<p>Even assuming you’re right, the only solution anyone has proposed isn’t any better. </p>
<p>If you want to know how technically impressive the special effects in a movie are, yeah, the SFX guy isn’t an incredibly reliable source. How is taking a random sample from the SFX guy, the storyboard guy, and a couple of the actors certainly isn’t going to improve anything? The guy with a vested interest may be biased, sure, but the other people you’re going to ask won’t have any idea.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I agree it is with credibility, but philosophically I really think a randomized system defeats the purpose of a recommendation, which should function to convey the enthusiasm one can have in the right setting, what led to this enthusiasm, what qualities led to channeling this enthusiasm to success. </p>
<p>Basically, a student is evaluated in context of his/her school, and perhaps if a “rec whore” teacher writes wonderful things about every single student, with very few discerning points, this recommender’s words should be systematically eliminated. </p>
<p>To convey very specific points about a person that lead to one’s conclusions is the only way to really give a recommendation worth considering. If there are generic, happy stories in each letter, then toss the recommendation. If this teacher prepares students horribly as normalized against standardized testing, regard the grades they award with suspicion.</p>
<p>I have another proposal, which admittedly I haven’t thought through much – maybe let the teachers choose a certain fraction of the class to write recommendations for. Cap it off, and make it OK not to have letters of rec. After all, a LOR is only useful if a teacher has something to say – if there is something to really recommend, let them do it. If not, forget it – that’s just a bonus the student has to do without. No doubt, some shy students may not get much said about them, but it’s up to them to make up for this in other ways anyway, current or any system.</p>
<p>I think the problem with this new proposal is of course that teachers have to be wise about picking their students, but basically if there’s some blow-off teacher writing letters to all the favorites, at least the real good teachers can choose to write letters too. </p>
<p>Basically, I think the average interaction of teacher and student doesn’t warrant much mention – people take classes and move on. In a few cases, a student may have a lot to say about experience with a teacher, and likewise with the teacher regarding the student, and they can say something then.</p>
<p>sakky,
I think your dissatisfaction with the current holistic process that asks (and assumes) applicants will deliberately present themselves in the best light is that you fundamentally object to the human subjectivity inherent in such a decision. The fact that an applicant can be a convincing applicant but not necessarily an objectively good applicant (I assume you’d define objective good in terms of their academic success at the school) troubles you. I don’t see anything wrong with that subjectivity, though. Why shouldn’t admissions officers be evaluating applicants with respect to what they believe is in their institution’s best interests? And as these liberal arts schools say over and over, they don’t want well-rounded students, but students who excel in a certain area and/or are passionate about something. They value some combination of creativity, critical thinking, and capacity to be innovative, as well as more concrete things like intellectual, cultural, racial, and academic diversity, and prestige through good interscholastic activities. Why bother presenting applicants more objectively or wholly, as you propose to do with your “random letters of recommendation” idea? I also fail to see why a computer would do better than an admissions committee. It’s possible to program a computer with certain parameters, of course, but there’s no way to truly evaluate the range of human experience and the nuances between different applicants that shines through in letters of recommendation and personal essays. Whether you believe the current method is flawed depends on what you believe the ultimate goal of the process should be. I personally think it generally works well. But perhaps I have a flawed view of what admissions committees should be trying to achieve.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I diametrically disagree. If you want a credible analysis of the special effects of a particular movie, you would indeed ask a random sample of special effects artisans - just not that particular special effects artisan who happened to work on the movie in question. After all, other special effects artisans would understand how difficult it would be to create certain effects.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>And let me stop you right there, for that is precisely where the problem lies. First off, I never claimed that all schools should only value well-rounded students. I agree that schools should be allowed to choose whatever student body mix they want, and if they are looking for students who specialize and excel in a particular arena, then so be it.</p>
<p>The question on the table is, how would they know that the student truly does excel in that arena, or whether they’re simply claiming that they do, through a combination of tailored essay answers and misleading LOR’s. For example, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that MIT and Caltech are looking for highly technically oriented and specialized students, and therefore savvier applicants would know to customize their application specifically to ‘fit’ that profile, whether it is true or not. For example, I distinctly remember one person who had applied to MIT having specifically tailored his application to emphasize his scientific/technical interests, but then had also applied to Harvard with an application that stressed his broad-based intellectual interests. He savvily chose different teachers to write different LOR’s for each school. </p>
<p>So, again, the real issue comes down to a matter of credibility. Schools can choose to admit anybody they want, but can reliably do so only with solid information about each candidate, yet the present system encourages the candidates to market themselves to the schools, and marketing, as we all surely know, is the practice of conveying a deeply misleading distortion of the truth in order to effect a transaction (in this case, an admission decision). That dovetails with the question I expressed before: is the purpose of the LOR’s to actually obtain a true view of the student, or merely an advertising message? </p>
<p>The only possible case where the present system is sensible is if the particular attribute that the schools are looking for is self-marketing itself. If schools are simply looking to admit those students who are savvy self-promoters/self-marketers, then I would agree that the current system works very well indeed. In other words, college admissions can be viewed as a type of “Addy Awards” or “Effie Awards”, which identify the best advertisements produced each year. But then that would mean that colleges aren’t really interested in the truly most passionate student, or who has the combination of attributes that they school is looking for, but simply *who is the best at *marketing themselves as having those attributes<a href=“whether%20they%20actually%20have%20those%20attributes%20or%20not”>/i</a>.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>The issue to me is that human beings have their own agenda, which is often times hidden. For example, a school may say that they want to admit students with a particular constellation of characteristics, but that’s not to say that each and every adcom officer is actually going to adhere to that purported protocol. If one officer decides to secretly deviate by rejecting applicants based on their own personal prejudices, nobody would ever know. For example, if a adcom officer of Chinese origin secretly decides, as historical payback for the atrocities of WW2, to discriminate against all applicants with Japanese surnames, you would never really know that, especially if the officer is careful to admit a few ‘token’ Japanese applicants. That officer can always claim that those particular rejected Japanese applicants happened to write ‘poor’ essays or submit ‘unconvincing’ LOR’s and nobody would ever really know for sure. A computerized system that were to discriminate against Japanese applicants would have to be specifically programmed to do so. Hence, all prejudices would have to be made explicit.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Ah, but the rec-whore could also write rec’s with highly discerning points, crafted by the specific desires of the students themselves. I can think of quite a few teachers who asked students precisely what points they wanted the LOR’s to cover, and then (presumably) wrote LOR’s to that effect.</p>
<p>Ah, the perfection of data and finely spun computer modelling. The same brilliance that fuelled (twice) financial derivatives markets to the point of crashing the global economy and because no meaningful regulatory reform has been enacted will certainly do so again.</p>
<p>Embrace humanity folks!</p>
<p>I’ve seen some pretty strange explanations for why the financial market crashed. “Computers did it” has to take the prize, though.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Well, if the recommendation refers to actual things a student did and discusses why these are worthy of mention, regardless, is this not a good thing? One of the less popular of my recommendation writers back in the day did meet with me to discuss things I felt were important, but I guarantee you he’s not a rec whore. </p>
<p>After all, I don’t think it’s the place of a teacher to criticize character, unless there were huge issues. If there wasn’t much to say, they should not say it, and if there was, then highlighting these points even with the aid of a student is staying honest to the task! If the points indeed are discerning, meaning they provide a way to distinguish among students, and if not, it’s easy to see all the recommendations from a certain teacher are turning out somewhat the same, and they can be thrown out. </p>
<p>Now I understand that some recommendation writers may be completely misleading and utterly malicious, and misrepresent everything – presumably, though, at least there would be standardized tests and other school records if this student had serious character or academic issues the university in question needs to know about.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I do agree this is a problem though. Perhaps a compromise is, as someone said, to combine the two systems and have one chosen letter and another random error to highlight any serious problems if need be – if these exist, then the individual can call aforementioned rec writers and discuss.</p>
<p>Honestly though, I think student essays are a bigger self-promotion scheme and pretty silly, as compared to the teacher letters. This is why I think any essay component should be more informational, leading to as little subjective exposition as possible. </p>
<p>The unfortunate issue with the randomized letter solution is that students are not random creatures within the classroom – they usually behave a certain way in a certain classroom by their own personal inclination. Now having all the rec letters in the world is obviously ideal, but doing entirely away with chosen letters does harm something. If the issue is as deeply rooted as to warrant a claim that huge numbers of teachers are completely misrepresenting students, then I think the LOR system should be abolished for high schools, and should be kept to PhD admissions.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Actually, it was the perfection of human-based decision-making that lay at the roots of the global crash. Computer-based financial models can suggest various financial strategies, but it is still up to a human to decide to implement those strategies, and which computer-based models to rely upon. </p>
<p>Furthermore, I would argue that the computer-based financial models were indeed highly successful…but for those particular humans performing the implementation (as opposed to society at large). The bankers made (and continue to make) boatloads of cash, and they’re not giving any of it back. As the old joke goes, when investments perform well, bankers become rich through giant bonuses, but when investments sour, oh well, the bankers merely lost somebody else’s money. The computer-based models therefore did indeed accomplish their true purpose, which was to enrich the bankers. The models were not designed to enrich the rest of society.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I don’t know that a huge number of teachers are misrepresenting students. I suspect the number is relatively small. The real issue is that that small number may bestow preferential admissions upon their students to the top schools, which are all highly selective and hence admit only a small percentage of their applicants. Those schools may therefore not be admitting the truly ‘best’ students - however the school chooses to define ‘best’ - but rather are preferentially admitting those students who market themselves as being the ‘best’, which, as mentioned before, is acceptable only if self-marketing is itself the trait that the college is seeking. Surely we can all think of products on the marketplace that succeed not through inherent product quality, but rather through clever marketing. Similarly, many excellent products fail because of poor marketing. {For example, while Citizen Kane may arguably be the greatest movie of all time, it was also a commercial failure due to poor marketing.} One therefore has to wonder just how many students were rejected from colleges that they should have been admitted to and which would have fit them perfectly simply because they couldn’t market themselves well, e.g. if their school just didn’t happen to have a ‘rec whore’ who would provide a LOR stating whatever the student needed to have said to construct a compelling admissions ‘advertisement’.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Something clicked, and I am seeing why you harp on the randomization, and agree with your logic, but let me give some details, for it’s a subtle distinction between our approaches.</p>
<p>I * do not believe* in using “character” measures in admissions, beyond checking for exceptional circumstances – only proved dedication and ability, not potential with very little in terms of hard facts to support it, realistically can be recognized. I think for instance an individual who got straight C’s in a year that, say, they were battling poor health, may be “excused” if their subsequent progress changed and was on par with others – i.e. throw out data that is just an outlying situation. Basically, if someone is working very hard, that’s not a “good” quality by itself – they should use their hard work to do something and then write about it. This “something” need not be getting straight A’s, but it should be something hard and fast showing the tenacity.</p>
<p>Now the problem is, colleges do seem to content themselves with believing they can get a good idea of character and use it to judge the student. The failure is twofold: in misrepresented letters of rec and self-advertisement both in that form and in the student essays, which frequently are on strange topics, not crisp, information-based ones. And, this leads to a set of human beings deciding the fates of students’ admissions who can realistically justify anything by saying “they saw the whole application.” I find it completely ludicrous how this has become a punchline – the whole application contains something, but the most honest admissions folk, some who posted on CC, have acknowledged that it’s still not much.</p>
<p>So what I was proposing was making the teacher LORs very information-based, and even more stringently, the student essays – to give examples of specific things the student has done to succeed, and to discuss student plans in relation to what the student has done. If one is to speak to general character, undoubtedly a randomized mechanism is the only way to get anything meaningful. I understand, Sakky, that you’re acknowledging the reality that colleges do in fact seem to try to judge character in a much less concrete sense than I’d define it, and for that judgement, randomization only makes sense.</p>
<p>The way I see it, they should stop guessing, and let the LORs be information-based, and have its purpose be to highlight things a student does that show promise, mainly academically – or, for that matter, get LORs from someone who can be witness to extracurricular involvement. It would, for this goal, only make sense for a student to choose reliable rec-writers who can provide a good picture of information, because they know the student well – else, the recommendation would be useless for its purposes. Whereas when the motive is to judge character, a student’s motive would be to pick a “rec whore.”</p>
<p>I think, again, I am modeling the way things go after the ideal of PhD admissions, where a “rec whore” and “character” are significantly diminished in favor of specific ways a student shows promise.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>To sort of phrase my above a little differently, I’m a skeptic as to whether the way some define “best” as you call it is even realistic or possible to be determined, and believe a more conservative definition ought to be given, and admissions criteria be adjusted as such. </p>
<p>I guess I believe that character is the sort of thing that cannot be measured through an application, and one must trust a class to distribute itself with various characters around – some arrogant, ludicrous, obnoxious snobs, some taciturn, etc. Further, judging character without a lengthy interview is one of the most ludicrous things.</p>
<p>Consensus: if one is to keep “character sorting” in the picture, then there should a) be your randomized letter system to check for it, b) an interview, c) LORs that are more information/experience based CHOSEN specifically based on what a student is excited about, and meant to highlight concrete things a student has been witnessed doing by example, substantiated by things like grades, test scores, awards, etc. This is what I meant by “character” earlier, which is different from what you mean – I’m talking of what an individual does when actually interested in something, not an overall picture. Sure, if your definition of character is to be measured at all, randomization is the only way. And you’re justified in harping because colleges do seem to have your definition of character in mind.</p>