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New research in the journal PLOS ONE has found that admissions officers appear to favor applicants with better grades at institutions where everyone is earning high grades over applicants with lower grades at institutions with more rigorous grading. The research is based on an experiment involving 23 admissions officers and on long-term, real data on applicants to four competitive M.B.A. programs.
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<p>Another reason not to trust the "holistic" judgements of admissions officers.</p>
It sounds like the experiment was flawed. The researchers apparently didn’t communicate the principles clearly or the AO’s didn’t follow them. In other words, if the transcripts are fake then the names of the colleges should be fake too except maybe all marked as say “top 20”. AO’s then should be asked to act solely on the context provided. The reputation of an institution as a factor in admission decisions is a whole other measure.</p>
<p>As a general rule, this is true. I always say that a B at Rigorous Prep (or in an AP course) does not an A at Public High (or a regular course) equate.</p>
<p>^^yes but the primary research for this paper which was supposed to be conducted in a more controlled manner wasn’t done properly. Also, it’d be helpful to publish some raw data or at least some stats to make a more convincing case.</p>
<p>I can see your point. I guess it may also show that an institution’s reputation for grading practices may be worth more than actual data on what their grading practices are.</p>
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<p>(Just posting this for those not clicking through to read the link.)</p>
<p>Is it common in these fields to publish raw data?</p>
<p>* In one study, college counsellors were given information about a group of high-school students and asked to predict their freshman grades in college. The counsellors had access to test scores, grades, the results of personality and vocational tests, and personal statements from the students, whom they were also permitted to interview. Predictions that were produced by a formula using just test scores and grades were more accurate.*</p>
<p>Holistic admissions allows other factors to be taken into consideration and this study doesn’t read or sound like a judgement of holistic admissions. That judgement is an over reach based on what is presented. It does show that people have biases they find difficult to overcome. They’d rather have a 4.0 student from any school than a 3.0 student from a very hard school.</p>
<p>And that doesn’t prove that the admissions decisions were wrong in any way.</p>
<p>If the alternative to holistic admissions is a strict by-the-numbers approach, I don’t see how that addresses the problem of rewarding grade inflation. It would only exacerbate it.</p>
<p>That’s what’s happened in law school admissions which by all accounts is now almost entirely numbers-driven, except at Yale and Stanford, and possibly to a lesser degree Harvard. Law school deans attribute it to the tyranny of the US News rankings; they carefully guard their GPA and LSAT medians because these factors weigh so heavily in the US News rankings, and the Dean can’t afford to be the one who allowed the school’s US News ranking to slip. So they will freely acknowledge that, other things equal, they’ll admit a 3.8 from East Podunk State over a 3.7 from Harvard. (Of course, other things are often not equal; most importantly, the Harvard applicant is much more likely to have a high LSAT score, which weighs even more heavily in law school rankings, but if the LSATs are both above or both below the school’s target median, the 3.8 will generally be chosen before the 3.7).</p>
<p>Did you actually read the study itself? The IHE article is a science writing article. The actual journal article is at PLoS One, and is linked in the article. The method is explained more thoroughly, and there are statistical results there.</p>
<p>The researchers did use 9 fictional colleges/universities in the study. The word “reputation” was referring to the reputation of an institution as a soft/hard grader.</p>
<p>To test whether the candidate’s success in the admissions process was predicted by the grading norms of their alma maters, we gave participants a simplified admissions decision task with two main pieces of information on each of nine candidates: their GPAs and the distribution from which each GPA came…Participants knew that the nine* fictional** institutions from which the nine applicants came did not differ in quality or selectivity. Grading norms at the different institutions were therefore uninformative with respect to student quality.*</p>
<p>Also, the researchers did not tell the AOs the principles of the study because that was the whole point. They didn’t want to tell the AOs to take into account the grade distributions; they wanted to see if they would do it independently. They told the AOs to simply select the best candidates among all applicants, and then after the experiment, asked them how they made the selections. The officers <em>said</em> that their selections were partially based upon grade distributions, but the analysis belied that thought.</p>
<p>And no, it is not common to publish raw data.</p>
<p>I can surmise that those schools with the mean highest GPA’s were also some of the most selective undergrads in the country. So, holistic works, if prestige be your priority – MBA programs are big into prestige – and a 3.5 from Yale undergrad (mean) beats a 3.5 from Directional State U (mean = 2.9) nearly every time.</p>
<p>“Another study considered more than 30,000 recent applicants to elite business schools, and again found that those from more lenient undergraduate institutionsdetermined by measuring average GPAs at those schoolshad a better shot at acceptance than did those who attended more rigorous schools.”</p>
<p>“GPA of admitted students is a factor in USNWR rankings”</p>
<p>How do you explain that employers also hire high-GPA graduates regardless of difficulty of majors and courses? They are not ranked by USNWR.</p>
<p>The fact is that when you get CDs with hundreds of resumes from the college placement offices for only a dozen spots, the GPA is just a very convenient cutoff metric, niceties be damned.</p>
<p>Actually, GPA is not a factor in the US News college rankings. “Selectivity” counts for 15% of a school’s total score. Selectivity in turn has 3 components: acceptance rate (10% of selectivity score = 1.5% of total score), percentage of entering freshmen who were in the top 10% of their HS class (40% of selectivity score = 6% of total score), and SAT/ACT medians (50% of selectivity score = 7.5% of total score). For “regional” colleges and universities, they use percentage in the top 25% of HS class instead of top 10%.</p>
<p>Thus HS GPAs affect a college’s US News ranking only if, and to the extent that, GPA affects the applicant’s class rank. For applicants from schools that don’t rank, GPA matters not a whit for the admitting college’s US news ranking. And all GPAs that place the applicant in the top 10% of applicant’s HS class are just as good, and all GPAs that place the applicant outside the top 10% are just as bad, as far as US News is concerned.</p>
<p>If college adcoms are easily wowed by high GPAs, it’s not because they have an eye on their US News rankings.</p>