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.

Comments

Re:If yes then what ?

[nucrash]

Yes, I have looked at the problems. These are basic problems that apply to teaching tactics of math that scale. Such tactics come in very handy with dealing with problems of a larger scale. When this is applied to simple problems, these methods are considered bulky, even unnecessary.

Immediately, people are freaking out because simple math is all of a sudden, not so simple. This is a quality example of people complaining about something without seeing a much larger picture. This is no different than the, "OMG, the sky is falling because of environmental requirements will destroy the economy; Obama is the devil," crap that I saw on Facebook every day until a couple of months ago when I decided to stop frequenting there.

Perhaps if people would think of the long term benefits instead of the short term detriments, we as a society would be a bit more advanced than we are presently.