Glimpse video for ED app

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I wonder why these schools are giving kids the opportunity to submit a video. Why would they want to have a visual image of their applicants? This is a real mind-bender.

There’s a lot written about this in various places and professional counselors will tell you why:

1. International candidates: a lot of people have others write their essays, especially coming from international communities. They want to make sure the kids will be able to participate in class; speaking English well.

2. On the domestic front, they want to see a full picture of the candidate, especially when there is not an interview. They are not looking for room of wallflowers, nor are they looking for a room full of, gregarious social kids. They want a mix. They’ll be able to tell who “fits” what they are looking for.

Note that it’s obviously subject to the AO own biases and preferences. Plan accordingly.

You impute good faith to the schools and I hope you are right. I feared it was a workaround to circumvent the recent Supreme Court ruling and enabling AOs to go back to emphasizing race in admissions.

I seem to recall back in the 1900s sending in a photo with my college apps, so isn't this along those lines?

[Anonymous]

The Midd and wake reps told my kid they should plan to do it if they are serious.

And to consider it like an optional essay. Those essays are not optional!!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The Midd and wake reps told my kid they should plan to do it if they are serious.

And to consider it like an optional essay. Those essays are not optional!!

The advice an admissions rep gave to my daughter when they visited her school:

- they seriously recommend that she does the video
- They are trying to put a face to a name.
- just sit at your kitchen table and talk about a minute about one of the prompts,
- videos that you see online are not typical. Those are the usually by influencers. (You could imagine that someone with a YouTube channel, would probably have a more production-quality video than the average applicant; and they are soliciting for a “like and subscribe”

[Anonymous]

what are people doing for this? transcript and kid memorizes or reads it out?

[Anonymous]

Fit in?! That’s funny. This is 100% about identifying minority applicants. Anyone can join their school’s African American Student Club so they can’t go off of that. Not every minority applicant will weave it into their essay. Please don’t kid yourself that this is anything else.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The Midd and wake reps told my kid they should plan to do it if they are serious.

And to consider it like an optional essay. Those essays are not optional!!

The advice an admissions rep gave to my daughter when they visited her school:

- they seriously recommend that she does the video
- They are trying to put a face to a name.
- just sit at your kitchen table and talk about a minute about one of the prompts,
- videos that you see online are not typical. Those are the usually by influencers. (You could imagine that someone with a YouTube channel, would probably have a more production-quality video than the average applicant; and they are soliciting for a “like and subscribe”

They sure are. Lol.
A skin color to a name is more exact.

[Anonymous]

What about kids who are pale/fair skinned and have Hispanic sounding last names?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Great way to spot diversity candidates with the box no longer there !

I think this is more about weeding out kids with ghost writers for their essays and getting at who the kid really is.

[Anonymous]

this seems to open them up to so much suspicion, Im surprised they lean into that.

I know colleges need to see which international kids have fluid English. That's been a big problem. But the rest .. who knows

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:this seems to open them up to so much suspicion, Im surprised they lean into that.

I know colleges need to see which international kids have fluid English. That's been a big problem. But the rest .. who knows

No one trusts typed text anymore, because of AI. My kid has one high school teacher who requires all essays to be handwritten, another who wants everything delivered as an oral presentation (on video, so it doesn’t eat up class time). This way, even assuming the kids get the text from AI, they have to devote serious effort to copying it out and/or memorizing and presenting it orally. And these teachers obviously know the kids in person, so they’re not trying to suss out minorities.

[Anonymous]

It's really smart.

The purpose is probably not as much to identify minorities but to identify non-minorities who are PRETENDING to be minorities.

I know that at our school there are quite a few Asians and white kids in the "black student alliance" this year. This never used to be the case. (Yes, certainly they could be allies but it's an organization meant for black students and black students were the only members until 2024).

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Great way to spot diversity candidates with the box no longer there !

I think this is more about weeding out kids with ghost writers for their essays and getting at who the kid really is.

Yes definitely

And there’s a reason international students have been doing this for a while (several years).

[Anonymous]

But what if you are a bad orator?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:But what if you are a bad orator?

If you can't record a 90 second video then why would a college want you? How the heck are you going to have a job in a few short years?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:But what if you are a bad orator?

For Brown at least, the only requirement is for the prospective student to say their name and high school. After that you can do what you want. The student doesn't necessarily have to be the star as long as the video is still about the student, if that makes sense.

The speculation that this is a way of identifying non-minorities posing as minorities is interesting. Brown's came about during COVID, to replace interviews. It is more equitable in that sense (since not all people had access to an interviewer). But, it still creates some equity issues in terms of access to resources. That's why highly edited/high production techniques could not be well received.

What I often think about is security - while most kids today are pretty comfortable having their video/face out there, Brown (and others) must need to have some pretty significant security in place to ensure someone cannot access all these videos, each of which puts a name of a minor to a specific face to specific high school. I think the legal challenge may lie there, not in the affirmative action sense.

My kid did one. I think it's good, but I also hope it's not a large data point on which they base any decisions - i think some kids may give it outsize importance since it's different (supplemental essays have all started to sound the same at this point). And that may be part of this - it's possible, but trickier, to repurpose these videos for different schools.