A Plan to Kill High School Transcripts … and Transform College Admissions

jonri
Tue, 13 Jun 2017 19:03:46 +0000

Yes, @citymama9 . I thought of St. Ann’s as well. I’m sure that there are other high schools that also use narratives rather than grades. While I’ve never seen a St. Ann’s transcript, my impression is that it discusses the student’s academic strengths more than the proposal does, i.e., it might say this student’s writing abilities are exceptional, (s)he has native fluency in Spanish, but his/her mastery of chemistry is above average, not exceptional. These aren’t a one time thing; my understanding is that the students receive regular narrative reports at the end of St. Ann’s equivalent of a marking period. I don’t think they are the sort of gibberish of the proposal.

What struck me as the oddest part of the proposal is that the private schools are going to “volunteer” to put public school students’ transcripts into this sort of gibberish. How exactly would that work?!!! It suggests that the students could be “evaluated” by someone from a private school who has never met them. Given the categories, I don’t see how this is possible.

LOTS of high schools do not rank students. They do give enough info to give an educated guess as to a student’s approximate place in the class, but nobody knows who is 8th and who is 11th.