<p>Aren't those who fake their recs and essays simply going to fail upon arrival at schools where top skills are required? Where is more face lost, by not getting into a top school, or by flunking out of it?</p>
<p>If the school are the ivies, it is hard to get in but not so hard to graduate from once you get in, judging from the graduation rate. Consider the case of Lon Grammer, who cheated and get into Yale from a community college. He did not flunk out, but was caught only because he boasted about it. His Yale GPA was actually slightly better than his real community college GPA. See</p>
<p>Lottery.</p>
<p>I realize that athletes and other recruited students would not fit into a lottery, but I think that if colleges had a base acceptance standard, even a somewhat high one, then all qualified applicants were placed in a lottery, it would result in a more unbaised selection process. Do we not acknowledge every day on this site that the application process skews to the benefit of certain type of kids?</p>
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Do we not acknowledge every day on this site that the application process skews to the benefit of certain type of kids?
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<p>Which type is that?</p>
<p>I'd say many different types, and the various schools each admit a slightly different mix of types, resulting in the many varied campus personalities and cultures. A lottery might tend to make schools more alike, but the diversity we have seems to serve students well.</p>
<p>Do we have true diversity? Wouldn't a lottery of pre-qualified applicants reduce: legacies; students with the money for campus visits, counselors and application coaches; early admits who skew to priviledged applicants; and quotas?</p>
<p>And you think that a pool of pre-qualified applicants would level the playing field? Have you seen studies which show that SAT scores are highly correlated to parental income and levels of education?</p>
<p>Pre-qualified could include factors other than just SAT's, such as class rank which enables less affluent kids to show ability.</p>
<p>I agree that the graded academic writing sample is a terrific idea. DS would love it! (but he's just quirky that way...)</p>
<p>So would you put a kid who's #1 in his/her class and has 1100 SAT together with a kid with 1450 but who's 30 in his/her class? Or would you disqualify the second because s/he's not in the top 5 or 10%? Would that be a fairer system than the present one? You're already tinkering with the idea of pure merit.</p>
<p>Pure merit is not just test scores. Many colleges consider those along with class rank, GPA and other factors. Once a college gets a pool of applicants who can succeed at the school, why not make the choices random?
A lottery may not be perfect, but it would reduce privilege.</p>
<p>But you are already not making the choices random. What do you mean by a pool of applicants who can succeed at the school? Is a val who scores 1000 going to succeed at HYP? I don't know. I don't know how grades are set at that val's school (btw, there's a thread about another challenge to the TX 10% system which probably addresses this issue). I don't know if an A at that val's school is the same as an A in, say, Andover or Exeter, or even a B. So, if I were an adcom, how would I determine that a student can succeed based on GPA and class rank (which is tied to GPA)? And if I put in SATs, then how about the comparison I mentioned earlier?</p>
<p>IMO a lottery is giving up. I have a lot of problems with the current way we do things but I don't think a lottery is the solution.</p>
<p>I actually have a problem with the term "qualified." When I hired someone I wasn't looking for a qualified employee but the best employee I could find.</p>
<p>In a lottery system for the "qualified," there would still be huge incentive to hire consultants to ensure being deemed qualified. I think the lottery proposal doesn't achieve the desires of the person who proposed it. </p>
<p>In America's nonsystem of higher education, if any college wanted to announce that it is using a pure lottery system for all qualified applicants, it could so so. Then it could see what that does to its pool of admitted students. Actually, charter schools in K-12 education in a lot of states already do that, as do some conventionally managed K-12 public schools with "magnet" programs of various kinds.</p>
<p>curious14 - your analogy is a good one. If you were not just hiring a single employee, but hiring a group of employees, your definition of "best" would vary -- you would look for different skill sets and personalities depending on the different job functions. It would be very important that your receptionist and that your sales staff have excellent interpersonal skills, for example -- whereas you might not care whether the computer network administrator was a tongue-tied reclusive type -- you'd be much more concerned with technical skills and knowledge. If you were assembling a team of individuals to work together, you'd probably want someone who was a good leader and showed initiative -- but you would be wary of too many "leaders" -- you'd know that teamwork also requires the participation of good followers and team players. So if somehow you were in charge of hiring hundreds of employees to fill all the different functions of a larger business, you'd end up with hundreds of different levels and types of "qualifications". It would be very hard to objectify, because the definition of "best" would be as varied as the different functions the employees were expected to fulfill.</p>
<p>I don't think either a lottery or a purely objective "merit" system would lead to desired results. I know that it is frustrating for parents and students when the admission process is unpredictable, but I think this frustration stems largely from a misplaced sense of entitlement. That is, they see admission into the elite, dream school as being a prize to go to the most deserving. I think college admissions officers see it differently: as an opportunity to choose among many qualified and "deserving" applicants to assemble the class that most closely fits their agenda. As a whole, they want the "best" possible class-- but when it comes down to individuals, I don't think they care if each entrant is the "best" possible student.</p>
<p>think calmom has it right. Building a team that has individuals with varied interests, majors etc is not easy. I think it is a bit of an art. In industry do you want all of a management to be clones of each other, say all linear thinkers and all from the same backgrund or department? The diversity of thought is important and that can be related to and evaluated from a lot of dfferent factors on the application. I was struck by reading about the process by which Olin evaluates candidates for their admssions. Here is a schoolthat is only engineering. Yet they want to have about 50/50 for gender mix and they require each tudent to be strong in some other area such as drama. During the Candidates Weekend they have particants engage in team exercises, and group presentations. Students must each facilitate a discussion and then each have a panel interview. They choose a final team of 75 students that together form a class. Any one individual might not be "the best" but each is an important part of a team that is small and is involved in a collarborative educational experience. I think top universities extend this model across majors and want to build a class that is excellent because of its diversity which may be inculde geographic, economic and social aspects. Certainly most, if not all, will be academically capable to the extent that coursework/test scores together can predict that. Are they all 2400 SAT's? No. Should they be? Maybe not. Except for the fact that I personally think legacies should not be a factor I believe the colleges do a pretty good in this daunting task.
As calmom says there is this sense that runs through many threads of entitlement based on achievement and perceived excellence. I would say it is a jungle out there and that except for a very few of the top students many good students are similair to many others. Fortunately, there are so many choices in this country,any good student will have a ton of great educational opportunities. I do not think there is one admssions approach that would be seen as truly fair by everyone.</p>
<p>I agree with Calmom's analogy as well. Not only do colleges seek to build the best class, but many students are attracted to this concept of what constitutes a best class. S deliberately chose a school where there would be students with interests and strengths very diverse from his, both in academics and extra-curricular activities.</p>
<p>I don't completely disagree with you folks but it is worth noting that a Unviersity is a fairly specialized orgainizational entity whose main purpose is higher education. It is not a farm club for professional athletics, not a country club, and not a chapter of the DAR. In this context academic qualifications are and ought to be the primary (not neccessarily the only) criteria for judging "best."</p>
<p>One Ivy administrator (can't remember from which school) said they could fill their next incoming class three times with equally qualified top candidates. This affords selective schools the ability to craft their classes while remaining fair. The two-thirds that weren't admitted attend somewhere else, crowding out otherwise-qualified candidates, and so on. Overall, I don't think fairness is a big problem. What <em>is</em> happening is that lesser-known schools are increasingly being recognized for their quality.</p>