<p>Is Prof. Schwartz's call for top colleges to select randomly from a pool of 'Good Enough' disrespectful? It is, no doubt, designed to push quite a few buttons - he is a psychologist after all. His proposal to honor the "good enough" tackles the concept of "best fit" head on and also promises to virtually do away with the concept of "reach, match, safety" - and yes, it brooks no exception for special talents etc. I remember a few years ago, several students competed for a coveted local academic award and, unable to decide between 3 brilliant students the teacher decided to resort to a tirage au sort and the name of the winner was literally plucked out of a hat. Really though, it is not hard to imagine the upshot when word leaked out that the final choice was based on chance - most felt cheated. </p>
<p>BTW, mini - I am surprised by your posts as well and agree with several other posters above that the gist of the article is not that the admissions process is a crapshoot. Yes, just like the NYS lottery, you have to be in it to win it - low income kids who are qualified should be encouraged to apply in greater numbers. But, doesn't Schwartz just take the rather hackneyed message we get just about every year when it is time for wait lists to come out one step farther, which is that for every class of students holding a coveted admit there is a more or less equal number of equally qualified students who are certainly "good enough" and could (and sometimes do) fill a spot in that class?</p>
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In the college-admissions game, both the applicants and the institutions are behaving like what I have elsewhere called "maximizers." Both believe that only the best will do. Research by my colleagues and I has shown that such maximizing is a self-defeating strategy...</p>
<p>Many years ago, the social scientists Detlof von Winterfeldt and Ward Edwards articulated what they called the "principle of the flat maximum." The principle asserts that in many situations involving uncertainty -- and college choice is certainly such a situation, from the perspectives of both applicants and institutions -- the likely outcomes of many choices are effectively equivalent. Or, to put it perhaps more accurately, the degree of uncertainty makes it impossible to know which excellent school (or student) will be better than which other excellent school (or student). Said another way, there are many "right" choices.</p>
<p>Uncertainty of outcomes makes the hair-splitting to distinguish among excellent colleges or students a waste of time and effort. There is more uncertainty about the quality of the student-college match than there is variation among colleges -- at least within the set of excellent, selective colleges. So once a set of "good enough students" or "good enough colleges" has been identified, it probably doesn't matter very much which one you choose; and if it does matter, there is no way to know in advance (because of the inherent uncertainty) what the right choice is.</p>
<p>Given that both institutions and students are distorting their goals in what amounts to a fool's errand, is there anything, other than hand-wringing, to be done? After all, selective colleges can admit only so many students; if 10 times that many seek admission, competition seems inevitable.</p>
<p>Not so. There is a simple step that selective institutions can take that will sharply reduce competition and thus change the distorted adolescence that many of our most talented students now experience. All that is required is this: When Harvard, Stanford, Yale, and Swarthmore get their applications, they can scrutinize them -- using the same high standards they currently use -- and identify students good enough to be admitted. Let's assume that would cut the pool by half or two-thirds. Then the names of all the "good enough" applicants could be placed in a metaphorical hat, and the "winners" drawn at random. While high-school students might have to distort their lives to be the "best" to gain admission to Harvard, they won't have to distort their lives nearly so much to be "good enough." The only reason that would remain for participating in all those enrichment programs and attending high-powered pre-schools would be interest, not competitive advantage.</p>
<p>This modest proposal may seem preposterous at first blush, but it isn't. There is little doubt that any random fifth of the applicants who might survive an initial screening would make a fine first-year class at Harvard. Stanford could fill its entering class with applicants who had near-perfect scores on their SAT's and still have plenty with such scores left over.</p>
<p>Further, while admissions people like to believe that they have the discernment to look at 8,000 wonderful applicants and pick, with high accuracy, the 1,600 "superwonderful" ones, there is a huge literature on decision making, much of it reviewed in a classic article in Science 15 years ago by Robyn M. Dawes, David Faust, and Paul E. Meehl, which makes clear that people in such positions are much more confident of their abilities than the data warrant. In other words, picking a fifth of the 8,000 at random might be just as good a way of producing a great class as the tortured scrutiny of folders that is the present practice.</p>
<p>It is easy to understand why admissions officers might deceive themselves into inflating their powers of discernment. After all, every year they admit a class, and it does just fine -- even better than fine. So they must be doing something right, they tell themselves. That is an example of what psychologists call "confirmation bias." The real test of discernment would be to admit the near-miss rejects and see how well they do. To my knowledge, no one has done that particular experiment.</p>
<p>In discussing this proposal with friends and colleagues, I have heard several objections. First, people argue that in a meritocracy like ours, anything as important as college admissions should not be determined by a roll of the dice. To that I have two responses: If you accept the principle of the flat maximum, which particular selective school a student attends is not that important. And if you accept how imperfectly admissions are currently done, it is largely a crapshoot already. We just pretend that it isn't.</p>
<p>Second, people argue that all a proposal like mine does is focus competition on getting to the right side of the cutoff line between good enough and not. As long as the competition continues, and applications keep looking better and better, the cutoff line will be nudged upward and nothing will have been accomplished. To that, I also have two responses: Nothing short of total randomness in admissions decisions can eliminate competition completely. And admissions professionals must resist the temptation to keep adjusting their criteria upward. If they have a sound idea of what a "good enough" applicant looks like, there is no reason why they should change it because some applications appear to exceed it by a wide margin. For my proposal to work, colleges must honestly adhere to the "good enough" criterion.</p>
<p>Third, people point out that an admissions procedure like mine would have no effect unless many, if not all, selective colleges adopt it. That is true, and since colleges and universities are not permitted to collude in setting admissions procedures, one can only hope that many institutions would see the good sense in the proposal and embrace it...
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<p><a href="http://chronicle.com/free/v51/i25/25b02001.htm%5B/url%5D">http://chronicle.com/free/v51/i25/25b02001.htm</a></p>