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

exlibris97
Fri, 16 Jun 2017 11:39:39 +0000

@londondad While I admittedly have only worked in college admissions at two universities, I have not gotten any sense that universities are moving more towards “objective” indicators if only because their objectivity is highly questionable. Indeed, the movement to drop or discount standardized tests is matched by internal policies that now refer to scores by ‘bands’, which is an implicit acknowledgement that there isn’t much confidence in scoring. For the past few years I’ve similarly worked on UK admissions and have seen the problem even more amplified for British candidates where we have been stunned by the number of students presenting a string of As on their A-levels (last year of the 560 British candidates we reviewed, something like 85% had 3 As). As a result, we now scrutinize school reports far more intensively in the past, while British universities are gradually introducing their own entrance ‘tests’.

In response to @Ynotgo observation, in my 15 years in college admissions, I saw a narrowing of the number of schools successfully presenting candidates. It’s not as bad as in the 50s and 60s when we had ‘feeder’ schools, but now something like a 15-20 schools will account for 50-60% of all admitted students. While admittedly this situation is especially true of the Ivy League universities and LACs, the reality is that it is getting more difficult for students who come from schools where their counsellors do not advocate on their behalf or where the school’s reputation is not well known.