<p>Senior’s Dad-- first, I’m not an official from Brown, just so you know. I’m a senior there right now and will be a grad student there next year.</p>
<p>Second, don’t be so sure that all institutions so heavily rely on GPA and SAT-- in fact, Brown’s common data set will show you that we depend more on other criteria such as demonstrated interest (fit) and the rigor of your academic schedule.</p>
<p>Third, universities have a lot of data on various K-12 schools that helps them to disaggregate and make sense of GPA-type data. Whether this model could be done for colleges and universities is hard to say, if for no other reason than the lack of homogeneity between college schedules. GPA at universities and colleges, and especially at Brown, are very poor indicators to look at because of how much student programs differ and how that can fundamentally change expectations. The number of graders at any institution in addition to the lack of standardization, not just across schools, but across universities, even across departments and across individual courses taught by different professors ends up introducing so much variation that such a measure truly loses its value. It’s one of the reasons I think law school’s admissions process is completely backwards and nonsensical.</p>
<p>Third, I’m all about more information. I think we should all have packets full of information. In fact, if you’re really good at looking around college webpages, you can find a remarkable amount of information (at least here at Brown). But I am strongly against supplying the general public with information that is not particularly useful and/or easily abused as much data is because of our mentality. I also am strongly against the idea that each institution should be supplying the same data-- they sometimes don’t even have the same goals in place, never mind the structures and assessments that form due to those goals, so why would we expect to be able to compare the same statistics across schools?</p>
<p>The movement toward E-Portfolio systems at some universities, I think, is a wonderful example of how universities can provide really striking examples of student progress and work to outsiders, though I recognize that does not provide any concrete numbers or data to crunch.</p>
<p>Why should a school release the number of the student with the lowest SAT score at the university? Should we penalize a top school for taking a risk on a student that may have had an exceptional circumstance who may have a tremendous and positive impact on their campus and make huge strides in terms of eliminating the achievement gap because they’re concerned about how the number is going to look published in a book? That’s the problem with reducing people to just a few metrics, none of which are really so widely agreed upon as being great to begin with.</p>
<p>I’m not posting about all of this because I think top schools should be put on pedestals as sacred cows or take anything for granted, I just think it’s a really interesting article that articulates a very real and pressing need to “rank” these institutions that lives outside of the admissions nonsense everyone is caught up in. I’m actually really against ranking in general, in case you can’t tell, but thought this article made a compelling point from a perspective I had yet to consider.</p>