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Is It Time To Throw Out the College Application System?
An anonymous reader points out this opinion piece by professor Adam Grant that questions how useful the current college application system is and suggests some alternate methods to gather information about candidates. The college admissions system is broken. When students submit applications, colleges learn a great deal about their competence from grades and test scores, but remain in the dark about their creativity and character. Essays, recommendation letters and alumni interviews provide incomplete information about students' values, social and emotional skills, and capacities for developing and discovering new ideas. This leaves many colleges favoring achievement robots who excel at the memorization of rote knowledge, and overlooking talented C students. Those with less than perfect grades might go on to dream up blockbuster films like George Lucas and Steven Spielberg or become entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs.
So you have pointed out all of the problems but not offered a solution or any other workable ideas.
So if you only have one choice you only have one answer.
Is that why Steve Jobs got straight-A's?
overlooking talented C students. Those with less than perfect grades might go on to dream up blockbuster films like George Lucas and Steven Spielberg or become entrepreneurs like Steve Job"
They may be talented, but college admissions is supposed to measure students' likelihood of success at tasks they will be graded on.
It's not hard to earn at least Bs on basic high-school materials; having all Cs shows a lack of ability to do the hard work or a difficulty with or lack of commitment to basic academics.
The things in College should be much more advanced, so "Artistic talent" can't really be an excuse for poor high school grades; sorry, but your latent potential talents in one tiny sliver should not get you admitted to a degree program you aren't ready for yet.
This is part of the whole, we need people who know how to fail type stuff. However, I don't think this is a useful thing for schools to be evaluating.
I am not sure that the current system is that flawed for finding academic talent. Now for finding generous successful alumni, maybe it is flawed. However, that is always going to be hard and the majority of C students still have a C life. I am not sure that successful people necessarily get inspired by college, and I really think you must be madly inspired to do the supposed new creative things that just instantly make you rich. As again, those inspired quirky individuals will still often fail statistically. I think go getter A students that know how to handle failure is still best. Maybe they should just add a freshman class that everyone fails?
Exclusive schools, such as Bowdoin, have already made SATs option. Standardized testing is the biggest target of "achievement robots". I know of some South and East Asian families who instead of having their kids involved in team sports, drama, art or anything involving other humans, have their kids start studying for the SATs at age 12. Perhaps that's is seen to work in Asia, but it is not healthy for the entire globe to follow the same model. It is a better world if USA/Canada/Europe can follow a more well-rounded model. Include other forms of intelligence (i.e. drama, athletics, music, art) more heavily in the mix and allow standardized testing to be optional.
Real universities require essays, character references, demonstrated public service, and have other opportunities for applicants to demonstrate qualities not necessarily related to academic performance.
Is that why Steve Jobs got straight-A's?
If he graduated high-school today, Steve Jobs would have gotten straight A-minuses and would have been among the 17% of his class that were not co-valedictorians.
Far too many jobs where people could get technical training instead get liberal arts training. Why the fuck does my doctor have to know Shakespeare? Could the fact that they spend a few too many years in College be one partial reason healthcare is so overpriced in this country?
The takeover of the HR departments who staff useless twit liberal arts majors that go out and require everyone else to be degreed like some cult.
College used to be a good idea for an elite few professions and instead has grown into a goliath of a racket that deigns to be a barrier to every conceivable higher job out there.
if you have an incredibly creative C student who will "go on to dream up blockbuster films like George Lucas and Steven Spielberg" who cares if they go to college? it isnt like you need a degree to be creative.
Back when I went to college, I could get by with a part-time job, some scholarship and occasional loans. Now, even with an established career and making $140k/year, it's not always easy making $3k or more payments every term.
Instead of reducing requirements to attract top candidates, how about making education more accessible to all? The idea of scholarship is that even the under-privileged can, through hard work, pay for college. The reality now is that the brightest, even with hard work, have a tough time going to school and working the required part-time for grants, meeting requirements for scholarships, and not to mention that poor folks have a rough time getting loans.
The counter-argument is that making education more accessible means that the average student will be of lower caliber than if it were restricted. And yes, that's how math works. By adopting a merit based system -- students who don't want highly skilled careers can opt for lower cost trade schools -- then this is reduced/eliminated.
BTW, by "creative people" I don't mean artists but scientists and STEM folks who have new ideas.
Sheesh, I had a 2.1 GPA in HS, and that would have been lower if it weren't for A's in electronics and physics. I was only concerned with playing heavy metal drums. Very few schools would accept me. Of course now I have and MSEE and make a good salary.
At some point you somehow have to say yes or no. There is no perfect grading system, and that's why many schools look at SAT - GPA combination scores so that you can have a weaker SAT (or ACT) score as long as you have a stonger GPA and vice versa. I guess I just feel like the more complex the system, the easier it is to play the subtleties of the system. When it's cut and dry - it just makes things more straight forward.
If they get C's in highschool, it is because they are lazy (both intellectually and in terms of work ethic).
To me, that is a great indicator that they aren't ready for a doubling or tripling of workload that Colleges dump on undergrads and expect said undergrads to complete on their own initiative.
And besides, it isn't like that is a mile high barrier to overcome. Part of the point of the community college is to allow poor performing students an opportunity to redeem themselves before going to a four-year institution.
And besides, didn't Jobs very famously drop out from college? Because if his argument is that we should admit poor performers so they can drop out and become billionaires, I fail to see why we should have admitted them in the first place since they were independently successful despite college.
while(1) attack(People.Sandy);
College applications, hell; let's throw out the job application process. It's essentially a mechanism to give self-important extraverts with little skill a huge leg up on highly intelligent, diligent introverts who are repulsed by the idea of salesmanship in general, and having to sell oneself in particular.
Unfortunately, as with college applications, I can't easily come up with an alternative that does a better job.
Plus, of course, there's absolutely no way to actually "throw out" either of these processes across the entirety of academia, industry, government, etc. Every private college and for-profit business can do whatever they damn well please in terms of applications, and for many of them, inertia is a way of life.
Dan Aris
Fun. Free. Online. RPG. BattleMaster.
just let ebay handle it
Let me get this straight. To gain membership into the social network for the good old boys, applicants must demonstrate membership in the social network for the good old boys? Perfect training for the real world, where job applicants must already have the job they are applying for, in order to get the job they are applying for. Social mobility does not exist.
There are always exceptions. Generally speaking, grades do indicate something. Sometimes good grades mean the student is very bright and picks up things rapidly. Sometimes good grades indicate a strong work ethic. Both of these are qualities that employers would want in future hires.
Along the same lines, good grades do not mean that you will be successful in the work environment. It is a first pass, enough to get your foot in the door. If the student can't follow through, get big complex jobs done, communicate effectively, and work with others they probably won't be very successful. Our academic system does encourage and promote some of those traits, but it could be better.
Essentially all these systems have in common that they're trying to predict a future outcome. That cannot per its very definition be failsafe as. Social sciences have by far the largest margin of error when it comes to predicting future outcome. It seems as though performance as measured in grades ---however inaccurate as a reflection of the human being as a whole--- is on average the best predictor of future outcome. As much as I hate saying it as someone who continues to really crap out on tests and exams.... But, if it's he best overall results you're looking at: a somehow grades based system seems the best. Steve Jobs was only good at what he did, because he was the right person at the right time. Luck DID have an awful lot to do with it.
Including those non-academic things in university applications is mainly an Anglo-American thing. Most continental European universities determine entrance solely on the basis of one's high school grades and entrance exams. While I graduated from an American high school, I moved to Europe and did my university studies there, and no "character references" or "demonstrated public service" were requested or even wanted. There was a sort of essay required for the entrance exam, yes, but it tested me on a basic reading list assigned by the university department I aimed to study in, it wasn't not a creative writing exercise like many American universities ask for.
Replace 'Asians' with 'Jews', and you'd sound exactly like a 19th century Harvard dean trying to figure out how to prevent the WASPs from running away.
Soft metrics for college admissions are just a facade for discrimination. "This guy may not test well, but he sure has well-rounded eyes!"
Go to a community/state college. I'm that "C" student who a lot of people see creative potential in, and frankly I wouldn't want to go to a competitive state university for Comp Sci? Why? Literally 5 more math classes, quite a few of them 4 credit hours instead of the usual 3. If I wanted to be a video game programmer or write the next vmware perhaps it would be worth it, but then how would I hack College Algebra through Differential Equations? Http://www.spcollege.edu/uploadedFiles/Academics/STEM/Math/College-Mathematics-Pathways.pdf , take a look there if you are interested in the course sequence for college math here in FL. Professors more interested in keeping the grant money flowing because that is their *real* job so TA's teach the class. I'm going to one right now for a 2 year degree in networking (basics + CCNA), then an articulated 4 year in IT dev and management(more programming + business stuff). Look, the CC/state college is not perfect. You have to sign up for classes early to get the good professors and time-slots (if you aren't doing online). You will have some incompetent teachers. The amenities (gym, lounge areas, student housing if it exists) will be worse, and there is less of a sense of community. But ultimately, when I asked all the people I know personally in the field if they would go the Uni route or the CC route, after showing them the course sequences, they ALL suggested the state school. The truth I believe that prestigious schools often seem to be best suited for those who truly like academic rigor, and that is not your average C student. Much better to have a degree from a state school than to flunk out of the university, right? And that doesn't even take TUITION in to account! There is still an unsolved issue left: employers want to see big name schools. They definitely make you stand out. The thing is: this is basically a way around IQ and skills testing for jobs that are not legal. They know you are bright if you graduated from Harvard Law, or Berkeley CS. Arguably, they also know you are better able to put up with "the shit". I do not have the answer for distinguishing ones-self if they go to a "lesser" school except by contributing to existing projects, starting your own, and becoming active in Phi Beta Kappa, student government, etc in order to network.
As of 2013, 41.5% of Americans had a college degree (Associate's or higher). If you want a college education, you can get one. I really don't understand where this hand-wringing about "the next Steve Jobs" is coming from.
The intensive, expensive day-long applicant testing advocated by the author might be worthwhile in a scenario where you're only accepting a handful of people, and you really need them to work out, but they don't make sense when in higher education, where about 30 million are accepted every year. In this environment, all you need is a device to weed out people who clearly have no chance of making it in college. The SAT does that just fine.
The assessment center approach described by the article would replace reading an application with days of evaluation of each student. Of course you would get better results but you just replaced a few person hours of work (on each side) with an order of magnitude more. That means much more expense for the colleges and way fewer applications possible for applicants. Is it worth it? You can't just say "sure" you have to examine the real data in detail. If you don't you could paralyze the whole system.
Who would need a real education ? Cant we all just have a shit education and tell each other we are Einsteins ? Would that not be a great vision of peace and love ???
Please overhaul! But not out of fear the next Lucas, Spielberg or Jobs isn't going to be admitted. Do it because it's an annoying waste of time and effort to fill out a completely different application and write a completely different set of essays for each and every school. Even better, establish a single application fee that buys the student the ability to apply to some (reasonable) fixed number of schools. Believe it or not, the cost of application (esp. when applying to several schools) is actually a meaningful disincentive for students at the low end of the income spectrum.
-1, Troll is not your personal Disagree button.
Citation
Key findings are: (1) HSGPA is consistently the strongest predictor of four-year college outcomes for all academic disciplines, campuses and freshman cohorts in the UC sample;
That should have read "it wasn't a creative writing exercise".
before one gets to embroiled in the minutia of trying to angle for the best spot, or 'fix' the system by devising a better sorting algorithm, it makes sense to step back and think clearly what one's intentions and expectations of the whole college experience are.
with the ratio of average-college-cost/anticipated-post-graduation-employment-opportunities skyrocketing, it's understandable that the first reaction people have is to panic and fret about ways to maximize their placement within the college apparatus... attempting to position themselves as close to the front of the queue as possible. but for many people, when they do an honest cost/benefit analysis, it's very likely that many of the schools that are being fretted over vis-a-vis their application processes are the same ones that are dangling the most ephemeral carrot in front of all prospective attendees.
Those with less than perfect grades might go on to dream up blockbuster films like George Lucas and Steven Spielberg or become entrepreneurs like Steve Job
Even art guys or entrepreneurs will benefit greatly if they receive proper education for those job titles.
As if society was in dire need of "another Steve Job", whatever *that* might be.
University efforts are best spent taking those who are ready and capable and stuffing their heads full of new ideas. There are people who are not ready or capable, but trying to find ways to slip them in and hoping they reinvent themselves in time to take advantage of the opportunity (if that's even possible) would be neglecting those who are ready - many of them would end up in remedial classes or just taking the easiest things possible to survive. Maybe they should wait a year and wander Europe, or otherwise take some time to get their life together first.
I was one of the C-B students who did all the gifted classes in high school but never had the grades. When I went to University, the first two years I loved the freedom and the content of the classes but was as lazy as I had been in high school on the grades. It was only later that I started taking things seriously. The first two years might as well have been wasted, plus I chose a university well below par for my abilities (wasn't even nearly the best one I got into). I think I turned out pretty well looking back 18 years later, but statistically, I was probably bad betting odds. Universities should focus on people who are actually ready to learn, rather than figuring out ways to churn out more people who are likely to drop out. Slashdot, in turn, should stop pandering to people who never learned to focus who drop out of university and console themselves by extolling the virtues of being an autodidact, of not knowing how to dress or clean themselves and paint themselves as "natural" or "different" or "fighting the system", and similar.
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
"Those with less than perfect grades might go on to dream up blockbuster films like George Lucas and Steven Spielberg or become entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs."
So was this story taken from some underground left-leaning liberal site that places a high priority on the value of a liberal education?
Oh no, it's from the New York Times, the magazine of the 1%. Quelle surprise.
I heard that Steve Jobs once sued Steve Job for stealing most of his name.
the college system was not meant to take on what it was being used for now days.
We have to meany people going to college now days when there should be more tech / trade schools as well more people going to community colleges.
k-12 system is being come to much tech the test and AP classes can be just tech the test.
The old college system is a poor fit for some skills and in others it can be to much theroy with skill gaps.
We need to cut down the time in college and have more trades / apprenticeships.
I was rejected by my mediocre, flyover state med school despite having a high undergrad gpa and MCAT score. In fact, I was perturbed to hear from the admissions person that I spoke at too high of an intellectual level during my admissions interview *and* that they would have rejected me even if I had a 99th percentile MCAT.
Then I met an accepted applicant who told me she had to take the MCAT three times in order to get a 25th percentile score. But, you see, she was from a *rural* area.
Your future physicians, folks. FWIW, I was accepted to a much more competitive school out of state. L4m3.
I had a low "C" too in high school, yet managed to maintain a 4.0 during my first three years of college and graduated with a 3.5. I concentrated on what interested me and blew off the rest during both.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
What is a Steve Job? Can anyone provide a link?
If doctors could set prices, you would be onto something. Unfortunately the big insurers dictate to providers how much they will get paid for a given service. Ever wonder why your primary care doctor only spends 6 minutes with you when you go for a checkup? It's because he/she needs to see 10 patients an hour to get enough payment from the big insurers to keep the lights on, let alone pay off their six-figure education debt.
Hearing the insurers complain about the high cost of healthcare can be used as a calibration for your bullshit meter. They could easily reduce costs by 25% or so by not existing (15% "overhead", they mean profits, and probably 10% or more of all costs to a practice is paying clerical staff to keep all the billing straight, due to the hundreds of insurers who all have their own billing systems with unique quirks that you ignore at your peril).
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
No, it's mostly an American thing. With the exception of Oxbridge (where all applicants have pretty much the same grades and have to be distinguished by interview), almost all UK universities base admission on grades alone.
BTW, for any Brits who remember the UCAS "personal statement", it's highly unlikely that anyone ever read it. It was very occasionally used in borderline cases, but (again, except for Oxbridge) was mostly irrelevant. The school reference, which you probably never saw, was more important.
Limit each applicant to three colleges, instead of the insane blanketing of the choices that goes on today.
Makes the student more responsible for refining the selections and quality of presentation, and not relying on the crap-shoot approach.
Those with less than perfect grades might go on to dream up blockbuster films like George Lucas and Steven Spielberg or become entrepreneurs like Steve Job"
If the C students are that creative, they'll find a way w/o college anyway, so why admit them?
The college application process is not meant to find a needle in haystack. Statistically speaking, your C student is more likely to be delivering pizza than founding Pixar.
I actually think essays have the opposite effect. The presence of an essay on an application gives an edge to the student who can bring the most resources to bear in "crafting" that essay. Perhaps, at the extreme, having it ghost-written by a professional college admissions consultant. I'd almost rather it boil down to class rank and test scores. Possibly with the addition of a space for students to list relevant accomplishments in a non-essay format. "First-chair trumpet at state", "state science fair winner", etc. Teacher recommendations are a little suspect as well, since schools (and therefore teachers) have a vested interest in seeing their students admitted to prestigious universities. There may also be students who are qualified from an academic perspective but have failed to sufficiently ingratiate themselves with their teachers. Or maybe their teachers, as a group, don't know how to write "compelling" recommendations (possibly because one of their students applying to an elite university is a once-in-a-blue-moon occurrence).
Also, when it comes to test scores, I'd prefer to see colleges use something more content-related instead of the SAT, which is pretty easily gamed. Maybe something similar to the A-levels in the U.K. or the AP exams in the U.S. If the AP exams were used there would need to be a new math exam created that stops short of Calculus; it's not reasonable to expect every college student to have taken calculus. AP tests are, arguably, harder to "game" than the SAT. In theory you have to actually understand the material.
If the set of all students consisted only of Steve Jobs then you would have an excellent point.
This leaves many colleges favoring achievement robots who excel at the memorization of rote knowledge, and overlooking talented C students
Hold wait, isn't that the norm? I mean the curriculum has always favored those w/the best memorization skills. Been like than for what 75yrs?
you get it! the social network is how we keep people out of grad school too. you need several letters from people already in the club. good luck with that if you're not in the system anymore or don't fit in culturally.
BOARD MEMBER 1:
Our profits are flat. We need a way to boost our income, but with this economy we can't raise prices much more. We're already getting heat from the state for last year's tuition rates.
BOARD MEMBER 2:
We could lower admissions requirements: you know, expand our market.
BOARD MEMBER 1:
What? And degrade our reputation as an institution of high academic integrity! Impossible.
BOARD MEMBER 3:
What if everyone lowered their admissions standards?
BOARD MEMBER 2:
Everyone?
BOARD MEMBER 3:
All the colleges.
BOARD MEMBER 1:
Impossible!
BOARD MEMBER 3:
We float the idea that colleges are missing creative and talented people, who just aren't good at testing: old standards were just to rigid and old fashioned. Out with the old, in with the new: that sort of thing.
BOARD MEMBER 1:
And then what?
BOARD MEMBER 2
Profit!
BOARD MEMBER 3
Exactly!
Of course it isn't perfect. Has anyone claimed it was? It simply plays the odds. An 'A' student is more likely to find success. There are always outliers.
...from the colleges point of view.
It is almost completely arbitrary, non-quantifiable*, and obfuscatory - meaning they can admit whomever they want, for whatever reason.**
*note that the one place it IS at least somewhat quantifiable by outside observation, that of race/gender demographics, they've scrambled mightily to make sure that 'diversity' is reached. Well, that is until women are overrepresented...then I haven't noticed as many righteous protests about gender balance in education. (?)
** as a non-public system in a capitalist society, this should be ultimately their choice; however, the moment the US government felt that it had a compelling interest in mandating "freedom of association" as meaning "freedom to associate as long as the right mix of genders and races are present", I believe we've long since set a precedent of Federal meddling in private practices in this context.
-Styopa
There seems to be an underlying assumption that what colleges *really* want is creative students, but perhaps colleges actually want (as demonstrated by current policies) is students who are good at taking tests and getting decent grades. The whole purpose of the SAT (aka scholastic *aptitude* test) is to assess the aptitude of the student for current college environment. It's not a "intellectual worthiness" test, nor is it intended to be a "best benefit to society" test or anything remotely like that. It's designed to give some indication that the student will actually make it through 4 years, and not so amazingly, GPA and SAT/ACT scores do predict graduation rates pretty darn well.
Do not for a minute think that what college officials say in commencement and matriculation speeches, or write in the catalog, or in glossy brochures, about "we strive to create a well balanced diverse class, blah, blah, blah" is at the core of their concerns.
Yes (having been involved in this process), there is an attempt to "build a class", especially at smaller schools (the big The Ohio State University, or UCLA, kinds of places are more about raw numbers and bulk statistics). That process, though, is more aimed at the edge/corner cases. Big score is a guaranteed admit (assuming they're not also applying somewhere else more prestigious, in which case they get a wait list, so you don't burn an admit on someone who's not going to attend), low score is a deny. Mid scores are where "gosh we need some folks from California in our class of mostly people from New York and Pennsylvania" or "the orchestra director says they're looking for a bassoon player" come into play.
Colleges these days are VERY sensitive to statistics about graduation rates: Parents shelling out $50k/year want to know that their snowflake will come out after $200k with a degree, not decide to tour as a rock-n-roll groupie after $150k. Note well that these discussions about college admissions are almost ALL centered around high dollar private schools and the defacto private high dollar highly selective state institutions (UC Berkeley). Nobody at the local community college level is agonizing about class diversity, and whether test scores are a fully adequate measure of a student. You meet the minimum bar (which is very low), you have your nominal tuition, you get to take the classes.
Thanks for dehumanizing and belittling people who are good at something I guess?
Maybe you should talk to one of them sometime, I bet they'll have heard of this guy Aesop's story about a fox who really wanted to have some grapes but then didn't for some reason when he couldn't get them.
As one of the "brilliant" B/C students referred to as slipping through the cracks (3.7 college GPA though hard work/relaxed pace). I think it would be a mistake to lower GPA admissions standards any lower.
Who I am:
I had bad grades(in high school) despite performing well on tests and quizzes. Why the bad grades then? Supposedly "high competency" A/B students, who couldn't get better than D/C on the tests through rote memorization, harass the teachers in to assigning more take home assignments(homework) so they could collaborate/cheat/group-study their way to a 4.0(diluting their bad test scores with lots of busy work). If the questions on the test/quiz aren't exactly(verbatim) identical to the ones they rote memorized through repetition, their brain shuts down and they can't solve the problem. After a long time teaching, almost all teachers cave and pander to these students at the expense of students like me who can commit a concept to memory after doing ~2-3 problems.
More importantly, after 2-3 problems I can then think laterally. That's a skill they never learn through the Prussian education method. As an example, I am usually considering the implications of what I just learned and re-inventing the subject of the next chapter when I am 25% done with the homework from the previous chapter(that is already tedious). For me to get the same grades as these A/B students, I have to force myself to grind away at homework that is adding no value to my learning process. This is at the same time that I am already capable of doing better on tests and exams than they are.
It's for this reason* that I'm 26 years old and have only just started taking Differential Calculus. I should be working on it right now, but the only way I can keep homework engaging is by procrastinating until the last second and doing a 2 hour assignment in the last 1.5 hours before I have to leave for class.
So why do I think lowering admissions standards is a bad idea? I am ALREADY disgusted by the low quality students I share classrooms with. The dunning-kruger effect will just encourage people who aren't unique or special in any way to believe they are the "C student" edge-cases that should be able to get in to Harvard by spelling their name correctly on tests.
People like me will not benefit either because our intelligence comes at the expense of work ethic(which is equally important to develop for the workplace). We will just apply ourselves that much less to hit the new target. Degree inflation is already a huge problem with 4 year programs being the new HS diploma(and a MS being required to make any decisions). How will diluting the labor market with more graduates help salaries at all?** Obviously: It won't. Economic signaling via degree differentiation is a zero-sum game.
We already have issues with wasting education on workers who will never benefit from it(Starbucks/Home Depot). If we want a meritocracy: keep forcing people like me to work harder, BUT give us the financial incentives to knock it out of the park. This means merit scholarships regardless of financial need/FAFSA.
*Ok, it's actually because of being lazy, cost of tuition, and neglecting core subjects for electives.
**But it will help fill chairs in classrooms/make money for universities.
He's just selling another assessment tool. Is the college admissions system really broken? If school admissions are truly worried about not accepting applications that are creative but have low grades they can ask for additional information and, wait for it, INTERVIEW the applicant. Another assessment tool IS NOT going to solve some perceived issue. It's up to college admissions to figure out which applicant will be successful at their institution.
So perhaps what you are really arguing for is NOT another assessment tool but rather a more thorough academic profile of your applicants.
Essays, recommendation letters and alumni interviews provide incomplete information about students' values, social and emotional skills, and capacities for developing and discovering new ideas. This leaves many colleges favoring achievement robots who excel at the memorization of rote knowledge
Considering that 90% of bachelor's are handed out for "exceling at memorization of rote knowledge" - and an argument could be made for not even giving students THAT for their $100k - I'd say the application process works perfectly. What doesn't actually work is secondary education.
The issue isn't really about college admissions. It's about our entire education system. Throughout the entire system, we promote and encourage "achievement robots". That's what most of society believes that we need, when you get down to it. Part of the reason there are "talented C students" in the first place is because we take talented children and say to them, "You don't fit the mold, so I'm going to treat you like you're mediocre, at best. Here's your 'C'. If you want an 'A' or a 'B', please fit the mold better."
Our education system is not about seeking success for each child and promoting the welfare of each child. It's a factory, turning out little 'appropriately successful human being' cogs and tossing out any units that are determined to be 'defective'. "You're not what we were looking for. As a society, we don't want to invest in whatever your potential is. Go get a job in a service industry."
Most colleges operate that way too, to an extent. Since that's what our highschools are, and that's what our colleges are, of course that's what the college application process will be. It's perfectly appropriate for what we're trying to do. The question is, are we trying to do the right thing?
You have a standardize application process for college where you'll take standard tests to prepare you for a job industry where you'll be judged on standard interviews.
We could change things from the bottom up (change how you get into college, and then maybe change the tests..and then people that come out of there may interview differently), but the transition period would be awkward at best.
Alternatively you could change things the other way around. Start being smarter about how job interviews are done, then college could change, then their application could change.
Though "creative" people generally go in "creative" fields where things like portfolios and whatsnot are the norm... not just standardized tests, so while there's problems, its not nearly as bad as its made out to be.
Key findings are: (1) HSGPA is consistently the strongest predictor of four-year college outcomes for all academic disciplines, campuses and freshman cohorts in the UC sample;
Of course it is. That's like saying "doing well in school is consistently the strongest predictor of doing well in school"
The people that are good at making good grades in HS are also going to be good at making good grades in college.
I was an A- student in HS and an A- student in college but I tutored 4.0 students that had a much poorer grasp of
the concepts than I did. Why did they have a 4.0 while I hovered around a 3.5? Because they hired a tutor before
they needed it, because they knew how to take tests, etc... Basically, they excelled at school. The bigger question
is does this actually translate into excelling in your career or in life in general. Many of the people I graduated with that
had higher GPAs than me there is no way that I would ever hire them as a programmer while many of the people I
graduated with that had lower GPAs than me were excellent programmers.
Seriously? US is already No. 2 in terms of economy behind China. By throwing away the college application that allows poor kids to compete with rich kids, US is on the way towards No. 10 in the world...
Graduates second in my class in HS by a half point (99 average)
#32 of 32 in first year engineering, though they don't account for the 50 that dropped out before the end of year.
Anyone that did graduate makes fuck all. I make 52k as a web developer. Would make 70 if I hadn't have wasted that time.
No,
People aren't freaking out because they don't see the big picture. They're freaking out because it's failing miserably. Mental math is a set of neural processes. You can't write it down. Writing uses very different neural pathways than doing mental math.
Our current system of arithmetic (long hand addition, subtraction, multiplication and long division) is the major invention democratizing mathematics. Before this system, there were people who were called "calculators" because they had an ability to do arithmetic. Now we're trying to throw that away in an effort to do something ... but we're not even sure what.
Face it. Common Core Math is a failure. It's failed our children, it's failed our society, and it's failed our teachers. There's a system that works. Rote memorization through 10 (or 12 in the US with 12 inches in a foot). Longhand practice. The argument that most homework in grade school does not have valuable outcomes is true, but for that very basic set of rote memorization, addition and multiplication, there is a need to do rote memorization, and that takes practice.
We're creating kids who can guess (not estimate) that 22+ 35 is 50, but who can't come up with 7-4=3 because we've thrown out what works for what sounds nice.
George Lucas, Steven Spielberg & Steve Jobs ... tuning a system for the 1 in 8 billion may provide unfavorable results overall.
...in a fast-paced modern economy that builds success on college degrees that have to have the right (expensive) college names on them and restricts admission to those papers based on school grades.
Self-fulfilling prophecy.
bickerdyke
I always found that grading could be improved in schools, and that grades should not be the only measure of a student's ability to learn.
In high school I skipped a lot of classes. I was just a kid out having fun. But I was also good at academics. I would score 100% on every computer programming test; top of my class, even though I would only show up once a week.
Yet, when it came to grades I would get a 75 or 85% because of attendance. Otherwise my grade would be 100%.
I do not believe that is fair at all. If schools gave a separate mark for attendance, sure I would have accepted the big 'F' for epic fail.
But regardless of whether or not I attended class the fact is that I knew the subject inside out. Other classes were like that also.
Creativity is not measured in school either, and should be.
I believe that college applications should be more about the student's sincere desire to learn than anything else.
Political correctness is really just herd psychology pushed by insecure people who desperately seek social conformity.
When I was in high school, I had a crappy math teacher (and yes it was the teacher, I took differential calculus later and got a 96.7% for the year, compared to my 57% with the previous one). I also had an English teacher that marked extremely hard and expected a lot of us. He had us doing essays, and marked mine typically 90%-100% on content, then cut the mark in half because he said it should have been twice as long, failing me. If I got such high marks on content, and managed to do it in half the word count, then I should get double marks not half. We were not writing novels. An essay should get to the point.
Meanwhile my best friend had a better math teacher, and an English teacher that apparently expected very little of the class. Seemed like a party class, they hardly did anything.
So I got low marks, which would have made my chances of getting into University pretty low. He had very high marks for a lot less work (he is smart though, deserves a good mark, but he didn't have to work as hard as I did for it).
I make 6-figures a year now, so I don't really care any more, but it really annoyed me at the time that two people with similar capabilities could be graded so differently.
I've known a few intellectually brilliant people who still live off their parents because they can't take care of themselves. They are "so in the clouds" that they are worthless, unproductive members of society. Sure, they're fun to discuss philosophy with, but I would never want to have one as a room mate or depend on them in any way. I don't care how smart or left-wing you are, every person has the responsibility to find a niche in society that allows them to work and TAKE CARE OF THEMSLVES.
These "creative C students" are exactly the people we DON'T want in college, creativity having nothing to do with it. They the sorts of people who can't complete simple tasks or do anything practical. How the hell do you expect them to not just completely fail out of college? A college degree program that does not require students to GET EDUCATED in a range of areas (literature, foreign language, basic math & science, fine arts, etc.) is not a good educational program, and these C students will not have the discipline to make it through classes in subjects they're not interested in.
Nobody will suggest that we give them a free ride through those classes either. So they're GOING TO FAIL.
I'm biased because I am one, but the creative types I respect the most are college professors, especially in fields where you have to seek your own funding. You HAVE to be creative to publish new science. But you also have to be able to teach, present ideas clearly and logically, manage people, promote yourself, stay focused on specific productive problem areas, etc. Some of them (such as myself) had industry experience prior to going into academia. These people are WELL ROUNDED.
Well-rounded is what we want to get into college. People who can manage their time and money, think about more than one type of thing, work on problems they don't necessarily prefer, etc. The most successful people are those most willing to do well at the less interesting parts of the job. And THOSE people are not C students.
Except James T. Kirk.....
Sounds familiar. .-)
bickerdyke
..its time to throw out the college -tuition- system.
Don't forget GPA.
What a useless scoring metric.
It is as useless as the IQ system.
Not to mention the stupidity of it all because IT ISN'T EVEN STANDARD. Some areas of the country differ just that little bit where it does become an issue at edge cases.
Averages NEVER WORK when it comes to determining a persons abilities. EVER.
All it takes is one bad class and goodbye decent score. Suddenly that person that was glorious at writing and sucked at math is now being punished.
GPA perfection doesn't mean a person is gloriously smart and knowledgeable. It is as meaningless as the college application system mentioned here.
The solution? Like discrete IQ areas, a separate score for each major unit that we already know are distinctly different in regards to how the brain deals with them.
Problem solved.
"doing well in school is consistently the strongest predictor of doing well in school"
And if they aren't going to perform well in school maybe they shouldn't be going to school?
The US has a huge shortage in the trades because we stopped telling high school students to go into plumbing, welding, electrical, etc. Suddenly the 'poor' student that would have excelled in something hands on like a trade were told "Go to college! You'll make more. Just pick something you like."
It's why we have a ton of "college graduates" that can't find a job because we don't need more Psychology majors with only a BS.
So you have students doing "public services" for all the wrong reasons. Which does a disservice to all those fields. In any group, it's better to have volunteers dedicated to whatever their group is doing (from drama to helping homeless) and NOT just find the easiest way to have it listed in their CV.
bickerdyke
The problem is, if you're a Harvard. Stanford or MIT, you already have thousands of students applying for a few hundred spots. And in the case of these schools, almost every one of these students is a carbon copy of the other - class valedictorian, perfect score on the SATs, perfect levels of extracurricular activities, etc. Beyond the essays and interviews that highly selective schools do, how else do you measure for people who aren't just "good at school" and churn out perfect scores on tests due to photographic memories or intense pressure?
My story is interesting - I've always been a mediocre (B or B+) student and a lot of it comes down to my lack of talent at memorizing stuff for tests. Even now that I'm out of school, I play the vendor certification game and often get mediocre (but passing) scores on those tests. I think I'd do a lot better if I had a photographic memory. Same goes for math -- I find the concepts very interesting but have some sort of calculating disability that I still haven't been able to figure out. Put stuff like that together, plus my insistence on pursuing a difficult degree (chemistry,) and my grades were no great shakes. I really don't know which is better -- the rote memorization method that China and India use, or our method which, if you ask a random sample of people, apparently doesn't work well enough.
One of the problems with lowering standards in the highly selective private schools is that you'd be opening the doors of a closed club to more people, and I'm not sure these institutions want to do that. I went to Big No Name State U, and the experience in these places is very much what you make of it. Especially if the place is big, you need to seek out every advantage and opportunity rather than have it handed to you. I read something a few months ago that compared the experience at a state university to that of the Ivy League, but of course my memory sucks so I'll have to look it up later. :-) Anyway, this author seemed to indicate that the primary difference is that once you're in the private university system, they don't let you fail. Opportunities to make up work, etc. that don't exist in a lecture class of 400 students are given to people who have trouble. The alumni network ensures that anyone who makes it through will get a good job, and the brand name on the degree will follow you forever. It's like you're in a club, and it's your reward for working like a dog (and paying a lot of money) to get into the top tier.
"Real universities require essays, character references, demonstrated public service, and have other opportunities for applicants to demonstrate qualities not necessarily related to academic performance."
And this is one of the main things wrong with "real universities". It isnt just about academic performance and intelligence, its about a particular moral viewpoint and "character", none of which should be the business of any university. Its just social bigotry social pretension promulgation.
There's no real way to measure "creativity".
As such, college entrance boards have to have data points that actually CAN be measured.
Grades.
Types of classes taken.
Extracurricular activities.
General personal presentation.
etc
etc
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
The local (a 2nd or even 3rd rate) medical school has pushed for a BSc in Medical Science which is starting its first year the past September. The dean of the medical school told me that the HS class average was 98%. Quite simply many public schools won't grade inflate enough for a 98 average. My daughter had the highest grade 12 math average in a 1000+ HS at 97. (She didn't apply to this program) But that might not have been enough.
There are all kinds of ways that a superior student could end up with far less than a 98%. Taking advanced courses, taking lots of hard courses, entering plenty of math/science competitions, fantastic science fair projects, etc.
Basically what they are saying is that you get to go to medical school if you have OCD and aren't interested in anything else.
Some med schools also have lists of this or that activity that they like to see but then the students go through it like a checklist.
I have long thought that there should be more of a risky system where you apply for medical school and then spend 6 months doing medically related things but then the people who just don't fit in are dropped. The same with other programs such as physics, chemistry, engineering, etc.
And any system that replaces it will focus less on the academic qualifications of the student and more on the credit limits of the parents.
Any insufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
I was a college athlete in a Division 1 college. I attended an academically rigorous school (Lehigh University) and got an engineering degree while playing sports.
You will have to spend a lot of time training in highschool at the expense of academic endeavors to get anywhere close to being competitive at the college level.
This is not true at all. Academics is only sacrificed if your time management skills are poor. Sports practice typically takes 2-5 hours per day depending on the sport and time of year. With game days and weekends it's usually a 20-35 hours/week commitment. If you cannot cram your academic schedule into the remaining 11-12+ waking hours when you aren't practicing/competing then you are doing it wrong.
They give you tutors because they know you don't have enough time to do proper studying.
No, they have tutors because if you are struggling with a subject your eligibility to play can be revoked. Some students need the tutoring, others don't. No different than any other part of the student body. Generally speaking most teams insist that athletes attend mandatory study halls with the rest of the team until they prove they can handle the academic load without help. On our team all freshman were required to attend, as was anyone whose GPA was under 3.0.
You'll have to choose classes that work around your training schedule rather than the ones that are important academically.
Again, generally not true. Sometimes there is a conflict with a class but it's the exception rather than the rule. I had one conflict once and I simply took the class in question the following semester.
You won't be able to take degrees like engineering because there are too many class and lab hours and it would conflict with the training regimen.
Not at all true. I got an engineering degree with all the attendant labs and other classes. I'd be happy to introduce you to (literally) hundreds of other student athletes who did the same thing. My wife played D1 sports in the Big 10 and now is a physician. I had a lab that ran into practice once a week on two occasions. The lab ended at 4 and practice started at 3:30. I just got to practice a bit late those days and stayed a little after. The notion that you cannot get the classes you need/want is complete nonsense except in rare cases.
I seriously doubt that most people could pull off a useful degree while still maintaining their obligations to the sports side of things.
Then you have no idea what you are talking about. It's not only possible, it happens all the time. Very few athletes are going to become professionals in their sports and the rest of them have to get a degree they can do something with.
The coach isn't going to recommend that they stay on the team for next year when they constantly want to skip practice to study.
NOBODY in Division 1 sports skips practice to study. They don't even ask. You learn to manage your time and work very hard. If you cannot handle it then you drop the sport, not the studying.
And there's always the chance you will have an injury, and then your scholarship is gone.
It's a possibility but then you are just like every other student. In practice it rarely happens. Generally speaking they don't pull scholarships before the end of the academic year unless you quit the team. Even for serious injuries they'll generally keep you on scholarship until it is absolutely certain you cannot play ever again. I'm sure you can find some examples of shit-head coaches being mean but it doesn't usually happen. There have been discussions (serious ones) of multi-year non-revokable scholarships though nothing to my knowledge has happened yet.
>>>become entrepreneurs like Steve Job"
Or they might end up posting on Slashdot about some guy named "Steve Job". Not sure who this guy is.
One thing you can tell from an application is something about attention to detail.
What you're describing is "risk taking"
Basicly "following your dream" is a huge risk (most of the time when someone does that they end up losing everything), You get disproportionately many people with "poor prospects" taking that risk because they loose less if they fuck up.
Additionally risk taking is a behavior that's looked down on until after the trial by fire (if you drop out of school to start an internet company and go bankrupt you're an idiot. If you make millions you're a "visionary").
My son took the ACT twice and scored 35/36 both times. He had 1575/1600 on the SAT. He had a solid 3.9 average from well respected high school. He had 5's on his AP scores for BC Calculus, AP US History, both parts of BC physics, and AP Biology and more. He rowed crew. The kid is creative and had sterling recommendations from teachers.
Ivy league? Dream on. The chances of a white, male, unconnected, middle-class kid from Alabama getting into the Ivies with that record is so slim there is really no reason to apply.
|
Second tier?
MIT turned him down
Harvey Mudd turned him down
Berkeley turned him down
Third tier?
Georgia Tech turned him down
Washington University turned him down
Of the ten colleges he applied to, he was accepted to only two. One of them was Auburn.
So yeah, the system is broken. But not in the ways you might imagine.
This is again why people are looking at this the wrong way because college is not a job training tool. Companies have just pushed colleges to do this because they want to get what people used to spend 3 years as an apprentice in a company learning directly day one. The point of college academics is to create .. wait for it .. more academics. People who will know how to think, do research, and contribute to society from an academic standpoint. Yes the first 4 years give you a basic world point of view, and help you with critical thinking, and some basic skills for a career path.
This is why (among many reasons) colleges in the US fail to setup people for the workplace. It is used as a baseline template of what someone needs to know to work in a job. It is like someone with the right degrees or certifications after their names being the only people who can apply for a jobs. I know more than many CISSPs that I have met but never felt compelled to plop down a grand to take a test. Does that mean I am not as good as those that have the discretionary (or their company has) funds to pay for that test? It is a benchmark for people but does not mean it has to be used.
College has a goal, a task, and a process for creating graduates. If you want to just learn skills, but not know how they work, or why they work, then go to a trade school. That is what trade schools were setup for originally, to give someone the skills that you learn in college without the theory.
Someone who didn't get a lot out of their elementary, middle and high school education (as evidenced by their grades), probably won't get a lot out a college or university education either.
Just sayin'.
On the other hand, higher education is good for you as a person.
There's definitely something a little iffy about the notion that an education is something that prepares you for a job. I'm a programmer who got a degree in computer science, which falls into what you described, but my college education also included "well rounding" in things like arts, economics, foreign cultures, philosophy, and the like that I feel was essential to being a good citizen in non-financial respects.
There's just something odd about cutting off there and going "hey, you're good now." Cutting off at high school, or cutting the liberal arts part out of my education to make it a more job oriented experience would have left me in a much worse place to take on the world. I see it as odd when we go around advocating doing that to as many people as possible.
Part of it is just how a college education is historically tied to being upper class, and some latent classism on my part("how could THOSE PEOPLE manage without my education"), but I also feel that it's good for society as a whole to have as many people as are willing and able to complete a degree university do so, regardless of their job prospects.
"The college admissions system is broken. When students submit applications, colleges learn a great deal about their competence from grades and test scores, but remain in the dark about their creativity and character... "
There's no real innovation because we're just building the pyramid on a swamp. It's too easy to fake enthusiasm by creating a portfolio that means nothing and really says nothing. The prestigious grad positions are given to people that are good at reading and learning and that's all they're good at. Innovation should start much younger and be a track record for prowess. Passions should be cultivated at a young age, not grades.
I remember reading this in an IRC channel many many moons ago. It went something like this....
A: This college app is asking me all these questions. Like "Why do I want to attend this school?"
B: Answer with: "Because you got a phat pipe that I can use to download warez, porn, and MP3s."
This sig contains repetition and redundancy.
On the other hand, higher education is good for you as a person.
There are lots of experiences that can be good for you as a person if you have the right personality and mindset. Serving in the military can teach you a lot about discipline, sacrifice, teamwork etc. but I would have been hopeless unsuited for such an experience. Similarly there are some people who are completely unsuited to benefit from higher education. Society needs to get out of the mindset that everyone needs to go to university. It is damaging the universities for those who do benefit from higher ed and it is saddling many with a crippling student debt. There are many different routes to become a valuable and respected member of society and many of them do not lie through university....and lest you think I am biased against universities I am a university prof!
"Education" doesn't have to be college. Going into a trade after high school is just as much of an 'education' as college is.
There's no reason you can't do an a la carte education. You like history? Sign up for a 5-10 week course offered nights. Cooking, music, food, etc. There are educational opportunities everywhere.
How the fuck would a person as smart as Steve Wozniak be flipping burgers?
Because life it difficult sometimes. Smarts is helpful but no assurance of success.
I see exceptionally bright people all the time who underachieve. I have a lady working for me who has amazing facility with numbers and would have made a hell of a good engineer. But she has had a lot of difficult life circumstances that prevented her from getting the education and support she needed. (Abusive parents, kids when young, abusive ex-spouse, etc) So she works a blue collar job and is very good at it but earns barely double minimum wage. She is my age and at least as smart as I am but isn't likely to advance much further because life is tough. To her credit she has a very bright daughter who is skipping grades and will be quite a legacy for her.
I knew a guy in high school who had a full ride scholarship to Harvard. He got into drug dealing and they found him beaten, bound and resting on the ice on a lake, barely alive. Sometimes people who are very smart do very stupid things.
I don't mean that it's the only way to do things, just that cutting it out for people who want it might be short-sighted.
Learn Rails
That's when you go and scored 1400+ on the SAT just to prove that a few Cs aren't your total sum worth as a student.
That still might not get you into Princeton or Harvard etc when everyone else has 1400+ on their SATs too plus straight A grades and all the rest of the stuff they look for. I was a B-C student myself with pretty good SAT scores and while it got me into a better college than my grades alone would have allowed, I didn't get into as good a school as my actual talent level (later proven) would have dictated. It wasn't until much later than I got my act together and got into a top flight grad school. In fact until grad school I pretty much hated academia. Grad school was the first time I actually enjoyed school and my grades reflected that fact.
I am not especially gifted and I learned pretty much everything I know outside of school. I can't even really credit school with teaching me the basics since it was my parents that taught me how to read. Now, I'll be the first to admit that my grammatical skills aren't always the best but even after essentially skipping class throughout high school eventually failing all my classes until I dropped out, I still tested in the top 1-10% in reading comprehension and english and better in science for college entrance... High school and middle school are largely just day care and even college while awesome if you have real academic interests you want to explore is going to become less relevant as the internet continues to permeate our lives. The best thing college does is provide a place to interact with peers who have the same interestsand it charges a pretty steep price for this service. Seems like we need more of an apprenticeship structure that begins in middle and high school and far fewer people going to college -unless the real point of college is to keep them out of the work force and unemployment numbers.
Creativity assessments are very Judgemental.
This might be true for subjective subjects like the arts but is not at all true for the sciences. It is easy to test creativity in an objective way: confront the student with a situation they have never seen before but which they can solve with the science they have studied. This used to be a common type of question towards the end of the old UK A' level exams. If US school exams do not test this creative component of science then the solution is to fix the school exams and NOT the university admission process.
Colleges and universities should set minimum requirements for entry, and then let anyone who can pay in. I'm paying to be taught something, colleges need to start remembering that students are customers and treat them accordingly. I'm not saying colleges shouldn't have tough classes. If a college desires to give the best education money can buy, and that means a tough curriculum, as long as students are aware of that before they start spending their money. If a college or university's product is one of high standards for getting a passing grade, so be it.
If I think I can skip Calculus 101, go ahead and let me. If I fail, I'm the one that wasted the money on those credit hours and will have to take Calculus 101 and Calculus 102, possibly pushing back my graduation. Graduation could require the passing of specific levels of education, not accumulating credit hours. This 'well-rounded' BS needs to stop, the college is not my mom. I don't need to take underwater basket weaving to be a doctor or lawyer. But I probably need specific levels of English, Business and other non-medical related courses. Let me decide if I want to take underwater basket weaving and spend the money on it even if it's not required.
If someone desires to go a college that expects hard work, quick learning, and a high degree of work outside the classroom, and they fail because they can't keep up, it's their money they are wasting. I'm sure some would argue they are wasting class time, but in my limited experience, many professors are very good at keeping the class moving along and letting those that just don't get it fall behind.
Colleges should set their prices depending on the market system, as they do now. If students need money to go to college, they can prove to those that give out loans and grants whether or not they deserve the money. Just because I'm in favor of a college letting anyone in, doesn't mean I'm in favor of the colleges, government or banks giving or loaning money to anyone who wants it. They have the obligation to determine whether or not handing out thousands of dollars to someone is a good investment regardless of whether or not it's getting paid back.
Colleges could still give out scholarships and even loans to outstanding students that they feel will give back because of their abilities. Whatever method they setup to do that is up to them.
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
Have you looked at what they are eating? If you don't fuel your body to rebuild itself, then it's going to fall apart.
What they eat isn't the problem. You could feed them the most optimal diet in the world and they would still be a physical wreck A typical flooring guy will have his knees and probably his back shot by the time he is 40-50. The ergonomics of the job just wreck their joints. Operate heavy machinery like a jack hammer and you'll be a mess pretty quickly. Most skilled trades guys I know have some amount of physical ailments thanks to their job if they are older than 40 or so and have been doing it for a long time. It's a good way to make a living but it's not terribly easy on the body.
It's not hard to earn at least Bs on basic high-school materials; having all Cs shows a lack of ability to do the hard work or a difficulty with or lack of commitment to basic academics.
Such a lack of commitment may be due to absolute boredom because there is no challenge, the material too easy.
My GPAs went in the opposite direction of what the college admissions folk expected up. My GPA in college was significantly higher than high school, my GPA in grad school significantly higher than college. My personal psychological/academic flaw is that I perform better on more challenging and more difficult work. This was true across various disciplines: history, political science, science, math.
Yes and more likely than not, the other 99% of those "C students" are going to be drop out, utter pothead, miserable failures at life whose only success will be their looks and falling back asswards into opportunities that people who earned them don't get.
That's what college is for. If college isn't for you, then good - you can probably make your own way.
f you're applying for a programming job, that will never come into contact with customers, why the hell should you need to demonstrate an ability to sell stuff?
To get a job you need to be able to sell someone on the notion that you are a good fit for the job. Sales doesn't just mean being a professional sales person trying to sell a product. The product each and every one of us has to sell is our abilities. If you want a job you have a sales pitch to make. Whether you are comfortable with that or not is irrelevant.
Not being able to determine creativity is a very bad thing, and has been for a long time.
Especially in the Arts and Literature departments - very evident and horrifying.
Mediocre copy-art, bad (elvish, emo or angst, free association) poetry and stories.
The post ignores that there are really three main systems of college admissions.
The first system is basically open enrollment, other than certain minimal prerequisites. This is the system employed by most community colleges, non-flagship state schools, and for-profits. There may be a state standardized test you have to pass or a very low minimum SAT score/GPA to enroll, but the system really just tries to weed out people with little likelihood of being able to perform college-level work (and lets in plenty who are in fact unable).
The second system imposes a fairly mechanical system composed of test scores/GPA/HS class rank and admits everyone who clears that hurdle. This is the system imposed by most flagship and near-flagship state schools. Want to go to the University of Texas? Be in the top x% of your high school class and you are in. These institutions are very large, and don't have the resources to go to deep. However, they have sufficient prestige that they want to try to select only brighter students.
The third system, which is the subject of the original article, is the system that attempts a holistic evaluation of the applicant, incorporating everything from essays, to portfolios, to community service, to minority status, to wealth. This is the system used by most elite private schools and is the one most people are really talking about when they talk about college admissions. Elite institutions use this system for two reasons: 1) it allows them to recruit a mix of students that fits with the school's culture, 2) it provides plausible deniability for favoring children of wealthy alumni and other groups the school wants to admit for financial or political reasons. These institutions could afford to go to the group interview/testing system, but they have little reason to, as they aren't necessarily looking for the objective "best", they are looking for the students that will benefit their institution the most. Often, there's an overlap- it's better for an institution's reputation to only admit kids with top grades and scores- but not always.
Under none of these systems is it really about finding the "best", and I think most applicants and members of the public would do well to understand that. Your failure to get into Harvard doesn't mean you weren't as accomplished a human being as the average Harvard admit. It means Harvard decided that you would not benefit the institution as much as the students who were admitted.
I should also mention that there is a parallel system for NCAA Division I sports, which cuts across different types of institutions. That is a whole 'nother kettle of fish.
1) This has always been the "problem" with college admissions, it's nothing new.
2) Colleges have always been factories for churning out mass workers of various types (e.g. - currently cubicle-dwelling slaves).
3) The really smart and creative types that fail at college entrance shouldn't even want to go to college. They don't need the indoctrination, and they're perfectly capable of learning and succeeding on their own.
The problem with fixating on Steve Jobs is that he's an outlier. The two sets of extremes that he represents should be ignored when considering education policy in general.
Also, he succeeded "in spite" of whatever faults the current system has. So it really makes no sense to distort the entire system to suit people like him.
He's statistically insignificant and is proven not to be harmed by the current regime.
He's the wrong part of the bell curve to fixate on.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Vocational training is really rote learning, a vocational program may include theory, but the more it includes the less it resembles classic vocational training. I think it is more important for our education system to adapt to the new reality of the Internet and easy access to information. So many of the jobs we want to do these days have a straight forward instructional video available, from setting up a server, to fixing an elevator and even medical procedures. I am unsure about pure vocational training today, students may not need to focus so much on the vocational how of a job and instead need to focus more on they why and where to get instructions. Also there are innovations happening in every field all the time, vocation skills may become out of date sooner than we think. Finally, a worker with background understanding, rather than vocational rote learning, is more likely to innovate in their field. I would be more worried about getting all students to understand the theory and why behind how things work so when they see the instructions they can quickly understand them. This may even apply to "intellectual" vocations like Lawyer. There will always be some place for vocational rote learning, but is has to happen only *after* the student has the tools to learn on their own. There IS a concern about the cost of education, many colleges justify their cost heavily on how much more money the student will earn by attending, but that is a different question than the type of learning students need.
The more information you add to the process and the more people who review the information the more subject the process is to manipulation by the operators. Not that the current admissions system completely in the hands of the colleges who play how ever they like for whatever their goals are -- which are mostly to keep the system running with lots of rich kids who can pay the freight.
A lottery subtracts all information and leaves very little room for manipulation. Unqualified kids in the lottery? They will go home after English 101 and Calculus, and be replaced by a new group.
The lottery does not discriminate by race, sex, religion, or national origin. It is completely fair.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
Sort of off topic, but can someone tell me why I've received almost 100 college related junk snailmails since I took my SAT 4 months ago?
... being more intelligent than the Jews' foot soldiers - blacks...
We can't have colleges admitting the most intelligent people, can we? It's 'racist' against Africans - since their average IQ is only 70... How awful and unfair it all is...
Why don't they want to live around their OWN kind, in their OWN countries?
Why are millions of non-whites moving into white countries every year (against the wishes of the majority of white people), but millions of white people aren't moving into non-white countries every year?
Any answers?
Plenty of people who can get high grades are also creative. Somebody who can't or won't get high grades thinks he should be able to go to college anyway, because (in his own estimation) he is so much more creative than all those losers who got high grades.
Get real.
You must be smoking some really serious weed. I have yet to see (in the US) any medical doctor who is not in the top 10% of income of the country (at the very least!). Get a specialization and you are easily in the top 2%. All of this "insurers set prices", "having to pay the lights" is complete BS. They see you for 6 minutes because they can... that way they can see 10 patients/hour and make 200-500 k$ salaries. Compare that to any other highly qualified professions (at > 10 years education) and you see that they have a pretty sweet deal. If this were not the case, you would not see so many applicants to medical schools, eh?
I wholeheartedly agree that the current process excludes a group - I'd wager an incredibly tiny group - who got mediocre grades in high school but could nonetheless excel in college.
But this sentence really flushes the rest of the article down the toilet: "Although the cost of applications would initially increase, in the long run selecting students who fit could translate into more satisfied alumni and more generous donations."
So: the increasingly impoverished higher education system, which is already jacking up tuition and slashing amenities, subsidies, faculty hiring, etc, has to come up with what would undoubtedly be billions of dollars to fund this new precious snowflake admission system, in the hopes that *maybe* in 20+ years it would pay dividends by increasing alumni donations, which tend to be an extremely modest source of revenue, some nebulous amount.
And that's assuming that the sort of system proposed would actually improve the overall quality of admissions. I'd guess it would cause a decline in high school performance ("Why work hard when I can just get into college by being charming and creative?") and for every quality student it produces who otherwise wouldn't have been accepted, you'd have ten (or 100, or 1000) who would be just as unsuited for college as they were for high school.
None of which will catch a "Steve Jobs" because the qualities you need to be looking for are "takes risks" and "gets lucky".
This is also how most colleges go about evaluating their students! SAT scores and high school grades are actually the perfect metrics to use, because they match up with the way that colleges are run. If there is any hope of changing this, we should start by actually valuing creativity, curiosity, and open discussion of ideas in college.
Typical colleges will throw a mountain of work and an onerous set of rules at their students, and then see who can survive. This works because anyone who can handle it will also be able to handle an employer's demands.
Citation needed. All the information I have is that young doctors don't make "doctor money" anymore, especially in primary care. Don't forget the $100,000+ a year that MDs need to pay for malpractice insurance, more or less depending on how 'high-risk' your specialty is. (Neurosurgeons and OB/GYNs pay a lot more, primary care docs a little less.) Salaries for primary care doctors can be as little as $85,000 depending on location. The top 10% of primary care doctors make about $238,000 a year, which, when you take into account the vastly higher cost of living in the areas where they command those salaries, isn't really 'doctor' money, and certainly not the $500k you suggest. Where I live, you need a household income of $100k or more just to break even, if you have typical expenses that include a mortgage. You can live on less, but then you're talking about renting a fairly shitty apartment and a clunker, not owning a home and driving a doctor-esque Mercedes.
The way doctors get paid these days by the insurers is through pre-negotiated contracts. If you're a primary care doctor, you need to be able to accept patients from the big insurers in order to stay in business. Your options are to take what the insurers offer or get nothing. They've got the whole damn system over a barrel. Providers have to beg for scraps, patients have their care arbitrarily denied, employers pay the higher premiums every year. Insurers can even get you fired if they decide you're costing them too much money.
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
These are Slashdot editors we're talking about. You can draw a parallel to the police practice of disallowing candidates who score highly on IQ tests. If you can edit well, you're unfit for the job because you might get bored and do something else.
Heh. I was consistently around the middle of my class in high school, and close to the bottom during most of the time I was working on my computer science degree. When I graduated, I made 73k. Fast-forward 6 years, and I'm making 110k. A friend near the top of the class felt lucky to get a software engineering job for 60k (not sure what he makes now, but he's working for a city government). Another (the valedictorian for both of his majors, computer engineering and electrical engineering) ended up with a 65k job after turning down one for 75k because he hadn't had a class that covered the work.
Performance in school has nothing to do with performance in the real world, but if you play your cards right, it opens doors for you that wouldn't have been available otherwise.
Why are these companies hiring software engineers to be code monkeys? College is not there to teach you a trade, it is there to teach you how to be a well rounded and teachable person.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
That's a wonderful point. How many people who study the humanities only get exposure to the [Platonic] "good" through a mediocre survey of philosophy class and Cliff's Notes on "The Republic"? How many welders/carpenters/chefs get to experience this first hand? I'd bet the latter group have a much better understanding of the universe, on average, than those without experience doing anything of value.
The irony here being that Plato himself was tremendous elitist. Just look at the main themes extracted from his Cave metaphor, it's almost certainly he would have viewed those carpenters/welders as ignorant savages who don't respect knowledge or the knowledgeable.
The fact is Plato was a simplistic asshole whose only real lasting contribution to philosophy was the notion that philosophy is great and you should all love philosophers, and make them your king.
Just let people show up and do whatever they like. Don't have admission standards or courses or anything. And it should be free as in zero cost.
Why do we need to find a better way to put kids who don't do well in boxes into boxes?
It's also not done in Australia either. The process here is that everyone puts their university/course preferences into a website. Then, at the end of the year after exams are marked (identical across the state), students are ranked and the system goes down the list and assigns people to university places. No wishy-washy essays or personality assessments, you get a number based on your marks and that determines what you get.
So you are an Asian F student?
I'm sorry, but this is completely incorrect. The entire system of secondary education is hopelessly broken and incapable of turning out useful degrees for anything remotely resembling a reasonable amount of money. Frankly, it isn't worth fixing. It should be scrapped. And whatever tries to replace it should be forever off-limits to the state and federal governments. Anyone proposing to regulate the replacement industry in any way, shape, or form, should be taken out on the National Mall and shot, then tarred, feathered, and hung up in cages as a warning to others. Then every living relative of theirs should be sterilized. And no, I do not consider any of that excessive given past history of government and education.
hat has nothing to do with college and everything to do with motivation, or some outside factor.
There is no reason someone with those degrees should be making under 6 figures.
Of course, if he lives is Iowa, and you live in the bay area, he is better off.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
You can do both. I would strongly recommend anyone going ito a trad to gar a Liberal of Arts degree.
It exposes people do different ways of thinking, exposes them to arts and sciences, and give a greater opportunity to gain critical thinking skills.
All of which makes life better.
"Psychology majors with only a BS."
we don't need more people who can't finish a program.
That said, there isn't a damn thing wrong with going to school and learning something you find interesting, regardless of the paycheck.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
"..unsuited to benefit from higher education...."
nope. Everyone can benefit.
TO what extent can vary, but education makes people better thinkers, and better people because you begin to understand there are other Points of view and concepts that are just as valid as yours. That means its harder to create a 'them'.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Replace 'Asians' with 'Jews', and you'd sound exactly like a 19th century Harvard dean trying to figure out how to prevent the WASPs from running away.
Soft metrics for college admissions are just a facade for discrimination. "This guy may not test well, but he sure has well-rounded eyes!"
Possibly. But the difference is:
-- that racism is optional, not mandated and present everywhere
-- your SAT does not eliminate racism at all.
So "racism" is a separate issue. What you really are calling for is that if you follow the rules of the government, you will be rewarded with a lifetime of success, from childhood to adulthood.
Sorry, "but racism!" is no excuse for communism. Nor is "think of the children!" nor is "but I am smart and deserve things!"
Making SATs optional is not "soft metrics" except only in your head. That does not mean there cannot be other tests. Your SAT is the soft metric and just a facade for race-baiting because you are afraid you cannot compete in a free market.
Way to troll the ignorant. From SAT -> racism, and you call a single metric "hard" while a free and competitive market is "soft" in your muddled little mind.
Bonus points for delusion, bad marks for anyone dumb enough to believe you and mod you up.
Communism is not the cure to education, nor is it the cure for racism. Just because I do not have a cure for racism, does not mean we should give in to communism because you are afraid of racism.
Now, if you want to not take taxpayer money, feel free to have whatever test you want.
If you are going to take taxpayer money to do so? Fuck off and compete like everyone else.
If you are going to put your SAT in public schools, give everyone a career path and a planned economy from childhood to adulthood? Fuck off and compete like everyone else.
You are allowed to be communist with your own money, with your own government. Not with my money. Not in public schools. No stealing from me to support your "hard tests" that apparently cannot exist without my hard-earned tax dollars.
What is great is you cannot defend anything, but merely can only throw blame at illusionary monsters. There will always be racism. Go start an anti-racism test then, and solicit donations, hell start an anti-racism business.
When you take my tax dollars to do so, that is another thing entirely, and you are the one being "soft" who cannot compete and instead must leech and mooch off of everyone else apparently.
"Facade" indeed.
If you don't like the free market because it is occasionally racist, that is your problem. Find a better solution than communism, my friend.
With racism, some of us lose, some of the time. With your path, we all lose, all the time, unless you are on the government payroll.
I'm sorry you are scared of competition, and I am sorry some people in the past have been racist. That is no excuse to rob everyone to prop up your planned economy.
There are lots of experiences that can be good for you as a person if you have the right personality and mindset. Serving in the military can teach you a lot about discipline, sacrifice, teamwork etc. but I would have been hopeless unsuited for such an experience.
I am the textbook case for someone who should never have joined the military. I did join despite the glaring fact that I am desperately unsuited to do so.
It has benefited me to a much larger extent that I would have ever imagined. No, I could do all the stupid "do this merely because we want to break you" crap. In some ways, that stuff was easy, so it was not discipline or teamwork or any of that stuff that benefited me. No. What the benefit was is the people that I met who opened doors for me later. Well, there were a few other benefits like making E5 in the shortest possible time proving that I had mettle and earning an honorable discharge proving that I can do what is required regardless of adversities.
In summary, any shared difficult experience (college? military?) can lead to incredible possibilities even if you are unsuited for those difficult experiences. The thing that is required is that you do the best that you can. I was once offered a driver position by UPS despite never doing the line work. Why? Because I did the best that I could, no excuses. Even after I turned them down the first time, they called me back again. I felt terrible turning them down the second time they called. An opportunity like that usually only knocks once.
"Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen
If they get C's in highschool, it is because they are lazy (both intellectually and in terms of work ethic). To me, that is a great indicator that they aren't ready for a doubling or tripling of workload that Colleges dump on undergrads and expect said undergrads to complete on their own initiative.
You've just proven yourself to be one of the lazy evaluators who just takes the easy superficial route.
2.7 GPA in high school here. 3.2 in college. 3.4 on the first Master's degree. 3.6 on the second. Oh, and I worked after school during my HS Jr and Sr years and about 25 hours per week during college (full-time during breaks, decent tech jobs after my freshman year) and full-time during both Masters. All science degrees. I never needed a student loan and graduated debt free.
Am I typical, no, but I am common enough to prove your perspective foolish.
Replace college application system with fMRI
Casteism
Here's article by Scott Aaronson that argued precisely the opposite last month. Here are some high points:
- "Standardized tests were invented as a radical democratizing tool, as a way to give kids from poor and immigrant families the chance to attend colleges that had previously only been open to the children of the elite. They succeeded at that goal—too well for some people’s comfort."
- "We now know that the Ivies’ current emphasis on sports, “character,” “well-roundedness,” and geographic diversity in undergraduate admissions was *consciously designed* (read that again) in the 1920s, by the presidents of Harvard, Princeton, and Yale, as a tactic to limit the enrollment of Jews. "
- "I’d say the truth is this: spots at the top universities are so coveted, and so much rarer than the demand, that no matter what you use as your admissions criterion, that thing will instantly get fetishized... So, given that reality, why not at least make the fetishized criterion one that’s uniform, explicit, predictively valid, relatively hard to game, and relevant to universities’ core intellectual mission?"
- "I admit that my views on this matter might be colored by my strange (though as I’ve learned, not at all unique) experience, of getting rejected from almost every “top” college in the United States, and then, ten years later, *getting recruited for faculty jobs by the very same institutions that had rejected me as a teenager.*"
Then at the bottom there are links to two anecdotes like this: Teenager is a math prodigy, has already professionally published papers in math, is strongly lobbied for by math faculty to get them in their program... and is refused at multiple schools by the undergraduate admissions officers (because they are "insufficiently well-rounded"). Has to go abroad in order to get undergraduate degree. Acceptable or not?
http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=2003
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
nope. Everyone can benefit.
Obviously not you. You are saying "nope" and not addressing anything the other person said. In fact, to object so strongly, you take a small sentence fragment and quote it in a way inconsistent with its meaning in the sentence.
Similarly there are some people who are completely unsuited to benefit from higher education.
You are saying "nope" to that idea. You are saying that every person on the planet will benefit from a higher education.
I have a cousin. He's mentally ill. If you sent him to college, he'd likely get bored and end up skipping class to rob a convenience store (to alleviate the boredom, not to hurt or steal). But your absolute that "everyone can benefit" says that he'd be better off. You are the one that's wrong. Not everyone is suited for it. Maybe you meant the middle 85% (what the politicians mean when they say "everyone" with regards to school). But you aren't a politician, nor did you offer any caveats. So that makes you 100% wrong.
Learn to love Alaska
Fill out this worksheet. Nobody actually benefits from you doing this
Most of the worksheets I filled out in school benefitted me, by presenting opportunities to practice valuable skills.
If your school passed out dumb worksheets that didn't reinforce vaulable skills (see: stupid Common Core math worksheet stumps dad with PhD), your school was doing it wrong. Sorry you had to go through that.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
The US has a huge shortage in the trades because we stopped telling high school students to go into plumbing, welding, electrical
Thanks... that explains why half the time when I turn on the faucet or the light switch, nothing happens, and the other half of the time, it only works because I've spent a large fraction of my income on maintaining those systems, due to the exorbitant wages those tradesmen are able to demand due to the shortage of those skillsets.
Oh... the previous paragraph wasn't true at all? There isn't a shortage of those skillsets?
Actually, contrary to being a shortage, demand for most kinds of workers is too low. That's why the labor participation rate just fell to a 36-year low.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
Is money the only important thing?
Being a web developer is the worse thing a software engineer would want to do.