Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Do a masters at a better school - you can do one in a year and it will hide your weak undergrad. I have an associates, a horrific undergrad upgrade to bachelors and a big buck masters, and it definitely opened doors for me. Just having access to a careers center at a top graduate school - they know so many people, who know people, etc. When I get hired, it's the skills learned at the Associate level that people find most valuable....
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.
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.
"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.
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.
Rote memorization through 10 (or 12 in the US with 12 inches in a foot).
If "rote memorization" is what I think (multiplication tables), then kids in Asia are required to memorize up to 12 as well, but may also memorize up to 25 as an optional which is very common.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yes, OK, you have successfully identified the exact same problem I was complaining about.
You, however, seem to view it as an axiom—something inherent in the fundamental concept of having a job. I view it as, at best, a necessary evil, and at worst, a method of enabling sociopathic narcissists in obtaining high-paying jobs, while people with strong job skills—and good interpersonal skills—but poor salesmanship skills are left un- or under-employed.
Dan Aris
Fun. Free. Online. RPG. BattleMaster.