He didn’t drop out. He is still there. I haven’t asked my son what is happening to the kid.
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I can see school like WPI which is project based and has been test optional for a very long time doing something like that. Any school that did that would be a school I’d be much more philosophically aligned with.
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I think the consequence of subjective admissions will be a flattening of the ‘prestige’ curve. Incredibly talented students are being sprinkled across many universities as admission criteria have become more ambiguous. It will be interesting how this plays out in graduate school admissions, as feeder schools become no longer reliable.
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Because universities are primarily in the business of university building, not student betterment. Think of the analogy of a homeless shelter, the purpose of which is to serve society, would a lower percentage of admission be a measure of success?
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The head of our science department sends around info on various programs that kids might be interested in. I was shocked to see that for a $3000 fee there is a program that will connect you with a professor and allow you to “help” with their research so you can get your name on as a co-author. I never knew stuff like that was out there. It’s made me cynical for sure.
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Test scores aren’t equally useful for all colleges, but they are more important for many colleges than for others. Caltech can rely on other indicators of academic accomplishments by its highly self-selected applicants and by the resources (including direct involvement of a significant number of its faculty) it devotes to its admission process. UCLA cannot.
Test scores aren’t equally useful for all college applicants, but they are for many applicants. If the choice to test or not, to submit test scores or not, is left to the applicant (i.e. not at the college’s discretion), the likely outcome is that the scores are missing for those applicants whose test scores would have been helpful, and that those who submit their high scores are the ones whose scores wouldn’t have made much of a difference.
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Standardized tests, in the name of equity, are being traded for the EC arms race. Guess who will be significantly advantaged in that contest.
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As with everything in life, having money is useful.
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In the current environment not having money is useful as well. It’s the vast middle no man’s land that is problematic for most.
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Two such companies are Lumiere Education and Pioneer Research. Pricey, probably closer to $6k, popular with international HS students too, who often don’t have any access to uni research (even with money and/or connections).
I can’t remember the name of the company. Seeing that definitely opened my eyes - I used to be impressed by all these CC kids who had research as one of their ECs. I didn’t realize it was a pay to play option.
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The way this is normally done is in one of the following ways:
- The school organizes research projects, asks for applications, and selects some 5%-10% of the class, funds the effort, and assigns them to research projects through the year with a faculty advisor
- The kids self propose ideas to the school, build a team, request an advisor, and do research on their own,
- The kids do whatever they want without the involvement of the school,
- The kids apply to nationally competitive summer programs that select some 5%-10% of the applicants, and they do research that way.
- Individual kids send out some 500 emails to profs at various universities asking them for an opportunity to do research, and one or two respond positively
- You have a relative or a friend that is a university prof, and they let you work in their lab. This is not as common as it might seem. That prof might be across the country, and doing research on insects that you have no interest in. I have a friend who told me they are taking in interns for the summer to work at an auto company, and I proposed to my son last night, and he said he had no interest :-).
Other things you can do that don’t cost money, don’t require an external university help, and don’t even need school faculty resources:
- Kids can get together and organize a journal club. There is a small team that vets presentations, and students are allowed to present to an interested group once a week on any piece of interesting research that they recently read, in their area of interest.
I think talent used to be sprinkled around the country like that prior to the mid-1080s, when most kids applied to just a few states in their region (outside of Ivy League applicants).
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I think the way to keep AOs honest is to require all TO applicants to submit their scores upon acceptance and matriculation, the way Wesleyan does (and, the way I presume Bowdoin does, although I have not researched their policy the way I have Wesleyan’s.)
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While that would indeed be a good solution, the reasons that it can’t work are that:
A. the USA has about 7x as many students applying each year to 10x as many colleges. That would mean that even the 10 allowed by the Common App is a relatively low number, compared to the UK.
B. Colleges in the UK are all public, including Oxbridge, so that there is control, and the government can also declare that Oxford and Cambridge are equivalents. The majority of the most popular colleges in the USA are private, and, while we talk about “Ivies”, the only real thing that connects them is being in the same athletic conference. Harvard has no more connection to Yale than it has to any other college. So they have zero incentive to limit the most sought-after applicants to one or the other.
The ones who need to change their behavior are the parents and the high schools. Parents and college counselors should focus more on finding the right fit, rather than the quest for prestige, and college counselors should stop recommending that students apply to colleges which are “lottery tickets” for that student. If a student’s profile is such that maybe 1% of all similar students will be accepted to a college, the counselor should not recommend that the student add an application to that college.
Parents and students do so because people tend to be really bad and actually considering the odds, and many counselors (especially as wealthy schools, both public and private) are playing a numbers game to increase the number of acceptance to “elite” colleges that they can advertise.
Parents should change their behavior since they are the ones who are suffering most, and parents should pressure the schools to change. There is no way to pressure the colleges to change because “parents of potential applicants” are not a group which have any power over the decisions of a college, and the parents of students, students, and alumni of the “elite” colleges have no reason to push for change.
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How does this impact admissions? You were admitted TO so whether you have a 20 or 36 ACT won’t hinder your chance once in.
I said, it keeps the AOs honest. It may not have any effect on a student’s decision to apply or not to apply TO. But it disincentivizes the Adcoms from going way out on a limb for pet policies and personal agendas.
Why not use a match system similar to MD residency? In this way, a student applies once, and it’s on the universities to decide who they want from the pool. Also, why not make all protected class attributes opaque in the process?
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AFAIK Bowdoin dropped that policy during Covid, because many students legitimately had no test scores. I don’t know what will happen going forward as the UCs are test blind, so Cali students (who represent a significant proportion of US 18 year olds each year) may not have as much access to testing as they used to…the number of test sites still aren’t back to normal there, and I’m not quite sure they ever will be.
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It has no impact on admittance is my point if you submit after admitted. What am I missing ?
How does it keep an AO honest if they don’t know the score at time of application?
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