<p>People can be hired to fill out the application, take the SAT, write the essay, and fabricate EC’s. I think its more of an international problem, but I’m not positive it is. But it does prove the need for universities to find genuine students with talent. Manipulating the system is stressing the holistic process to the point of breaking so if it’s not working the first people to blame are the dishonest ones.</p>
<p>@soso, so int’l applicants & rich domestic kids w college counseling are to blame for UC Berkeley breaking the law (violating prop209)?</p>
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<p>Sometimes, the almighty dollar wins out. There was an article in the NYT a few years ago about some international students from Asia who outright admitted to have hired someone to complete their entire applications to UDel (? sorry if I got that wrong). The university didn’t seem to care, and even had a special pre-Frosh program in place to teach English(!) and acculturate these full-pay students before the term began.</p>
<p>"After admissions decisions have been made, colleges should survey applicants and ask them how much help they received with their applications. For example, </p>
<p>(1) Did you employ a paid admissions consultant?
(2) Did your consultant help you revise your essay?"</p>
<p>How about “did you take a prep course or receive private tutoring for your SAT/ACT”? Oh wait, that’s different.</p>
<p>Some researcher needs to look at the UC Berkeley and UCLA applications, compare acceptances and denials, compare SES, ‘overcoming adversity’ and race to see if they are complying with Prop 209 or using holistic as a way around it. Are ‘overcoming adversity’ essays weighted the same by race? Is SES weighted the same by race? </p>
<p>The process needs to be completely transparent and unbiased.</p>
<p>omg. Of course one can review an app, consider the kid’s context and not weight by race. You all want to fix a process you don’t really know.</p>
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<p>Well, the indication is that when the external admissions reader who wrote the article tried to weight the kid’s context without race taking into it, he was reprimanded. By the way, the author teaches writing at Stanford, so hopefully he can discern subtleties and connotations in applicant essays as well as instructions by admissions directors.</p>
<p>So we can conclude the personal statement plays a big role now, right?</p>
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<p>So, how do we find out?</p>
<p>We had a very long thread on this topic, lookingforward, in which some of us argued that public college admissions should be transparent, and you argued against it (for reasons I did not think were significant).</p>
<p>This young man ought to be told why he received a 2. He paid for the review, the information is out there; I say give it to him. There is nothing to fear if the decision is a rational one. In fact, it could help put to bed the suspicions about racial discrimination.</p>
<p>Sheesh, you think some first-time external reader, just because she teaches one or two classes at Stanford and gets an article into the NYT, is revealing details of any significance, at all? Why would I want to tell more, when the starting point is such uncritical acceptance?</p>
<p>Bay, I am not against it. I tell folks all the time what I do see and know. It’s up to them whether they get it or not. And, when they start with all this conspiracy stuff and demands for more studies and more explanations, its seems all the more useless.</p>
<p>Frankly, if you sent your kid my way, I’d be glad to guide. And, end it if he insisted, as some kids do, that it’s a crapshoot, that all that matters is stats and hs titles…and race and some sappy tale of woe and curing cancer and being an Olympic athlete and all the other crap.</p>
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<p>No one knows if UCB is breaking the law. But based on the admission stats. It doesn’t appear so. Anyway the point is that since so many kids, through various means (some clearly unethical, some borderline unethical), are reporting the same great stats that a holistic consideration is needed.</p>
<p>I think transparency in a general sense is warranted, especially at a public institution. However, there are problems with revealing the decisions behind individual cases to the public. However, it would be appropriate to have some sort of monitoring by an unbiased review board, if there is such a thing. </p>
<p>Lookingforward, presumably you don’t work for an institution which is barred from affirmative action, so you don’t know if in fact Berkeley is skirting this directive by including race in their weighting factors. It is the opinion of the author of this article that they are. </p>
<p>We are not arguing whether it is possible to consider context but not race, just questiong whether Berkeley is. There is clear political fallout to failing to have adequate representation from different groups. And originally, when Berkeley discontinued the practice of affirmative action but gave points for hardship and socioeconomic status, they still experienced a drastic drop in minority admits. When they changed their process to a holistic one, the minority population rebounded. Now why would a holistic process benefit minorities more than another group, if socioeconomic and other forms of hardships are already accounting for in the admissions process?</p>
<p>For all the people calling for transparency, how many have any role with admissions at their own alma mater? Or any involvement in helping kids on the front end? How many have ever seen an LoR? Or have any sense of how the great bulk of applications come across?</p>
<p>I’m just a cog, an opinionated one. I liked this early comment on the article:</p>
<p>Jon Boeckenstedt
Chicago, IL
I have been in this business 30 years, and when I get puzzled reactions to things like holistic admissions, I ask parents a few questions: When you hire someone at your company, do you just look at GPA? Or major? If you can make decisions based on paper, why do you interview? Are there factors that go beyond “ability to do the job?” And even if there were, can you really always tell who’ll be the best? Do you ever hire someone who is a little different to add unique perspectives? This makes a little sense to people who think “qualified for admission” is simply a function of standardized test scores (which actually predict very little) and GPA (which, of course, means something different at each of 35,000 high schools.)</p>
<p>We have a selection method in this country that uses sterile, “fair” measures of candidate evaluation: It’s called Civil Service. It doesn’t always work so well.</p>
<p>It’s clear college admissions is not perfect. And, as a part of life’s early lessons, it’s certainly not always fair. But the extent to which it seems to succeed every year might be considered testament to its success.</p>
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<p>Do you really think people on CC are as uninformed as the people this guy is talking about?<br>
If we have problems with how holistic admissions is applied, it cannot be so easily dismissed as ignorance. In the case of the article, it appears that Berkeley is violating a state policy in their admissions. I don’t know why the concept of holistic admissions should require so many years of admission to understand. It’s clear from the article that the guy would apply holistic admissions without respect to race, and then would get a message advising him that he had too many Asians, or not enough URMs. How many years would it require for this guy to understand what is going on?</p>
<p>CollegeAlum, we are allowed AA, but are highly sensitive to the criticism against it and all sorts of ways we could invite legal action. </p>
<p>Holistic is complicated because the goal is to build the right freshman class, for that U. You’ve been there when I said, eg, that one ivy looks for something different than, say, Stanford or NYU. There was a huge “I don’t get it” argument back. </p>
<p>JB said, when I get puzzled reactions…</p>
<p>It may appear UCB is violating something. But your source is a newbie who didn’t get it. from my perspective, it’s not well written and should have been titled, A New Reader’s Confusion.</p>
<p>First order of transparency: it is not all about stats.</p>
<p>ps. Were you there when I said, rank is something we take a quick look at, then move to the transcript to verify how the kid got there? And the parents told me I was wrong, how much rank matters? And, that was a discussion on a kid already in the top 5 or 10%.</p>
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<p>How closely did you read the article to draw these conclusions? In the course of this careful reading did you not notice that the author is not a guy?</p>
<p>the guy would apply holistic admissions without respect to race, and then would get a message advising him that he had too many Asians, or not enough URMs</p>
<p>If this is in the article, I’m missing it.</p>
<p>In answer to the quote from the businessman from Chicago: “When I interviewed candidates for posts within the firm, I never gave a preference based on race”. That is what we’re talking about here. Is ‘holistic’ just a code word for getting around Prop 209?</p>
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<p>The Hout report was exactly that, but about 9 years ago.</p>
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<p>Pretty hard to grade essays or do holistic review in a way that is completely transparent and unbiased, although the Berkeley process is designed to maximize consistency and repeatability compared to how some schools’ holistic processes appear to be done.</p>
<p>Even grades (or derived class rank) can be biased due to biases in the teachers (class rank can also be the subject of other shenanigans, as perazziman has described). Course rigor can also be affected by biases in placement recommendations by teachers and school officials. Test scores can be biased by selection of questions and topics, or essay grading, as well as test preparation (including “gaming the test” in extreme cases).</p>
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<p>I’m surprised no one on this thread’s noticed this passage yet.</p>