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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.
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.
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.
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.
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 problem is that we need an accurate measure of a student's creativity instead of a student's talent for memorizing the correct answer. This creates a brain-dead workforce which kills the ability to innovate. The reason this problem has surfaced is that education in general has looked for the easiest metric to measure rather than the most accurate metric to measure. If a student can quote back sections of a science book, to say they are learning is easy. To say that a student is able to map new processes of a protein folding, that's intellect, not retention of knowledge.
Common Core actually addresses some of these ideas in that they address principles of how to learn rather than just facts and figures learning. The system still needs tweaking though and not just because people are complaining about the problem.
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No, there is still only one answer; the current system.
The college admissions testing business is worth about half a billion dollars a year right now and the two major test providers, ACT and ETS, spend quite a bit of money to make sure that they remain the two major test providers.
You posting on slashdot telling people to get started on a better solution as if it were as simple as doing your laundry just shows that you're clueless about what would be required.
The problem is that we need an accurate measure of a student's creativity instead of a student's talent for memorizing the correct answer.
The problem is that most large companies don't want creativity or innovation in most cases. They want only the amount of creativity that holds between the lines delineated by convention, process, job title, and political infighting. If they need creativity, it's in the form of regulatory capture or making competing products or business models illegal. And that's done at the CxO level. If you want to actually be creative, a larger company is one of the worst place to try to do that. Small companies might need "creativity" but mainly on tactical day-to-day survival issues. So creativity here is limited by resources and simple fear of being crushed by the competition. Really, about the only place that creativity is needed is in a startup and, then, only for the amount of time needed to get the product out the door and, in general, it's mainly the ops side of things than need to be beefed up. After the finance and process guys start stepping in, creativity goes down the tubes.
So, sorry to dispute, but I see a huge need for worker bees who carry out processes and hue to the corporate line. I don't really see businesses needing or wanting creativity, at least not to any great extent, regardless of what they say. In fact, you want to see how receptive your company is to creativity? Step on a few of the sacred cows that lie around in almost any business. Or even try suggesting new technologies. Even if your idea is creative, sound, and makes sense, it will not be celebrated by many in your company.
So, what's the problem with the educational system? It seems to be turning out the employees companies want (i.e., unemployable people that can be ignored while hiring lower-cost workers overseas).
That is all.
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?
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.
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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.
Have you actually looked at some common core math problems? have you talked to any common core math teachers??? common core is a disaster. 22+22 is no longer 44. its now 40 (plus 4)
Which is exactly how every sane person does mental arithmetics. Take a difficult problem (22+22) and break it down into simpler sub-tasks (20+20)+(2+2)
If you can't do that, you'll be relying on a calculator for even the simplest tasks. Welcome to Idiocracy.
bickerdyke
"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.
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.
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!