In reply to: College Admissions.. posted by TWO
Do your grandchildren go to Cistercian? My nephews are there now, another went there.
I'm glad I didn't have kids.
Like everyone has to be “fixed” until they’ve obtained a license to breed. There would be aptitude tests and relationship interviews plus a credit score for good measure.
Everyone says it’s a Draconian idea.
Then I tell them about my friend TheHoltzRoom...
They come around eventually
Your system would produce a population that spends a lot of time learning how to game the system and not enough time exploring things they are passionate about. No thank you.
We need to move towards getting rid of grades, and ask students to apply to universities with CVs, personal statements, letters of recommendation, and portfolios of work. Students would learn to take feedback from their teachers and use it to make real improvements in performance, instead of just trying to figure out "what I need to do to get an A in this class." They will take some chances and do some really creative stuff. And it will make the admissions departments earn their paychecks.
You want to get kids who will go on to do great things? Let them take some chances, instead of spending their weekends in SAT prep courses.
...and kept seeing "Portillos".
College entry is based on your grades in 6 core classes. Your grades in year 11 and year 12 in those classes determine your "Overall Position" or OP for short.
Kids do take standardized tests, but the standardized test scores are aggregated across the entire school and used as a basis for normalizing each schools grades. For example, if you average a B in year 11 and year 12 Physics, but your school has a higher aggregate performance on the standardized test than the rest of the country, your grade would be raised to a B+ or an A- to account for the difficulty of the school. The final OP is a formula based on your position in your class and your school's position relative to other schools in Australia.
The system tries to combine the best of both worlds. It realizes that day-to-day performance against your peers is a better metric, but also realizes that being average in a very talented peer group also has merit over being the highest performer in an average peer group.
and nobody here games the system. its based on marks. I cannot speak for private schools, but in the public system, nobody gives kids higher marks so they can go to university. that would be unreasonable and unfair - two things we are definitely not.
If all universities set a minimum standard for grades and test scores below which students need not apply, in a system where we have decided that admission into elite universities is of utmost importance, then I think we would see students carrying even more stress than they are now (and their stress loads can be quite high), taking classes that they know they will get an A in, regardless of whether they are interested or not (I can remember a story when we lived in the US of a kid who took Mandarin I his senior year to preserve status as valedictorian, despite the fact that it was his native language). And the kids who can afford private tutors would have a spectacular advantage over kids that can't. Again, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer because the system would be set up that way.
We have technology now that would allow students and teachers to create narrative achievement reports and work with students to create electronic portfolios of work that admissions boards could evaluate. Kids might be more willing to dig into a subject that they are really interested in rather than getting their A and moving on to something else. It's a lot more work for the office than sifting through 80,000 Common Apps, but it could give kids a chance to thrive that might get weeded out by a minimum GPA or test score.
submitting portfolios, is already in place. For example, students pursuing the Arts usually have to submit portfolios as well as audition in person. The Iovine & Young Academy at USC, while still requiring grades and ACT/SAT scores, also requires everything you list long with personal interviews.
It's way too easy to eliminate bright students who may not shine on paper and can contribute much in the classroom.
Schools can look at class rank, unweighted GPAs and difficulty of schedule to roll back whatever GPA the student reports. Elite schools analyze class rank, scores on AP/IB tests and SAT/ACT to help offset grade inflation.
Schools who inflate their grades do it at a disservice to their own kids, IMO.
I'd be fine ditching grades, but the SAT is highly correlated to intelligence. Sure some folks benefit from prep courses, and most would be wise to at least grab a vocab workbook. But it is STANDARDIZED, which is the important part.
I'd take the smartest kids (realizing there will be some duds) than the best bullshitter on CVs, "Portfolios of Work" and "Personal Statements". I'm sure the dolt with an 800 SAT who's dad went to Stanford would love to put together some statements and work product with dear old dad and make sure the college doesn't see his grades or SAT score.
Standardized tests are the most valuable resource because of there very name
There is a cottage industry among crazy parents in the northeast (and presumably elsewhere) to generate an IEP for your kid before he/she enters high school so that he/she gets extra time to take the SAT or ACT. While I believe that there are some kids who have legitimate reasons for additional time, there are too many others who are getting extra time, or no time limit at all, with a trumped-up "condition". How is this still considered a standardized test?
I don't have a lot of evidence either way, but I'd be surprised is extra time mattered that much for the SAT, especially at the high end. Mostly just based on my experience years ago and my oldest kids recently. The ACT is more rushed, maybe matters more than than the SAT.
About college, I can confirm that extra time forms are common, and that it isn't that hard to design tests for which they aren't a big advantage.
Those kids will get extra time on their work projects too.
My wife works at a school in the UC system. If memory serves me correct, more than 40% of students at her university "qualify" for special-testing circumstances.
So you can see the actual piece of work that the student did, or you can just see the grade at the top. Mom and dad would have a tough time putting together a piece of work that I sent to a university as part of a kid's portfolio--they do all of our assessments in class.
SATs may correlate to IQ tests, but there is also good evidence that they also correlate to wealth--rich kids do better than poor kids, in part because of actual physiological differences in the brain that occur because the kids from lower-income families don't have the same opportunities to develop their temporal and occipital lobes, and they are often subjected to more stress. So our system is making the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, because inequitable access to a good education makes it so.
that's not correlated with wealth.
There are statistically significant achievement differences among the races on the sAT and ACT. If the SAT is actually a measure of intelligence, then these differences should not exist.
I'm very sure that someone who scores a 1600 on the SAT is very smart. I'm not sure that someone who scored a 1000 on the SAT isn't smart.
and race is a confounding variable? I ask because I don't know.
If it is mostly economic, then I would posit that it is because children of more wealthy parents get more guidance and prep (both academic and test taking).
Not sure why in the case of race.
That is, they capture race but not other socio-economic information from the test-takers.
I suppose my point is, on a truly standardized test (if such a thing exists), there ought not be differences by race, sex, or socio-economic class.
However, it's hard to picture any test, however fashioned, whose outcome is unaffected by parental encouragement, school quality, nutrition, and other factors that are likely to be correlated with the variables which you mention.
The SAT and ACT test intelligence, but also test academic achievement, and academic achievement is correlated to a certain extent with social circumstances of upbringing.
Because while your criticism is valid, I think that both the US and Canada have a strong leg up on equity and letting kids be kids and teens try interesting things versus deciding at age 10 whether you're "professional material" or not.
How many kids that want to attend premier universities in the USA are living anything close to normal, healthy lives? My somewhat informed guess is that it is not nearly as many as it should be.
The German system may identify "professional material" early for your taste, but eWill's rejoinder could very easily be that our system places way too much emphasis on getting into the "right university" often at the expense of the teenager involved.
I’m not defending any system. I’m briefly explaining why I think the US system and mine would be better off if we got rid of grades. There is a lot of research that supports that idea (and some that doesn’t). It’s complicated, but I think in the long run we would be better off if we destigmatized non-college career paths and made college admissions more work for the admissions officers (and the high school teachers. It’s easy to write a test and throw a number at the top. Good feedback is more work).
Sorry.
making campus visits. As with most matters, grandfatherly input in the decision process is not required.
I can't help but remember when I entered ND (the same week that you did, I imagine). I hadn't visited ND or any other college before that day. The sole exception was the campus of the University of Nebraska. That was pretty much unavoidable since my father ran a Conoco station on the edge of campus.
bit early? That doesn't seem to even be on the radar for my Freshman daughter or her friends, and she's a high achieving Honors student at a Catholic Prep school. But maybe I'm out of the loop here.
when my son and daughter-in-law take family trips, they include a look at college campuses when possible so that he and his sister can start thinking about it.
They aren't really "campus trips" in the usual sense.
Of course my mom was a guidance counselor. I had counted visiting well over a hundred schools at one point
who has been a college counselor for a long time, that is advising kids and parents on a path that leads to increased chance of acceptance to the university they desire.
While I don't believe he made recommendations on the start of actual visitations, the start of the the actual process of working on that goal starts even earlier than freshman year of HS. The process he recommends might be one that you shake your head at but it he has a track record.
you better be aiming for that goal before HS. I just thought the actual narrowing down of schools you may apply to, and thus visit, would occur later in High School.
SAT is the gateway to college and colleges publish a 25-75% range that is often 100-200 points apart. Not much of a guide.
...test scores in the age of industrial test prep are a poor, overly narrow gauge of the types of ecxellence that elite US colleges are looking for.
Elite US colleges also don’t care if you volunteered at a homeless shelter. But if you founded a nonprofit to help the homeless or conducted original research into the homeless population in your hometown, that’s probably a better indicator of the merit that matters than a grade inflated 4.0.
...scores a 1580 after studying for the SATs for a thousand hours or a kid who got a 1480 and used that time to make it to the Intel ISEF, I’ll take the latter.
There is a difference between studying the content of the standardized test (math, vocab, reading comprehension, etc.) and understanding the actual drivers of success on the standardized test (e.g., is it better to skip or guess, when is it right to guess, how long should I take on each question, etc.)
I suppose there is also the reality that studying is generally free, while test prep is generally not.
Test preparation is basically that: learning test taking techniques.
Regrettably my "fastball" tops out in the low 70s, and my control isn't exactly Bob Tewksbury...