<p>Thanks for your clarifications.</p>
<p>That Brown has a lot of data on K-12 schools supports my belief that the same sort of data can be arrived at for colleges and universities since there are far fewer of them than there are K-12 schools.</p>
<p>Maybe it’s a function of my background in the news media or my current work with governmental entities that are required to operate in the sunshine, but I cannot believe the general public is not to be trusted with raw information.</p>
<p>We require governments and public companies to disclose massive amounts of information, wholly without the assurance that everyone who learns of the information will draw the “correct” conclusions from it. With financial data public companies are required to disclose, it is almost a certainty that most members of the general public cannot properly analyze such data on their own. That’s why there are tons of financial advisors whose business it is to know what the information contained in prospectuses means (and even these “experts” frequently do not, in hindsight, draw “correct” conclusions from prospectus data).</p>
<p>Again, I don’t disagree with your statements that:</p>
<p>“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.”</p>
<p>But that argument, taken at face value, undercuts even the notion of a GPA, yet, as you concede, law schools, medical schools, business schools, and graduate schools all assign significant value to undergraduate GPA. Even Brown relies on grades for awarding degrees magna cum laude.</p>
<p>I don’t know why you are concerned that the scores of the lowest SAT score-archiving students would be identified. Instead of being an object of shame, that a college or university took 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” should be viewed as a badge of honor. The only shame would be if that student were hopelessly in over his- or her-head. Even then, the shame would be the institution’s for making a poor choice among numerous exceptional circumstance students, not the student’s.</p>
<p>I suspect that, at base, your objection to disclosure of pertinent and relevant information is your fear that it will be used by third parties to conceive a “ranking” of colleges and universities. While disclosure of such information may well facilitate ranking, the primary purpose of my suggestions is to facilitate the free flow of information to students and families whom I believe are entitled to it and to diminish secrecy. In fact, publication of factual data can only improve rankings of colleges and universities by enhancing public knowledge of the facts upon which the rankings are based.</p>