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High schools across the country are resisting demands from hundreds of colleges to disclose students' criminal and disciplinary records on applications, worried that minor offenses could stigmatize applicants as troublemakers and keep them from being accepted.
more stories like this</p>
<p>While some colleges have asked about student conduct for decades, hundreds are now seeking the information through the common application accepted by 315 schools. For the first time last year, the form added questions for students and guidance counselors about whether applicants have ever been punished for academic or behavioral misconduct that led to probation, suspension, removal, dismissal, or expulsion. It also asks whether they have been convicted of a crime.</p>
<p>"I want to help the colleges, but I want to make sure we help our students in any way we can . . . Our first allegiance is to the students," said Jim Montague, director of guidance counseling at Boston Latin School, which leaves disciplinary questions blank on the application but will answer them if college officials inquire directly.</p>
<p>Some educators and school lawyers say high schools' allegiance to students could work against them, if colleges decide to give preference to students whose counselors were willing to be more open.</p>
<p>Nationally, less than a quarter of high schools disclose such information to colleges, according to a survey by the National Association for College Admission Counseling conducted last spring, after high schools were confronted with the new questions.</p>
<p>Many colleges criticize high schools for avoiding the questions, saying they need to know as much as possible about students' academic records and behavior amid heightened concern over campus safety following last spring's shooting rampage at Virginia Tech.
<p>I understand the counselors point, but essentially saying " no comment" by leaving the yes/no question blank, in itself doesn’t sound good.</p>
<p>This would be great opportunity for the counselor to say- well she had this issue, but this is how it was dealt with and this is what she did afterwards.
Kids are human, but isn’t it better to show that it was " a learning experience"? rather than have to leave the colleges guessing or simply toss the students app because it wasn’t finished?</p>
<p>Remember the student who wrote her essay about her one-time consumption of pot-laced brownies? She was denied admission at Wesleyan. Wesleyan!!! Experiences like that are not lost on GCs.</p>
<p>yes the point is taken, but that is an odd thing to write an essay about.
Did Wesleyan specify that, that was the reason for the denial?
Perhaps she should have applied to Bard ;)</p>
<p>Yes. The story was reported in The Gatekeepers. Why is it strange to write about an experience from which she learned a lot? That is a perennial writing prompt. Her GCs went to bat for her. She was a top student. No go. I believe that she was eventually accepted at a school that is less “out there” than Wes. Wes is not exactly a pot-free zone.
I like Wes, by the way. And one thing I like is its “live and let live” attitude. I would have felt very differently had I bought the book before my S matriculated there.<br>
One brownie and you’re out? With such draconian policies, why should GCs report offenses? An awful lot of them have read The Gatekeepers.</p>
<p>My kids’ high school is one that does report offenses at the level of suspensions , and explains the circumstances. I don’t see this as a bad thing. I’m sure their policy has kept some kids out of some schools, but I don’t know of a case where it hurt a student to the point of keeping them out of college. I know of students who were suspended, and reported, for drug and alcohol related offenses that have been accepted to USC, NYU, Wellesley, UCSC, Dartmouth, and many others. It’s not a deal-breaker at all colleges, and I think how the high school and the applicant handle the situation matters a lot.
I think an open policy is the best policy. I don’t agree with the decision that Wes made in The Gatekeepers, but I believe they have the right to know about offenses that are serious enough to warrant suspension.
Maybe the high schools should take a good look at their policies and be sure that when they suspend a student, the offense is not something as minor as tasting one brownie.</p>
<p>I agree with your last point very much. And the corollary should be that colleges (especially of the Wesleyan type!) should also reassure high schools that they will not reject a student for tasting one brownie. This only leads high schools to adopt a blanket no reporting policy.</p>
<p>Marite, you have the story a bit off. While she was at a top school, she was not a top student. She was a level below most kids that apply at top schools, but a solid B level. What hurt her more was SATs that were in the extremely low end for the schools she was applying to. She was, however, the Student Body President. That seemed to be significant at this school, meaning she was respected by students and faculty.</p>
<p>The interest of her story is that she was the only kid that owned up to a mistake . She was suspended for one day. She decided to bravely address that suspension day by writing what she learned from it, which was a great deal and well put. She became president after and head of honor council etc.</p>
<p>But her scores were still low compared to peers. I think the school expected their student body prez to get in regardless of noncomparable grades. But I think this girl did everything right in her applications to be seen as exceptional.</p>
<p>She was waitlisted at Cornell and Wes but ultimately admitted to both, and iirc she chose Cornell on a deferred semester program. I would guess not a perfect match for her. Wouldn’t it be great for her to write a follow up essay on how it went? She must have graduated by now.</p>
<p>Does that mean that something like 3/4s of GC’s leave those checkboxes blank? If so, that’s surprising–does anyone know if schools have policies that keep this information private or if there was some professional consensus that answering this question crossed some sort of ethical line? It just seems strange that 3/4s of the GCs would decide independently not to answer a question, particularly when the failure to answer could potentially be read as concealing negative information.</p>
<p>People suspended from school don’t always have a way to challenge the suspension. A common scenario at my kids’ hs is two boys fighting in the hall; both get suspended, but everyone knows one was the instigator and one was trying to defend himself. The “appeal process” is complicated and virtually guaranteed to fail unless the parent obtains counsel and threatens to sue.</p>
<p>You are right she was not the top student, but she was in the acceptable camp. The story does make it sound that the sticking point was the brownie. Had I been an ad officer, I would have interpreted the essay the same way her champion did: as a story of learning from mistakes and about integrity. But that’s not the way it played out at the adcom meetings. The chapter is headed, ironically, “It’s not about the dope.” When her advocate commented:
“She was the only one who came forward to say she accepted the brownie,” another commented:“But she didn’t turn in the brownie.” </p>
<p>The girl in question was indeed waitlisted as a favor to the ad officer who’d championed her, but it was clear that Wes that year would not be using the waitlist (p. 195) </p>
<p>The chapter also notes that a student who had written about recovering from alcoholism but has earned straight As in junior and senior year was similarly rejected. “I certainly think people can redeem themselves. But given the selection this year, I don’t think it’s a risk we need to take.” (p. 184)</p>
<p>Can anyone conclude from these stories that a student should own up to past mistakes and that a GC should help derail a student’s chances at admission by pointing out such mistakes?</p>
<p>Addendum: I don’t know what happened to the girl. After one year, the ad officer who championed her left Wes to become a GC…at the school where the girl had attended.</p>
<p>The story was reported in The Gatekeepers. Why is it strange to write about an experience from which she learned a lot? That is a perennial writing prompt.
must have missed it, I actually don’t read books about college entrance/admisions , thousands of posts on CC is bad enough ;)</p>
<p>While she was at a top school, she was not a top student. She was a level below most kids that apply at top schools, but a solid B level.
I thought that one of the things that we advise students is, is that it is a tossup when you are talking about top students with top scores applying to competitive schools.</p>
<p>Perhaps I am just more pragmatic, but when I am applying for a job or a college and I am asked about an experience that I learned something from, I wouldn’t pick something that would be considered illegal or unethical to include, but something that puts me in a better light.
At least it has been my experience that when interviewers ask you about your faults, they want to hear things like you check over everyone elses work, not that you lied on your time sheet.</p>
<p>But colleges, at least the ones we are talking about here, aren’t like public schools who have to take everybody and deal with what may come. They are part educational institution, part residential community. I think schools have every right to know what they are dealing with. Look at what happened at VA Tech–that kid had a history in high school and probably never would have been admitted to any school that required a recommendation letter. </p>
<p>Attending the college of your choice is not an entitlement–it is a privilege. Schools have a responsibility to the community to know whether those they invite to join will be positive contributors, and with people, unfortunately, looking at history is a pretty decent indicator of what is to come.</p>
<p>The VTech incident is used as a justification for demanding that offenses be reported. But if colleges are going to reject students for a minor offense, they’re really undermining their own efforts to discover the more important ones.
Would any of us be happy to see our kids rejected over a parking ticket? for having been rowdy in school? My kid got a suspension in 6th grade for sticking a pencil in another kid who’d bullied him. The principal was rather apologetic in explaining the suspension, but rules were rules even though he realized that our kid had been bullied. Fine with us. Granted, that was 6th grade, not high school; but high schoolers get suspended for equally trivial offenses. If parents were aware that offenses might get their kids rejected from colleges down the road, the likely upshot is they would demand s much higher bar for suspensions. That would have a negative impact on k-12 schools. And the colleges would not be any closer to ensuring the safety of their own students.</p>
<p>That is what I worry about. But that is what the Gatekeepers story tells us happened. Wesleyan kicked up a fuss about a girl who’d had ONE pot-laced brownie and had had the integrity to come forward and confess. Even if she had not written her essay on that topic, her GCs would have had to report the offense under these rules, instead of trying to support her as they did.</p>
<p>The article is really about the dilemma for the GCs. Whom are they working for? Primarily, their students. Not the colleges.</p>
<p>I think they should ask the STUDENTS (not the GCs) to answer the question and provide an explanation, and, since they are minors, have it initialled by their parents.</p>
<p>If a counselor writes a college recommendation for a student, isn’t the counselor ethically bound to address administratively documented incidents of academic dishonesty, which occurred during the student’s high school career?</p>
<p>This is not just an academic exercise at one top public high school in NH where 9 students (then juniors and now seniors) were charged with stealing tests from a locked file cabinet or acting as lookouts. The exams were then shared with an additional 20 to 40 students. Here is how that school is dealing with prospective colleges. </p>
<p>Q: Does the high school notify prospective colleges of cheating? </p>
<p>A: There is no explicit notation regarding cheating on Hanover High School’s Mid-year Report that is included in college application packets. The Mid-Year Report does include a rating scale for “Personal Qualities and Character” and a checklist that asks the counselors to recommend students on a scale that ranges from recommending “with reservation” to “enthusiastically”. These rating scales provide a means for the school to differentiate between students who have no record of academic dishonesty from those whose honesty might be questionable. Finally, if a counselor writes a college recommendation for a student, the counselor is ethically bound to address administratively documented incidents of academic dishonesty, which occurred during the student’s high school career</p>
<p>I think that schools should report expulsions and criminal records. These are serious enough that colleges should be aware of them. Probations and suspensions typically involve far less serious behavior and colleges should not be asking about them IMHO.</p>
<p>Perhaps a good compromise would be for districts to formally expunge a single detention or suspension from the student record upon completion of community service or a few clean terms. Its allowed in our legal system so why not the hs too? This way the policy could be included in the hs profile report which colleges receive, the GC’s could honestly answer the application question and the students could have the benefit of the full reporting.</p>
