Although colleges look at applicants' portfolios - including their GPA, class ranking, and special talents - SAT scores play a large role too.

Top universities favor students with a wider knowledge of the world and have developed other skills in addition to their high test scores alone, the newspaper said.

We had an agent who shopped the manuscript around, and the publishers all wanted 60 to 70 percent of the pages to be recipes. I said, “That’s not my shtick.”