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.
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.
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.
Place something witty here
No, you go to college so you don't have to work that hard in a 9-to-5 job full time. Changing jobs is easy because you have both experience and a degree. The latter is more important to the HR filter were as the former is what managers are looking for. Again good luck getting past the filter.
You can go through life with just vocational training an certification with a nice paying job. Just keep in mind you will be the first to get axed and vs the low experienced degree'd person.
It's a caste based system now. First you must pay into it if you value job security.
Not only that, but people like George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, or Steve Jobs probably would have excelled regardless of the application system or which college they went to. From a quick read up on wikipedia, it doesn't sound like any of them had trouble getting into university.
Also I think it's important not talk about anomolies in the statistical data (which is what these people are) when trying to figure out what will work best for a large population of students. Not being able to get B's or higher in highschool shows a sincere lack of effort, or general lack of intelligence needed to succeed in university, college, or future careers. Sure you might be the next Steve Jobs, but then, you don't need college anyway, so it's not important how the educational system is set up.
It's the same reason why I can't see why so many people push their kids to try to be professional athletes. Sure the professionals make a boat load of money, but they are statistical outliers, and those who don't make it to the pros, are left with very little in terms of job prospects. Had they spent the same amount of time push their kid in academic endeavors, they would have no problem getting into a decent college, and would have plenty of very good career opportunities where they could make a very comfortable living.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
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?
having all Cs shows a lack of ability to do the hard work or a difficulty with or lack of commitment to basic academics.
I really don't agree. I agree that it's not exactly hard to get a B in high school, but I don't agree that failing to do so indicates either stupidity or laziness. There's at least a few other possibilities.
One of them being, frankly, that high school really can be inane, stupid, and soul-crushing. I don't blame kids who check out and lose interest. You're taking a bunch of people during what may be some of the most difficult years of their lives, and asking them to spend their time performing some of the most boring work possible, where nobody actually cares about the product of their work. "Fill out this worksheet. Nobody actually benefits from you doing this, but your future depends on it because I want to make sure you're working hard and following directions, for no purpose. Plus, I'm on a power trip because I've failed at life and this is the best job I can get. I'm not even interested in the material on the worksheet, and we'll throw it away when you're done, but you'd better get it done immediately. If not, I'm going to make you sit quietly for an hour doing nothing." It's kind of insane that we treat young adults that way. I think if I had to go back in time to my highschool years right now, I'd probably tell half the teachers to go fuck themselves, purely out of frustration. Yet here I am, I fairly well educated and relatively successful adult.
Having worked my entire working life with both white and blue collar workers, I can tell you that after 20 years or so of manual labor, those men (and increasingly women) suffer from carpal tunnel, bad backs, and all sorts of chronic injuries. A not-insignificant percentage are on disability, unable to hold down any job.
This is not because they're lazy or faking it.
Manual labor is hard, and after many years their bodies break down. And chronic injuries don't go away when you retire.
So yes, you can make a lot of money initially, but there's a price to pay.