is it just me, or have we screwed ourselves?

Applying to College
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which means that your average bwrk doesn't stand a chance.

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Well then, how is this "fair"?</p>

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<p>No, you still have to play the game to get into the 2nd, 3rd, and even 4th tier schools, it's just a different game. All schools except the very lowest have admissions requirements, and you still have to meet them. They just get easier and easier to meet the lower you go.</p>

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<p>The College Board and Princeton Review are not some national agencies appointed by Congress. They are private companies responding to a market need. What would be their motivation for changing the system when they are making good money with the current one?</p>

<p>And there is no such thing as "the american public educational system," no one monolith that can move in one direction or another to change the need for assessment. There are thousands of separate little public educational systems. Every school district is its own little system, governed by it's own school board and overseen 50 different state school boards. </p>

<p>What puts "all the cards" in the hands of the top schools is simply supply and demand. Way more kids want to attend these schools than they can possibly accomodate. They have to choose among all the candidates somehow - hence the need for assessment to sort them all out. And thus arises College Board to help them with that task; and thus arises Princeton Review to help the applicants with their task. </p>

<p>And how would we propose to change that huge demand? Are we back to a pointless and ineffective boycott?</p>

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<p>sarorah: i said that the criteria were fair, not the industry designed around appealing to them.</p>

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<p>coureur: well with that thinking, we can all say that any system that is established has a pragmatic application and should never be changed. also, in the context of fpublic schooling in america, standards of assessment and teaching have gotten so far that we can acknowledge one massive school system, even if they are divided into individual school systems. No Child Left Behind certainly made a very large move towards standardizing schools across the nation,especially in terms of accessment.
while i acknowledgfe that a massive boycott would not work, there are solutions that could, such as the focusing of education on actually learning how to think, not what to think. also, if we focus on the personality of students more than anything else, we just might find that there are people out there that want the smae things and are willing to work for it, just that our current state of education doesn't give them many options. we've created a nation in which excess money equals learning, equals knowledge, and equals success towards college. that must change. </p>

<p>or are we going to stay in an insensible and reprehensible game, only fooling ourselves into thinking that this is the way it has to work?</p>

<p>thisyearsgirl: numbers lie, and are primary tools to do nothing more than separate the smart from the dumb, etc. in my state, georgia, on the numerous assessments we take, if your form is the right form, you don't even have to get half of the questions right to pass. the sat is somewhat the same way. there are numberous forms and different ways of scaling those scores. in terms of gpa and rank, looking at the example i provided earlier, numbers can easily become skewed and people that take easy classes can end up on the top, while those that take ap courses end up in the middle. and always, these numbers can be adjusted as one wishes with a quick visit to the princeton review or kaplan office.</p>

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<p>one large school system? Not even close. And no child left behind is just in the public schools. A large number of American kids are in parochial schools and a smaller but significant number in privates. </p>

<p>Do you think colleges are fooled by the 4.0 applicant who took easy classes? For top colleges it is required to take the hardest classes and still get the highest grades in them.</p>

<p>Maybe you think better than those who rank higher than you, but I think there's a good chance that you don't. If you're telling us that you have depth of knowledge that will be missed by colleges, your enhanced understanding of the world should have told you that you needed to apply it if your goal was a top school.</p>

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<p>britishkid: the fundamental issue with your suggestion to focus on personality instead of numbers is that there are many kids with wonderful personalities but whose intelligence is below average. the purpose of college is, after all, to provide an education--not to develop lovely personalities--and there will always be enough brilliant kids (with or without prep courses) to fill up all of the top schools without scraping at the bottom of the applicant pool. </p>

<p>SEPARATING THE 'SMART' FROM THE 'DUMB' [sic] IS NOT A BAD THING. it benefits everyone to be in an environment where everyone is of roughly the same intelligence. i honestly don't think that letting kids of average intelligence into elite schools would solve anything, because one of the reasons high school is so inefficient is that students with completely different abilities are grouped together in the same classes. as a result, either (1) the attention is focused on the best and brightest while all others fall behind, or (2) the course is designed to appeal to the lowest common denominator and the smart kids are ignored or seen as troublemakers. in my experience it's always been the latter, but i'll try not to let my personal gripes get in the way of the argument.</p>

<p>i don't think that the problem is caused by separating smart (that is, 'academically successful'--it's a politically correct world) kids from average ('otherwise talented') kids. the real issue is the rift between the smart kids themselves: rich smart kids and poor smart kids, or smart kids with marketable interests, or smart kids who find their passion at age three and work from there, as compared to undecided smart kids who are still sampling their options.</p>

<p>and britishkid, it's true that you can boost your gpa by taking easy classes. but you have to remember that the most selective colleges look at the strength of your curriculum and how challenging it is compared to what your high school offers. if a high school offers 15 ap classes and a kid only takes college prep, she's not going to get into harvard even if she has straight a's. there are more than enough overachievers with straight a's AND the 15 ap classes for them to fill a class just based on that. (i'm exagerating, but you know what i mean.)</p>

<p>no, i don't think it's fair to buy a perfect score or skew the odds in any other way. it's an imperfect system, but it's as close to fair as we're going to get, if only because people are lazy but ambitious and will always find a shortcut in.</p>

<p>or do you have a better suggestion?</p>

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oh my god, yes. (so tired of this argument...)</p>

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<p>I think everyone would agree that teaching students how to think is a Good Thing. Saying that is rather like boldly coming out in favor of love and motherhood. But that doesn't address the fundamental problem --> how to decide who gets the scarce seats in the top schools. After we have trained all these scholars to think, we are still faced with how decide which among the hundreds of thousands who want places at the top 50 schools will get them. So we are back to staring at what you call "assessment".</p>

<p>I certainly don't think that the current system is ideal nor that reform is impossible. But I do think it works reasonably well given the legal, social, and cultural constraints in which it must work. It's not some evil system designed by bad people to keep good people down. The current system has evolved for the better over time and will continue to do so.</p>

<p>One mistake in your earlier complaint was thinking that the College Board or Princeton Review are part of the problem. They are just selling ways to help deal with the problem. And any fundamental change in the current system that will come about really will happen one school district at a time and one school board at a time. To say otherwise reveals a naive notion of how US schools are actually run.</p>

<p>In your first post in this thread you boasted that you could apply your knowledge better than the top 5 kids in your class who are ranked far above you academically. Okay, let's see you put your thinking powers to good use and suggest some SPECIFIC and workable alternatives (not just vague generalities) to the current system that permit us to teach all students how to think and focuses on the personality of each student, and yet, in a reasonably fair and objective way, allows for the top schools to identify and select the top students. What would such a system look like?</p>

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<p>I think I have to agree with the bulk of the opinion here and say that while the current system is obviously imperfect, it's clearly a lot better than most of the alternatives, and in particular, is a whole lot better than what the system used to be just a few generations ago. Just think about how the system used to be. Even as recently as the late 60's, several elite schools still refused to admit women (Yale and Princeton waited until 1969 to become fully coed, a move that was bitterly resented by many alumni). Elite universities also used to practice blatant discrimination, not just against specific races such as African-Americans, but also against Catholics, Jews, Asians, and basically anybody who wasn't a rich WASP. Back in those days, admissions was far less meritocratic than it is today. This is how mediocre high school students, but who came from prominent families, got into elite schools. Bush got into Yale, Kennedy and Al Gore got into Harvard, yet none of them were exactly star high-school students. Al Gore graduated barely in the top 50% of his high school class (he graduated 25th out of a class of 51), yet Harvard admitted him anyway. </p>

<p>But that's how the game was played in those days. A poor and unpriviliged person has a far far better chance of getting into an elite school these days than he/she did in the past. The system is obviously not perfectly meritocratic, but it is far more meritocratic than it used to be.</p>

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<p>The extremely selective admissions system is only there because Americans are so brand conscious. "There are at least a hundred American universities whose academic resources are indistinguishable from Harvard's." In fact, I have read repeatedly that a problem with Harvard is that the faculty is oriented towards research and not undergraduate education. Still, everyone tries to get a slot in the top 10, 20 or 50 schools because of their brand consciousness. </p>

<p>The above quote is from Jay Mathews who wrote "Harvard Schmarvard". He is a Wash Post reporter and a Harvard graduate.</p>

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<p>Probably true, but how do you propose to remedy that? Put ads on MTV beseeching teenagers not to be so brand conscious?</p>

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<p>I don't think that there is a solution that can be imposed, but things run in cycles. At some time in the future, the economy will go bad and less kids will go to college, or there will just be less kids because the population is aging. The real problem, at least to me, is the brand conciousness. Even if the number of kids applying to colleges did decrease dramatically, everyone would still be applying to Harvard in enough numbers to fill it ten times over. Until something does change, we are stuck with it. Parents can probably ease their own problems and those of their kids by not emphasizing the importance of being accepted at an HYPSM school (i.e. a "decent" school). In my experience, high schoolers would not be so obsessed over going to the HYPSM's unless the adults around them made it seem so important.</p>

<p>This isn't the biggest problem that the world is facing, either. :)</p>

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<p>Yes. This is exactly the point I was trying to make to the OP.</p>

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<p>I love The FountainHead ;)</p>

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<p>Mathews writes nothing but drivel. I've read some of his articles and they just lack substance. He's merely a high-minded pontificator, and his comments about Hernandez are completely false. In reality, Hernandez has done far more to help college applicants than Mathews ever has.</p>

<p>Avoid his writings like the Black Death!</p>

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<p>I think there are three books that are worth looking at:
"A is for Admissions" by Michele Hernandez
"Admissions Confidential" by Rachel Toors
"Harvard Schmarvard" by Jay Mathews</p>

<p>Michele Hernandez was a asst director of admissions at Dartmouth. "A is for Admissions" gives the impression that the process is working great. It is staffed by competent and high trained admissions officers who are doing a great job, and making correct decisions. Getting into one of the top colleges is the only worthy goal of a high school senior, and getting into one of the ultra selective schools is extremely important in ensuring one's future success and happiness. If you don't get in, then that is Social Darwinism at work. Of the three books, hers might be the most helpful in getting in.</p>

<p>Rachel Toors who wrote "Admissions Confidential" was an admissions officer at Duke. She demonstrates the randomness of the admissions process in who gets in and who doesn't, and is slightly cynical about the whole process. There is no attempt to glorify the role of admissions officers. (Her book is marred somewhat, at least to my mind, by some irrelevant details of her personal life such as the fact that she used to have a pet pig.) Of the three books, hers will help you best understand the process.</p>

<p>Jay Mathew's "Harvard Schmarvard" reads exactly like a Washington Post story of which I have read many. His book will not help you get into an ultra selective schools. His point is more to show, in a reporter's way, how irrational the system works and how you getting into an ultra selective school is not going to improve you life. As a reporter, he quotes a lot of people and refers to statistical studies. He also offers advice of his own on how to deal with everything. Of the three books, his will put the whole process into perspective.</p>

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<p>I'd add Getting</a> In: Inside the College Admissions Process by Bill Paul to the list. It deals specifically with Princeton admissions, but much of it can be applied to other schools. Paul, himself a Princeton alumnus, follows five very qualified applicants through the process, and the focus on specific individuals makes for a more riveting read (you really want to know what happens to these kids). You learn just how accomplished applicants to top schools really are, but also how to avoid stupid mistakes--like rushing through the entire application the night before the deadline--that could ruin the chances for even the most promising applicant.</p>

<p>I hope I don't sound like a promotional ad, but I found it to be helpful.</p>

<p>(don't know why this post is randomly capitalized while the others aren't...oh, well.)</p>