So if it can all be faked, how should college admissions work?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I'm from the UK so that is the system I'm most familiar with, and I think that works to identify merit (though there are still the problems of how to create opportunities for people with disadvantaged backgrounds). But the reason it can be done is that there are standardized tests of all the subjects in every school (A Levels). Those are not tests like SATs, they are more like APs, but they are taken by everyone in the subjects of their choice. The offer you get from a university in the UK is typically conditional on your A level results (e.g. 3As). There is almost no consideration of extra curricular activities, sports is not a factor at all because there are no college sports in the same way as here, and although legacy might be a thing for a small number of people, it's very limited and is not a factor that concerns people. It's really just about your predicted, then actual, A Level results, and, to show your track record, your GCSE results (the standardized national exams everyone takes at 16 in about 10 subjects).

This - I like this. Let's do this. My question is - can you cheat on your O and A levels?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:We should educate everybody.

Education should not be a culling process.

Get rid of SAT/ACT.

Some people really don't need college/won't succeed in college.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:We should educate everybody.

Education should not be a culling process.

Get rid of SAT/ACT.

But where does gaming the system (ie: the mediocre wanting to be top tier) stop?

Who care if a few "medicirce" (in your opinion) goes to a top college.

Most successful people were mediocre students.

Except that everyone thinks they are UMC/better than mediocre. Look around.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:1. Increase the security around proctors and test sites for SAT and ACT. I think over the years people have been complaining about it getting too strict or creating too many "barriers" but I think this scandal should shut that down.

2. Increase the scrutiny around getting extended time waivers on testing. If I were a parent of a child that actually needed this accommodation, I would be LIVID that people have been using this, and thereby making it that much more difficult for my child to be given appropriate accommodations. If a person is going to be granted this, they have to have an already demonstrated record of a 504, IEP, etc. that can't suddenly develop this need in their Junior year, unless it can be clearly documented why the new need. (I think in another thread someone mentioned a child receiving a concussion, and I could see that being a reason for a new need for accommodation. Even with those accommodations, see my first point--the sites where these test are done and the proctors doing them must be held to a highly secure standard.

3. For the coaching/recruit side of this. It must be a required part of the work of coaches that they:
a. Are responsible for demonstrating they have confirmed the validity of the student athlete they are designating as a recruit. This is super easy to do. Verifiable scores/rankings, etc. can be obtained from independent sources.
b. They must submit reports each year documenting the participation of students that they identified as recruits in previous years. We all know that sometimes there are instances that a student might be recruited but ultimately not play, but there needs to be transparency about it. If student didn't participate for legitimate reasons, there's no reason to hide that information.

4. I think this one might be harder, but...
I would like to see legislation that puts some kind of prohibition against colleges or universities accepting donations from anyone with a child ages 12-20. Like I said, probably really hard to make illegal, so instead perhaps it's about reporting, transparency, spotlight, shaming.
-Make donation information easy to access and reported annually in a consistent format across all institutions (similar to the Common Data Set.)
-Require reporting that shows the names of currently enrolled students who's families have made donations to the schools.
Hopefully, this will discourage schools from accepting these "pay-for-play" students because it will be damaging to their reputation.

Anyway, that's a start....

I'm sorry but eliminate accomodations. If you think that is needed let everyone take as long as they want...[/quote]

+1

Fairness across the board.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Let just start here...

Eliminate all preferences (athletics, recommendations, legacy, etc.)

Eliminate the essay (perhaps get written directly from school but really not even that)

except athletes and high level art are more successful than the general student.

How about no students that aren't athletes or in the arts.

So... they'll be more successful in highschool

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Ditch the SATs, the essay and the extracurricular stuff.

Have entrance exam that test subject matter knowledge. There will not a be single student in the USA who can score 100% on all of them.

Combine that score with the GPA and take the top x students. Done!

+1

Change the exam every year, so there is no over prepping and cheating off last years exams.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Here’s a better system:

Take sports out of the admissions process. All the college teams can become clubs (much like the European soccer clubs) that are affiliated with the university. Athletes can be paid and they get to take classes part time at the college.

In addition to removing sports from the college application, remove extracurriculars as well. Admission should be granted based upon SAT scores, GPA and AP exam grades. College as an academic experience should be based on academic performance. All students should be given AP tests for free - much like the English A-level exams. I understand that whatever system exists will be games but grades from 3 separate unconnected institutions (SAT, GPA, AP) seems like the best approach. Things like “fit” and extracurriculars make it way too easy for the wealthy to game the system.

David Leonhardt, NYT editorial board member, makes the same argument in his newsletter today, with a study to back it up.

The admissions scandal

Getting a peek inside the college-admissions process isn’t easy. But a team of academic researchers managed to do so several years ago. It helped, no doubt, that two of the researchers were former college presidents — William Bowen of Princeton and Eugene Tobin of Hamilton.

The researchers were given access to anonymous admissions records at 19 elite colleges and then analyzed how admissions offices treated different groups of students. Low-income students, for example, were no more likely to be admitted than otherwise similar students with virtually identical academic records. So-called legacy students — those whose parents attended the same schools — received substantial boosts. So did underrepresented minorities.

But the biggest boost went to recruited athletes: An athlete was about 30 percentage points more likely to be admitted than a nonathlete with the same academic record.

I thought of that study yesterday after the Justice Department announced it had indicted 50 people for trying to rig the admissions process. The alleged scam involved payments funneled from parents to college coaches, who in return would falsely identify applicants as athletic recruits to the admissions office. Just like that, the students then become virtual shoo-ins for acceptance.

If the accusations are true, they’re outrageous. But they also highlight a larger problem in the admissions process that has somehow become acceptable: A scam like this could exist only because competitive sports occupy a ridiculously large place in that process.

The situation is different for other extracurricular activities. Great musicians are more likely to be admitted to a college than similar students who don’t play an instrument — as is only fair, because musicians deserve credit for their accomplishments. But the musicians don’t generally receive a 30-percentage-point boost on their admissions chances. Stage managers for the high school theater don’t, either. Nor do student body presidents, debaters, yearbook editors or robotics competitors.

Athletes do. Their extracurricular activities are not treated merely as an important part of a college application but as a defining part. “Athletic recruiting is the biggest form of affirmative action in American higher education, even at schools such as ours,” as Philip Smith, a former dean of admissions at Williams College, has said. It’s a relic of the supposedly character-defining role that sports played in elite colleges a century ago.
And sports have retained their unique place in the admissions process even though most teams at elite colleges are not good enough to compete for national championships. To put it another way, the student athletes being recruited to these colleges are not among the very best in the country at what they do. They are extremely good, yes, and they work hard, yes — but that also tends to be true of high school musicians, student government leaders and so on.

I’m a sports fan and long-ago high school athlete. I have a lot of admiration for students who are talented enough and work hard enough to play sports in college. But they are not a different species. It’s time to end the extreme special treatment that colleges give to so many of them. College sports can still exist without it.

That will never happen. Star college athletes and bring more money into colleges than anyone else. Pro athletes get endorsements that pay them money. In college, the athlete gets nothing and the college gets millions.
https://www.salon.com/2013/09/24/the_shocking_college_athlete_rip_off_now_theyre_fighting_back/

Part of the problem with straight scores or whatever is that it unfairly gives wealthy people an advantage. I'm not even talking about race here. Some of my family lives in a county in the Appalachian Mountains that has one high school for the entire county. Some kids take a 2hr bus ride each way. They don't have all the same AP classes you would get around here and almost no one is wealthy enough to hire a tutor (if you could even find one). SAT prep isn't a thing there. They really just don't have the same quality of education. So if you based all admission on simply SAT score for example, these people would never get into college. One thing many college's do though, is that they try to admit people from different states, regions, and with different backgrounds. That's something that helps people in this situation.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:1. Increase the security around proctors and test sites for SAT and ACT. I think over the years people have been complaining about it getting too strict or creating too many "barriers" but I think this scandal should shut that down.

2. Increase the scrutiny around getting extended time waivers on testing. If I were a parent of a child that actually needed this accommodation, I would be LIVID that people have been using this, and thereby making it that much more difficult for my child to be given appropriate accommodations. If a person is going to be granted this, they have to have an already demonstrated record of a 504, IEP, etc. that can't suddenly develop this need in their Junior year, unless it can be clearly documented why the new need. (I think in another thread someone mentioned a child receiving a concussion, and I could see that being a reason for a new need for accommodation. Even with those accommodations, see my first point--the sites where these test are done and the proctors doing them must be held to a highly secure standard.

3. For the coaching/recruit side of this. It must be a required part of the work of coaches that they:
a. Are responsible for demonstrating they have confirmed the validity of the student athlete they are designating as a recruit. This is super easy to do. Verifiable scores/rankings, etc. can be obtained from independent sources.
b. They must submit reports each year documenting the participation of students that they identified as recruits in previous years. We all know that sometimes there are instances that a student might be recruited but ultimately not play, but there needs to be transparency about it. If student didn't participate for legitimate reasons, there's no reason to hide that information.

4. I think this one might be harder, but...
I would like to see legislation that puts some kind of prohibition against colleges or universities accepting donations from anyone with a child ages 12-20. Like I said, probably really hard to make illegal, so instead perhaps it's about reporting, transparency, spotlight, shaming.
-Make donation information easy to access and reported annually in a consistent format across all institutions (similar to the Common Data Set.)
-Require reporting that shows the names of currently enrolled students who's families have made donations to the schools.
Hopefully, this will discourage schools from accepting these "pay-for-play" students because it will be damaging to their reputation.

Anyway, that's a start....

You want to publicly shame the rich. The will never happen.

Unless it gets really lopsided - and then forget shaming - there's always the guillotine.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:We should educate everybody.

Education should not be a culling process.

Get rid of SAT/ACT.

We offer a free public education for everyone for 12-13 years. That's a lot more than other countries offer. If you can't show your potential for success in further academic studies during that time, academics should be over for you. Find a trade to be trained in.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I'm from the UK so that is the system I'm most familiar with, and I think that works to identify merit (though there are still the problems of how to create opportunities for people with disadvantaged backgrounds). But the reason it can be done is that there are standardized tests of all the subjects in every school (A Levels). Those are not tests like SATs, they are more like APs, but they are taken by everyone in the subjects of their choice. The offer you get from a university in the UK is typically conditional on your A level results (e.g. 3As). There is almost no consideration of extra curricular activities, sports is not a factor at all because there are no college sports in the same way as here, and although legacy might be a thing for a small number of people, it's very limited and is not a factor that concerns people. It's really just about your predicted, then actual, A Level results, and, to show your track record, your GCSE results (the standardized national exams everyone takes at 16 in about 10 subjects).

This - I like this. Let's do this. My question is - can you cheat on your O and A levels?

You can cheat on anything. But these will have to be national exams which will necessitate agreement on the exam and curriculum across states not to mention allocation of federal funding or mandating that states fun this. That will not happen. States will want to opt out and there goes the unifying metric. We already have charter schools which are not accredited and states and feds are ok with this and want to make it easier to send more money to them.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Ditch the SATs, the essay and the extracurricular stuff.

Have entrance exam that test subject matter knowledge. There will not a be single student in the USA who can score 100% on all of them.

Combine that score with the GPA and take the top x students. Done!

+1

Change the exam every year, so there is no over prepping and cheating off last years exams.

the entrance exams in many countries are so hard the only way to “prep” for them is to study the subject throughly for years.

[Anonymous]

So, a lot of you want to eliminate quantifiers?

Not sure how mixing a pool of students could work that way. The top tier would be frustrated and pulled down, the lower tier would be frustrated and not able to keep up.

Students should be measured with what they can do without being overly prepped.

Entrance exams should go back to being one and done. When did all of this change for the worse?

I have friends that tell me that they would not (supposedly, not sure if they are just being humble, could be) be admitted to their top tier university these days, because there are too many applicants. When there are too many (best of the best) students, and not enough slots, therein lies one of the many problems.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:1. Increase the security around proctors and test sites for SAT and ACT. I think over the years people have been complaining about it getting too strict or creating too many "barriers" but I think this scandal should shut that down.

2. Increase the scrutiny around getting extended time waivers on testing. If I were a parent of a child that actually needed this accommodation, I would be LIVID that people have been using this, and thereby making it that much more difficult for my child to be given appropriate accommodations. If a person is going to be granted this, they have to have an already demonstrated record of a 504, IEP, etc. that can't suddenly develop this need in their Junior year, unless it can be clearly documented why the new need. (I think in another thread someone mentioned a child receiving a concussion, and I could see that being a reason for a new need for accommodation. Even with those accommodations, see my first point--the sites where these test are done and the proctors doing them must be held to a highly secure standard.

3. For the coaching/recruit side of this. It must be a required part of the work of coaches that they:
a. Are responsible for demonstrating they have confirmed the validity of the student athlete they are designating as a recruit. This is super easy to do. Verifiable scores/rankings, etc. can be obtained from independent sources.
b. They must submit reports each year documenting the participation of students that they identified as recruits in previous years. We all know that sometimes there are instances that a student might be recruited but ultimately not play, but there needs to be transparency about it. If student didn't participate for legitimate reasons, there's no reason to hide that information.

4. I think this one might be harder, but...
I would like to see legislation that puts some kind of prohibition against colleges or universities accepting donations from anyone with a child ages 12-20. Like I said, probably really hard to make illegal, so instead perhaps it's about reporting, transparency, spotlight, shaming.
-Make donation information easy to access and reported annually in a consistent format across all institutions (similar to the Common Data Set.)
-Require reporting that shows the names of currently enrolled students who's families have made donations to the schools.
Hopefully, this will discourage schools from accepting these "pay-for-play" students because it will be damaging to their reputation.

Anyway, that's a start....

You want to publicly shame the rich. The will never happen.

Unless it gets really lopsided - and then forget shaming - there's always the guillotine.

Okay, then.......

[Anonymous]

The people in this thread must be the same people who worry the handful of people out of our population of 350 million who commit voter fraud. Until I see some numbers showing that cheating is higher than about 10%, it is not cost effective to try to reduce it.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Ditch the SATs, the essay and the extracurricular stuff.

Have entrance exam that test subject matter knowledge. There will not a be single student in the USA who can score 100% on all of them.

Combine that score with the GPA and take the top x students. Done!

+1

Change the exam every year, so there is no over prepping and cheating off last years exams.

the entrance exams in many countries are so hard the only way to “prep” for them is to study the subject throughly for years.

What countries? When did so many people decide to come to the U.S. for education?