There’s this private school in Brooklyn called The Saint Ann’s School and they do not give grades, at least they didn’t the last time I checked. What they do is write narrative reports for each kid. This particular school has always been known for some of the best college acceptance rates in NYC. It helps that the kids are “gifted”. Colleges seem to love St. Ann’s.
^ ^
The fact they charge between $34k - 41k/year depending on grade level, smaller class sizes/resources available, and more than 3/4 of the students’ families are full pay are key factors…
Yes, @citymama9 . I thought of St. Ann’s as well. I’m sure that there are other high schools that also use narratives rather than grades. While I’ve never seen a St. Ann’s transcript, my impression is that it discusses the student’s academic strengths more than the proposal does, i.e., it might say this student’s writing abilities are exceptional, (s)he has native fluency in Spanish, but his/her mastery of chemistry is above average, not exceptional. These aren’t a one time thing; my understanding is that the students receive regular narrative reports at the end of St. Ann’s equivalent of a marking period. I don’t think they are the sort of gibberish of the proposal.
What struck me as the oddest part of the proposal is that the private schools are going to “volunteer” to put public school students’ transcripts into this sort of gibberish. How exactly would that work?!!! It suggests that the students could be “evaluated” by someone from a private school who has never met them. Given the categories, I don’t see how this is possible.
LOTS of high schools do not rank students. They do give enough info to give an educated guess as to a student’s approximate place in the class, but nobody knows who is 8th and who is 11th.
Agreed. Also, how will they account for the inherent biases considering they have a strong interest in promoting their own students whose families are mostly full pay as opposed to public school students who may be competing against them for elite/respectable college places.
@cobrat I agree that these St Ann’s kids have an advantage, but how do you explain other small private schools filled up with wealthy students that don’t have the same kind of matriculation lists?
^ Isn’t the problem here the opposite of high school transcripts? By that I mean that many schools (outside of the tippy-top schools) are becoming more “European” in their admissions and are focusing more on more objectively graded exams (SATs, APs, IB, A Levels etc) to judge academic achievement rather than depend on transcripts which can differ greatly from school to school? Maybe the solution is the opposite and make AP and SAT exams more difficult so a 5 on an AP exam or an 800 on an SAT Subject test become much harder to achieve?
"This “reformed” system would require teachers to know their students at a far deeper level in order to provide that level of feedback. While it’s fine for private day/boarding schools with small class/school sizes, this isn’t realistic for larger private schools or moreso…public schools in which teachers may be assigned to teach hundreds of students.
There’s much more increased level of subjectivity involved due to the nature of needing to know students well…or at least giving the appearance of such which could unfairly advantage students from “desirable”* backgrounds, people pleasers, rule followers, and otherwise those who don’t rock the boat and disadvantage those who aren’t from “desirable” backgrounds or worse, those who march to the beat of their own drum or worse…rock the boat by disagreeing with a teacher on a debatable point."
My d would probably not do well with that grading system. She is highly gifted and spends most of class time doing other things while listening to the teacher. She complains of teachers repeating things endlessly; she gets it the first time around but has to wait for the teacher to keep explaining things again to other students until they understand also. I don’t think the teachers appreciate her lack of attention to them. She spends most of class texting, watching videos, etc. and then gets 98% or better in her classes. She continues to do this in college as well. I think teachers would penalize her from a subjective point of view for not being more enthusiastic and listening to them with rapt attention- i.e. in their terminology, she is not “engaged” in the learning process. In her viewpoint, she is engaged the first time around and then tunes out.
This is a useful discussion. Very interested in understanding the value of schools in providing more than a credential - but evidence of knowledge. Thanks for all the different views.
I think this plan shows a lot of naiveté about the wide range of differences in high schools and in high school students.
Many public school teachers can’t be bothered to get to know their students well enough to rate them on characteristics like these. Our elementary teachers graded from 1 to 4 on similar competency-based skills. But, they only had 24-28 students. Most public HS teachers have ~35*5 or more students. Our HS English teachers for the most part don’t have time to read the essays they assign.
And, not all students take all classes at their HS. A lot of our local students take a number of classes at the local community college. My son took courses from 4 colleges during HS. So, submitting transcripts to colleges where he applied was a pain (and expen$ive). But, there’s no way he was going to get a descriptive response about the skills he gained in a 600-student Linear Algebra class at our local UC.
@londondad While I admittedly have only worked in college admissions at two universities, I have not gotten any sense that universities are moving more towards “objective” indicators if only because their objectivity is highly questionable. Indeed, the movement to drop or discount standardized tests is matched by internal policies that now refer to scores by ‘bands’, which is an implicit acknowledgement that there isn’t much confidence in scoring. For the past few years I’ve similarly worked on UK admissions and have seen the problem even more amplified for British candidates where we have been stunned by the number of students presenting a string of As on their A-levels (last year of the 560 British candidates we reviewed, something like 85% had 3 As). As a result, we now scrutinize school reports far more intensively in the past, while British universities are gradually introducing their own entrance ‘tests’.
In response to @Ynotgo observation, in my 15 years in college admissions, I saw a narrowing of the number of schools successfully presenting candidates. It’s not as bad as in the 50s and 60s when we had ‘feeder’ schools, but now something like a 15-20 schools will account for 50-60% of all admitted students. While admittedly this situation is especially true of the Ivy League universities and LACs, the reality is that it is getting more difficult for students who come from schools where their counsellors do not advocate on their behalf or where the school’s reputation is not well known.
@exlibris97 Good points. Just to point out that the UK has already changed their exam grading. Last year, my son had a number of friends (around 5) who had 4 A-stars on their A levels and did not get into any top 10 US Unis (they are all happy at Cambridge though). This year, my daughter who is arguably as good a student as my son’s friends might only get 2 A-stars (plus 2 A’s) on her A2 exams, due to much harder marking schemes. Similarly at GCSE level where all of DD’s friends got between 9 and 11 A-stars, next year the grading is 1 - 9 where a 9 is the old A-Star. The tests are expected to be both more difficult exams plus will be graded more harshly. The Dept of Education has publicly stated that only 1 or 2 kids in the entire country are expected to receive all 9’s. It will be interesting to see whether US Unis will pick up on these changes as the GCSEs and A Levels should do a better job of highlighting who the truly gifted UK students are.
@exlibris97 Also, given that many of the British kids do have similar grades and other similar details (white, upper middle class kids from London private schools) how was your Uni able to differentiate among them?
@londondad I know that the admissions officers I work with have mentioned the changes in how British exams are being marked. What is also happening is that some schools are now getting much better at providing individual student reports, in many cases providing individual “course” reports that estimate how the student stacks up against their peers (first, top 5% etc). These reports now more closely resemble the “transcripts” issued by American high schools.
As we’ve discussed before, especially with respect to the UK, the days of “feeder” schools are past. Strenuous efforts are being made to recruit students from across the country and that was very apparent this year. At the same time, I do know that most top American universities do recognize that many American children are being educated in the UK. My experience is that the vast majority of highly qualified American students do land places.
One observation: I suspect “top 10 Unis” is a reference to Ivy League colleges and their peers. For UK parents wanting to educate their children in the US, especially those with kids in private schools that send scores of students to Oxbridge, they’d be well advised to think in much broader terms. Most admissions committees won’t feel terribly sorry for a candidate who has to “settle” on Cambridge having been turned down by the Ivy League.
^ Thanks. I agree with your points in the third paragraph. There are still too many London parents who have an “Ivy or nothing” attitude and refuse to pay for any non-Ivy US Uni. Fortunately, the top secondary schools here are well aware of this and are helping to educate these parents on the qualities of LACs and other top schools. I did notice this year that a few of DD’s friends at other London schools were going to Williams, Middlebury, Pomona, etc.
Some friends who are Ivy alums and/or taught at Oxbridge at some point in their academic careers would wonder why someone with the exception of some STEM majors would feel Oxbridge is an inferior choice.
The ones who taught at Oxbridge have all stated the tutorial/supervision educational process is much closer to that of a respectable/elite US LAC than an undergraduate experience at most elite Us with a few exceptions(Princeton, Yale, Dartmouth, UChicago, etc).
My DD is a scholarship student entering her freshman year at one of the elite schools on this list. My concern for her, when it comes to college application time, is how will her non-grade transcript be evaluated for merit / financial aid? Will she be taking SAT / ACT also? I’m not sure, because we haven’t had a parent’s meeting about this, but I plan to bring these questions up at orientation.
My guess: the kids who get good grades now would be the ones who shine the most with the proposed approach. They’ll figure out the ways they’re evaluated and adapt accordingly.
Hmm . . . could this be part of the anti-Asian bias thing? I am sure it is not. I don’t know why that even popped into my head.
I saw a student this past year who attended a school with grading much like that described in the article – the Cal Poly/Cal State system would not work with his "competencies’ and it didn’t fit the UC system either.
“OK, so we get rid of standards altogether and have the private schools evaluate the public schools students.”
Lol, that will go over well with the teachers’ union. I applaud the effort to look at the college admissions process as it is broken and too stressful, but this is a non-starter for the reasons many have already cited.