she said. "You should feel honored you reached the final group." I returned the hug and left the building, unwilling to wait for the winners to be named. Later I found out that one of them was the girl who'd tried to boost my spirits, which made her gesture seem patronizing in retrospect. She knew she was bound for the sharp end of the pyramid, and was merely practicing her royal manners. 

All around me friends were securing places in grad schools and signing contracts with worldwide corporations, but I found myself without prospects, in a vacuum. I'd never bothered to contemplate the moment when the quest for trophies would end and the game of trading on them would begin. Once, I'd had nowhere to go but up. Now, it seemed, I had nowhere to go at all.

 When asked who my favorite author was, I answered Lord Byron—for the life he'd lived as much as for his writings. (I might not have understood Romantic poetry, but I knew what the names of the poets signified.) When someone brought up my D in Spanish—that glaring stain on my academic record, which the Rhodes committee had also noted, provoking in me much defensive stuttering—I confessed that I'd stayed up late drinking before the final and let it go at that. This elicited broad smiles. The next question touched on my athletic interests—or, rather, my apparent lack thereof. I replied that I liked to exert myself in solitude, by taking long walks. "Very British," one man said. 

Flexibility, irony, class consciousness, contrarianism. I'd gone to Princeton, and soon I'd go to Oxford, and these, I was about to tell Karl, are the ways one gets ahead now—not by memorizing old Ralph Waldo. I'd learned a lot since I'd aced the SATs, about the system, about myself, and about the new class the system had created, which I was now part of, for better or for worse. The class that runs things. The class that makes the headlines—that writes the headlines, and the stories under them