You thought HS grades and transcript are the most important pieces of a college application? Think again, at least according to some people:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/magazine/2021/10/20/crusade-end-grading-high-schools/
I looked into the Mastery Transcript Consortium in 2017 when my son’s private high school signed up with the consortium; his school has not adopted the no-grading system (as of 2019 when he graduated). My impression of MTC was and still is, a marketing tool to sell to schools to circumvent and hide the failure of teaching the fundamentals of language arts, music and arts, math and sciences to our K-12 students by shifting the dialogue to, we have been evaluating our schools and students incorrectly.
From my son’s experience, the letters of recommendation and essays were just as important as his HS grades and transcript; the school’s profile might have played a small role.
What surprised me the most isn’t that there are people who would be motivated to advocate the elimination of grading in HS, but that some colleges actually allocated resources to evaluate applicants without HS grades. They’re taking “holistic” admissions to the extreme.
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By evaluating applicants without HS grades, these colleges can check off some of the goal boxes in their mission statements, such as levelling the playing field, global perspective, multiculturalism (learning differences), which align, with what MTC and the like advocate. How synergistic! I hope that we will not ever devolve to consider “a different perspective” on THE answer to a math problem.
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They can (and do) do that now with students with real grades.