Perhaps one of the unstated reasons for high end private LACs and the like to prefer athletes in obscure preppy sports is a covert way of shifting the student demographics (i.e. richer to reduce financial aid expense and maintain a high SES environment that produces high SES socialized graduates that elite employers like, and slow the fall in white enrollment to avoid becoming unmarketable to white prospective students and donors).
One solution to this is give everyone unlimited time. When some rich schools have 7x the accommodations rate of poor schools, there’s no question this creates an unequal playing field between rich and poor. That’s unless you believe ADHD is the one unique health problem which afflicts the rich significantly more often than the poor.
“Need more, or do you wish to tell me again that rich people aren’t gaming the system?”
Your posts indicate that all rich people are gaming the system, which the numbers definitely do not show. The NYT article shows 5.8% of parents in the top 1% have accommodations, surely it would be easy for the other 94.2% to also game the system but they don’t. And you also assume that all the 5.8% that have accommodations or IEP/504s are gaming the system, which again is not a rational assumption. Yes the wealthy have an advantage, no doubt, but that doesn’t imply that all wealthy people are bad.
Yes, need more than anecdotes in the popular press.
Specifically a breakdown of how many accommodations each year for, say, genuine motor skills disabilities that affect writing ability vs the # for those vastly exaggerated, and frankly absurd, mental diagnoses such as ADHD.
In the latter cases, if a child has a cognitive deficit, then a lower test score is a legitimate indicator of his or her relative inability to do advanced abstract thinking of the sort that the test aims to measure.
Allowing extra time on an intelligence test for an ADHD-diagnosed individual is like giving a head start in the 100 meter dash to an asthma sufferer. Absurd.
This thread was started about college awareness, checks, etc. Not legacy, rich families, or other assertions. If you don’t like test accommodations, the test companies should be your targets.
MODERATOR’S NOTE: I deleted a few posts because they were wandering too far off-topic. Please stick to the topic of the thread.
"Not legacy, rich families, or other assertions. If you don’t like test accommodations, the test companies should be your targets. "
Well varsity blues is about wealthy families using test accommodations to get the score needed (either by themselves or with proctor help) as part of the scheme, so I think it’s a little relevant, of course mods make the call on that.
“That’s unless you believe ADHD is the one unique health problem which afflicts the rich significantly more often than the poor.”
I don’t but I don’t believe in the “demonization” of wealthy (not that I’m one).
I highly doubt it. UCLA gets 110K applicants, at 20% that would mean 22K applicants are being checked!
Anecdotally, my daughter last year has only seen I person from her HS asked to verify information. Her school has over 150 apply to UCLA every year. My guess is that they check 1-2% of applicants randomly.
Historically it was because the “ideal gentleman” was athletic, smart, but not TOO smart. They also liked team sports.
The WSJ article mentions some very wealthy districts, like Newton North in MA, at which 1/3 of the students have time accommodations for their standardized tests. To achieve that level requires the entire community’s acceptance.
besides, the rich game the system across the board. The fact that a qualified rich kid has a vastly higher chance of acceptance than a qualified poor kid already demonstrates that.
Since the entire purpose of the college admissions system is to identify whether a student is a good fit for a college, any action which has the purpose of making a kid look better on their application than they actually are, is gaming the system. the more money a family has, the better they can make a kid look, compared to the kid’s actual qualifications.
The entire industry of “test prep” was developed specifically to game the system. The idea behind the SATs and ACTs was to test how well students have mastered the basic material they learned in high school. Therefore, teaching them to do well on these tests, regardless of their mastery of the high school material, is gaming the system. Training a kid who can, perhaps, pull a B in pre-calc and geometry, to get an 800 on the math part of the SAT, is gaming the system.
Tutoring kids who are getting B’s in their English classes to write a “killer” colleges essay, is gaming the system. I’m not even speaking of the people who are, essentially, paying the tutors to practically write the essays for these kids (there are people who actually pay other to write colleges essays for their kids as well).
Training kids to present their ECs to look a lot more impressive is gaming the system.
Putting pressure on teachers to inflate grades is much easier for wealthy parents, and in wealthy school districts.
The rich are not evil, but seem to be less ethical, especially in obtaining their personal goals:
@MWolf Game, set, match right there…
Why would any college be spot checking a portion of all applicants? They only need to spot check the pool of applicants who are accepted - a fraction of the total. And if they consult with anyone who’s done some auditing, that person could easily design a process to identify the “high risk” applications to even better target the efforts.
Indeed. Just flag all the admits from the high net worth sports, for starters.
Or, to be more precise, all admits with a) below-average grades, b) significantly above-average family income, and c) participation in sports correlated with above-average wealth. Not likely that more than a few dozen admits satisfy all three of those criteria.
Should be easy to check actual participation in the sport claimed. Athletic.net lists results of competitions for all high school track and field events; Fencing.net does the same for fencing. There must be similar websites that report results for other high school sports.
Colleges don’t have income data for all families, only the ones that complete a financial aid app. Instead of going by family income they might need to use other indicators, one of which might be students who did not apply for aid or submit financials alone.
The scandal in the news involves athletics but it would be a mistake to assume that’s the only cheating, lying or puffing going on in college apps so colleges would be wise to design an auditing program that isn’t solely designed to check for one type of fraud.
I agree with @milee30. I’ve seem at least a few dozen CC posts by kids concerned about their own or other kid’s exaggerations or outright lies on applications. “I told my friend he could say he was VP of my club, but what if they check?” “Will schools find out that the club I started only met once?” “If I quit my sport after a week can I still put it on my application?” “My classmate says he started a nonprofit but it was really his father.” “She said she won the award but it was actually me. Will colleges think I’m lying?”
I don’t condone lying on college applications, but what we’re not talking about here is the person on the inside of the college making the admissions happen based on the lie (as in, the coaches/assistances involved in the scandal). That’s what schools should really be rooting out…fraud by their own employees. Same with the testing companies.
Saying you are going to spot fact-check applications is great from a deterrent standpoint, but IMO doesn’t really have much to do with Varsity Blues and the application lies. The reason all of these kids lied on their apps was explicitly because they were told to do so by their fraudulent college counselor as a part of a laid out scheme that involved fraudulent coaches/assistants/admissions personnel.
While I agree it’s important for colleges to put their own houses in order, I think one of the reasons coaches, parents and students were willing to be involved in fraud was the perception that no one was checking the veracity of their claims. Thirty seconds of googling would have raised a red flag when none of the “recruited athletes” showed up on the rosters of elite teams. Verification would be very simple. Just request a video of the student participating in a competition, with the event, date, and opponent noted. There’s not a parent of a high level athlete alive who couldn’t come up with one.
SAT/ACT fraud is harder to get at, and accommodations fraud harder still. When my daughter had to take a flex test for the SSAT the psychologist at whose office it was administered informed me that he was certain she had learning disability, which he would be happy to diagnose. We turned him down flat. I have two other kids with LDs and I know a neurotypical kid when I see one. I later learned that he made the exact same offer to two of her friends, kids who like her who had no discernible deficits and no need for accommodations. We reported these events to the school that recommended him.
Or even just those who matriculate. Since UCLA was mentioned, note that UCs have applicants self report high school courses and grades on the application. These are verified by final high school transcript after matriculation, a far smaller number than the number of applicants or admits.
A similar auditing process can be done in other areas (e.g. athletic or other impressive EC achievement, or claimed current low SES disadvantage but no FA application) for high fraud risk profile matriculants.
“high fraud risk profile matriculants”
Which factors do you have in mind for your “high fraud risk profile”?
AOs have trusted their coaches, development office and the testing process. They still have to do so. It’s the coach and Athletic director who vets the athletes. When your own college coach, AD are on the take, it’s a huge problem. It’s not the candidates you are betting , so much as your own people.
It is not uncommon for an elite athlete to NOT be on the highschool team. I ve seen it a lot. For some, it’s an impediment to their progress to play highschool. For my one athlete who was national level, it certainly was. But the coach would know the venues and if the athlete is the real thing. Asking the AO to verify directly from the athlete is checking up on ones own coach. Takes a lot of time and most of us are unaware of what makes an athlete competing in his/her field and what that college’s standards and needs are.
It would be very difficult for an AO to verify that the athlete is good enough to warrant a recruiting slot but it should be very easy to verify that they are on the team they claim, putting them at least in the neighborhood required for recruiting. Every elite club I’ve had experience with has information on line. If not the roster itself you should be able to find tournament photos, newspaper articles, or other information that can be found with a 20 second google search of the applicant’s name.