Yes! And this is exactly what would be lost if we went to a lottery system or somehow did away with holistic admissions. All the people who are frantic that they can’t get into Harvard don’t realize how much could be lost.
There are also so many students at my kids rigorous private school in the Bay Area that get extra time. I guess you just need to go to the right Dr. to get it. Then a lot of those kids get really high test scores which I don’t think is a coincidence. This frustrates me for the kids who really need the extra time. Not sure the best way to solve this but it needs to be looked into.
@Nocreativity1 said “I am not naive and will readily acknowledge that some people are unscrupulous and faking a need for more time but enough complaining we are not all victims because we suspect some are cheating!!!”
However, if some schools are fraudulently gaining extra time for their students, other college applicants are being cheated.
The fact that one cannot define which exact students may have lost their spot due to this behavior makes it feel to some as if ‘everyone’ has been cheated.
Would you find it offensive if high schools were to make it known to the testing companies what percent of their test takers are doing so with special accommodations?
A general assessment of an institutions approach to this complex problem might help, especially if the school could explain that they serve as a resource for students with LD, etc.
I’m sincerely asking whether you think this is a good or bad idea…not being snarky.
@“Cardinal Fang” I don’t think the GCs are complicit but perhaps willful blindness.
The counselors at top prep schools are very involved. They make follow up calls as you know, even if doesn’t move the needle.
Counselor x from Top Prep academy -
“Just checking in on Olivia”s application. Want to make sure you have everything including the latest scores.”
Adcom at Stanford -
“Yes it looks good and we received the information from the sailing coach which may help in committee. But out of my hands now.”
GC X - “that’s great. Anything we can do on our end, just let us know. I bet you’re busy so I’ll let you go. Thanks again”.
GCX to self. “Sailing? Whatever I’m not risking my job on this land mine. Mortgage is due next week. Make a note to the file that you called. Who’s next on my list”
Did it happen ? Pure speculation. Could it have happened? Maybe.
@SamuraiLandshark I have no problem with a coach evaluating a student’s athletic potential. But can’t it be like a music professor evaluating a student’s musical ability? Or an art professor evaluating a student’s artistic ability? As far as I know, those evaluations can help with a student’s admission, but the professors don’t get a guaranteed number of admissions slots. With a strong evaluation, talented athletes or diamonds-in-the-rough would still get a boost from the coach, but no guarantee.
The reason this scandal existed in the first place is that Singer told the parents that he had a “guaranteed” admission. Without the guarantee, a bribe to a coach is not going to be that appealing.
Now you could argue that sports are different from music, art, debate, or chess, because we need to have a minimum number of athletes for the college to participate in a given sport. But an orchestra needs a minimum number of bassoons, and many extracurricular activities need a minimum level of participation. Also, as a practical matter, there are generally plenty of students who could participate in a given sport, albeit perhaps not at the highest level. That is why many colleges have club teams now, filled with students who want to participate in athletics but may not have the time or talent to be a varsity athlete.
We just have to collectively agree that sports should be de-emphasized, admittedly not an easy thing to do in our sports-obsessed culture. Why can’t colleges compete against one another at a more informal level? I think that was essentially the original intent of the Ivy League.
I have nothing against sports in college, and I say this as someone who competed at the varsity level at one of the top schools in the country. However, I did not even know about athletic recruiting at that time, so I got in without any assistance from a coach and walked onto the team instead. So perhaps that colors my wish for an ideal world where all athletes are walk-ons.
The small size of those colleges means that a given set of sports teams needs a much larger percentage of students to be athletes than at a large college. A college ten times the size of Amherst that has the same sports teams needs only 5% of its students to be athletes, rather than 50%.
@Northcampus I take your question as earnest and agree this is a complex problem that should be addressed. I am supportive of trying to make cheating harder, and being hypocritical by not putting forward a viable solution.
My fear in making schools report on their populations is based on the rule of unforeseen consequences and my firm belief that any system (no matter how well designed) will be abused by those determined and lacking morales.
In the scenario you describe I fear kids that legitimately need time might be dissuaded from seeking it by school officials, schools that offer great support to kids with LD and consequently have more LD kids in their populations could see their reputations adversely impacted, and the likely loss of students privacy as such numbers will become invariably speculated upon and some kids vilified. Lastly I don’t think it would provide a statistic that is meaningful. If a theoretical school reports an absurd 70% of kids getting time, the 3 of 10 kids that didn’t need time will be “tarnished”. Once again less privacy, no meaningful result, and institutions targeted to help LD kids diminished potentially to the point of extinction.
I don’t like throwing baby, wash bin, unused soap, and rubber duck out with the bath water or using a shot gun to kill a fly :-*
Varsity sports are not at fault here nor they are the cause of this college admission scandal. Greedy and unethical people who believe money can buy everything are. There are many problems with NCAA, but they are not on trial here. @mdphd92
We have all been brainstorming various solutions to the problem of extra time. I wonder if any of these are being floated by the people that matter…the colleges and the testing companies? Has anyone seen any articles referencing any potential fixes?
2044
@mdphd92 maybe Universities value what elite student athletes bring to the culture of the student body and Alumni. Perhaps they see athletics as an important part of the undergraduate experience. Perhaps Universties respect the attributes of a student athlete that excels not only in the classroom but in competition. Maybe they bring skills and traits to the table that can’t be taught in a classroom. Why should an University be interested in filling an incoming class with a homogeneous student body of gifted students? I’m sure these elite institutions with major endowments have a sense of what they’re doing.
One way to help solve testing dilemma would be to allow everyone as much time as they need, but report the score and the time it took to take the test. The students can then explain directly to the Universities why they took longer. For those with significant disability it may actually help admissions. For others from very expensive prep schools, I imagine the reviewers will have the same opinion I do. Also, for those who get high scores in half the time it could be another way universities could compare candidates.
@Knowsstuff I think the point people are making is not that the accommodation is bogus but that there is a whole industry of private schools that are set up to abuse the system.
Private school parents, at least on the West Coast, have money. COL is high and you can’t just be like, a store manager and send your kids off for $2,000 per month each. I hear in some parts of the country it is different but here if you have money for private school, you have money to solve other problems too, like getting an IEP to ensure your kid gets the facilities they need to achieve the results you want.
Getting an IEP through the public school will be much more difficult.
That’s more the discussion. If your kid is in public, your experience is that it is incredibly hard to get accommodation, you have to fight and pay and fight and pay.
If your kid is in private school and you have fancy health insurance? It’s as simple as a measles shot. Go to the right doctor, have them e-mail the results, voila.
That’s the whole point of frustration here. Not that it’s easy for everyone, but that some people bypass the entire system with money.
Again, giving students with LDs extra time to take the test itself is not the problem, lacking proper proctor procedures is the problem. I don’t think one proctor one student testing site should be allowed. @gallentjill
I never realized how much power coaches in all sports - not just revenue and fame producing sports like Division 1 football and basketball - had to designate a student as a recruit and how ripe that is for corruption, especially when talking about all those teams the most selective colleges field in sports which are almost exclusively played by affluent students. I knew there were clear incentives for a coach to bend the rules to recruit a student who may not be very academic to play big time basketball for a year so he can showcase his talents and be higher in the draft and help you win and get even more personal wealth. In that case, it is often the coach – or the people he hires on the condition that they bring him top recruits – who have to find a booster to pay the kid.
But in these scandals it is not truly top athletes in revenue and fame-producing sports being “incentivized” to come play for a university when they have little interest in academics. Instead it is rich parents whose kid would not be admitted to the university otherwise willing to shell out hundreds of thousands of dollars to “incentivize” the coach to designate their kid as a recruit. (See University of Pennsylvania, Georgetown, USC, Yale)
The more athletic recruits a coach of a sport played primarily by very wealthy people has, the more incentive he or she would have to designate at least one of them to the highest bidding parent. That seemed to be what the U. Penn basketball coach did and what the USC Water Polo and crew coach did and what the Stanford Sailing coach planned to do. The fact that Singer has been doing this for 10 years certainly is a red flag and any investigation that only looks at the parents he helped since he knew he was being wired seems like one that would cover up a lot of wrongdoing. The USC water polo team won many championships despite apparently wasting a handful of recruiting spots on kids whose parents would pay a lot of money. Maybe this happens more than we know since apparently it can be done while still fielding a very good team.
It’s similar to giving a very big donation to a college. If your kid is decent academically but not as strong as other applicants, your kid often gets the seat over a more accomplished student. So is what the coaches are doing okay if it was more of a situation that happened at University of Pennsylvania, where the student played basketball, but was not someone who would have been recruited over other student athletes without the big donation? Is there really a difference whether the money goes to the development office or a “Woman’s Athlete Fund” or directly to the coach? I find it funny that in the last instance - when it is done without the university’s knowledge through athletics because the university has standards it won’t bend just for big donations – the university gets attacked, but if there is a back door directly approved by the university, then that is good.
@makemesmart I heartily agree that if there were no greed or immorality in the world, we would not have a problem. But greed and attempts to game the system will always exist, so it is incumbent upon us to find ways to make the system fair for everyone. An analogy would be all of the systems in place for reporting income to the IRS, such as W-2 and 1099 forms. Although we could envision a system where these did not exist and we simply trusted everyone to be honest, it is fairer to everyone if opportunities for cheating are minimized.
The standards for diagnosing a learning disability are all over the map, though.
I know that many people tried everything and had to go through a gauntlet of examinations to get even small accommodations.
But many people do not. Not at all. What would result in detention for a poor kid in a rural area, results in an IEP and extra recess for a rich kid in a fancy private. The poor kid will not even have money to pay for the SAT and will not realize that there are options for scholarships. The rich kid will get 1.5x time or more.
Yes, many of these kids have thick files but as someone pointed out above, that’s something you can only get if you have time and money.
@ShanFerg3 Did I say that athletics should not be part of the college experience? Did I say that college student bodies should be homogeneous? Now perhaps I am indeed arguing against “elite” athletics. But note that the Ivy League also requires rigorous academic standards first, as a prerequisite to letting an athlete in, so it is also trying to reduce the level of sports mania, which is what I am suggesting. You yourself said in an earlier post that many Olympians, perhaps the most elite of athletes and who would arguably enhance a college experience, did not get into Yale, so I think you are saying something similar.
There are many different types of testing accommodations. People are glomming on to the likelihood that they were requesting extended time, and this is IIRC the most common accommodation, but it is quite possible that this is not the accommodation they would be wanting to get, for several reasons:
Unless things have changed, the SAT requires the extended time students to sit there, even if they have finished, for the duration of each section, and cannot move on to the next section (as they can with the ACT). If they were hiring the whiz from FL or someone else to take the test for them, its less likely they’d want to have to sit there that long (they might prefer, say, the quiet room accommodation). Also, one might think that the bribed proctor might want to have as few other issues to be dealing with or where there were a lot of other students in the room who might possibly know the person wasn’t who they were claiming to be (though if they were taking at a different location this is less likely). At any rate, it might be reasonable to consider that the proctor and stooge test taker might want to have few, rather than many, other students in the room during the testing time.
Please remember that the testing submitted with the request for accommodations has to support the need for the accommodation requested, and the policy had been that the student needed to have the accommodation at their home school and used it at school for at least 4 mos prior to the submission of the request submission. And these days, its typically the school counselor who submits the request for accommodations to CollegeBoard. And CollegeBoard has psychologists on staff who review the accommodations requests and either allows or denies the request (which can be appealed with additional data, but the minimum 7 week clock they require to review the request starts over, and the student cannot register for an accommodated testing/test site without the approved accommodation.
So one wonders where else there might have been bribes taken to get the accommodation request submitted and approved…
Because I know y’all don’t read the Daily Mail
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6809589/Lori-Loughlins-daughter-second-cheating-scandal-alleged-rigged-contest.html
@mdphd92 I said that many Olympians didn’t get into any Ivy. The reason being these schools value the student part of student athlete. But, others did as well as world championships, Nationally ranked fencers, etc. You didn’t say athletics shouldn’t be a part of the college experience but you want it to be basically devoid of elite athletes and exist essentially on the intramural level. The attributes that make up a world class athlete and club player are markedly different. The experience of watching the sport obviously wouldn’t be close to the same if you substituted elite athletes in a sport with intramural level players. Whatever values, traits, attributes, etc an elite athlete brings to the culture of the student body wouldn’t be the same in a much less competitive or accomplished performer. You haven’t addressed that these over century old institutions see something of value here when constructing an incoming class.