A teacher has to have something to support a letter grade. Completely holistic assessments require two things to be taken seriously:
a high school with an excellent national or worldwide reputation
a real ranking of students
That last point, which harkens to letters of recommendation, is a stickler. You can imagine that they will be ranking students as follows:
top 5% of all students taught
top 10% of all students taught
top 20% of all student taught
not ranked
So will every single student at these top prep high school be above average? Will Harvard take someone with no grades who is not ranked = “bottom 80% of students”?
It seems like an ego trip to me, another elitist excuse for “everybody gets a trophy”.
This is a natural extension of holistic admissions. It puts more of a burden on the private HS to evaluate and humanize a particular student, and will give admission committees more information than kids from public schools. Makes sense to me.
Re: #19: How quickly would the SAT/ACT test prep industry turn to college entrance tests? Almost immediately. No way to avoid test prep and gaming the system. It certainly seems that 3-4 years of grades is more informative than 1 2 hour test.
Having sat through several senior awards assemblies, I am not at all confident in the ability of teachers to accurately rate student proficiency in the absence of objective measures. I have heard far too many speeches in which the teacher cites her personal relationship with the student: “John comes to class early and sits in the front row. He always laughs at my jokes and he and I discuss last night’s big game. I also taught his brother James and sister Julie; he comes from a great family!..” or “Brian reminds me of myself when I was in high school…(talks about self)” or “I’d like to present the 'Excellence in Social Studies” senior award to a young lady who took 7 classes in the department and got all A’s. It’s true she never took an AP course, but…" Clearly in the latter case (which happened this year at D2’s assembly, when considering a class of over 700 seniors, for personal reasons the teacher chose to essentially ignore rigor and “rank” this student higher than many, many other kids who had gotten all A’s in AP social studies courses.
In agreement with TheGFG, I don’t know how anyone who went through high school themselves, and now has kids going through, would think high school teachers and guidance counselors should have even more say in college admissions than they do now through standard grades and recommendation letters.
^ Speaking of guidance counselors, none of my 3 kids finished high school with the same GC they started with. The GC who took care of college stuff for D2 didn’t start work until late October of D2’s senior year, after the previous one retired suddenly. She not only didn’t know my D at all; she wasn’t even familiar with the workings of the school and the academic environment here. The less we trust subjective school assessments, the better in my opinion. Furthermore, there is a lot of small town politics and values that can come into play when evaluating a student. My kids always were much more highly valued outside the walls of the high school than within–something that was obvious at scholarship night this year. The scholarship committee at the local corporation doesn’t care if Susie’s dad coached soccer, or if Josh’s mom was PTO President, and has no way of knowing how pretty or handsome a student is.
Furthermore, there are some very smart and talented kids who do a great job of communicating to others that they are smart and talented. I’m not saying they’re arrogant, but maybe just more chatty, personable or outgoing. The two girls who got val and sal this year at D’s school were not who everyone expected to get it. The class superstar ended up not actually having the highest GPA after all, though I am sure if you had taken a poll of the teachers a year ago, they’d have said he’d be the val. D certainly thought he would be! But test scores and other grades settled the matter differently.
I think some expense private schools are not comfortable with a system where some students can be perceived to be under achievers. Why would a parent pay $20K+ for their kid to be in the bottom 25% of the class?
So a system that “is designed to avoid not only grades but class rank” and “each high school would be required to come up with its own system for evaluating student knowledge and skills” could easily become a system where everybody is a winner.
I thought the combination of the following concepts was very telling.
more colleges drop standardized-test requirements
no grades and no standardization
if public schools lag a bit in producing these new mastery transcripts, teachers at his school (and others) could review portfolios of their work and certify their masteries.
OK, so we get rid of standards altogether and have the private schools evaluate the public schools students. :-q
When you have an elite college such as Harvard evaluating 40,000 applicants for 2,500 spots, there is going to have to be some kind of measurement, and even a “qualitative” measurement will have 40,000 potential students trying to figure out the methodology for gaining admittance. (http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/parents-forum/1995873-what-exactly-are-individual-top-colleges-looking-for.html#latest) Not to mention the fact that once these 100 private schools figure out a way to spread their idea to close to 40,000 other public and private high schools in the US alone, their methodology then becomes standardized to the point where quantitative methodology then becomes required.
And, maybe it’s just me, but some of those specific ideas look very similar to various common core standards throughout the grades. And we all know how that turned out nationwide.
At our son’s school, about 50% of parents paid $200K+ (four years, non-FA) for their child to be in the bottom 50% of the class. The entire class did fine come college time.
Why bother with this mastery transcript nonsense? Why not just let the HADES headmasters meet to decide which students go to Harvard and which go to Yale? The adcom’s role in approving those recommendations could be pro forma.
And some of the respectable/elite boarding/private school graduates in the top 20% or higher of their graduating HS classes ended up crashing and burning and barely crawling to the graduation line after 4+ or sometimes even much longer due to being placed on academic suspensions and/or parent mandated gap years because their academic performance was abysmal to mediocre. .
This was only underscored by how on visiting the home of one older classmate who was one such student…the father openly expressed his bitter disappointment in his son’s college performance and how it indicated an extreme poor ROI on the boarding school fees he paid(~$20k+ in the late '80s/early '90s).
The ROI on a boarding school education is the stellar high school education, not the college results. Anyone who thinks they are paying for college results is kidding themselves. The boarding schools are quite clear on this, but cannot disabuse everyone of magical thinking.
He was putting 100% of the blame on his son for not fully utilizing that stellar education provided by the boarding school as shown by his disappointing undergrad academic performance and thus, wasting the investment the family made.
College admission should be open to all applicants who have fulfilled the prerequisite work. And then it becomes a matter of performing at the passing level. That would eliminate subjectivity and stop favoring those with the “connections” and wealth. This is how it is done in countries where education is offered to all with the SAME chances for success. Then the system will tease out those that are more capable than others.
This would never work in public schools. Teachers have too many responsibilities to create individualized reports for 100+ students every year. And, how is it possible to find these incremental differences between students when many of them are carbon copies of each other? Sorry, but it’s the truth.
This is gross and incredibly classist. I’m not surprised to see something like this but I still find it dimwitted and pretentious. High school and college mimic one another, and it takes someone with a lot of nerve and too much money to propose a complete change in that because they don’t feel their private school students are being “represented well”. Are you serious?
Maybe this plan arose from the fact that private schools are slowly realizing that parents don’t want to spend a small fortune to send their child to a school that will make no difference in how good of a college they get into. No public school has the budget or the resources to give every student an individualized education, and there’s a reason for that. If you can’t handle the course load of a high school curriculum, then you shouldn’t be allowed to go to a top college.
Seems to be a system that favors the well to do. It also is happening in youth sports, where top local town teams are being supplanted and sabotaged by expensive “elite” travel teams.