“More than 100 elite private high schools aim to replace traditional transcripts with competency-based, nonstandardized documents – with no grades. They plan to expand to public high schools, with goal of completely changing how students are evaluated.” …
The article didn’t mention what compelled these schools to abolish transcripts.
Seems like it would take more work for college admissions offices to read such transcripts than the current ones. It would also make the college admissions process more opaque to applicants. Standardized test scores would be the only visible and easily comparable admission input that applicants can see, perhaps leading to overemphasis on such.