Anonymous wrote:

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 wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I really don't get the Oxbridge booster on this thread. I lived in the UK for years and the idea that Oxbridge is any more meritorious is laughable.

I'm one of the PPs talking about Oxbridge - there are definitely several of us - and I'm not a booster, I'm just a British person and a Cambridge graduate who has experienced that system. The reason it seems more meritorious to me is that in the UK, if you get excellent GCSE results and then excellent A level results (or predicted results), and can explain yourself coherently in an interview, you stand a fair chance of getting in. It's still really competitive and there are still more applications from excellent students than spots, but it feels achievable if you are academically excellent. Here, from what I am reading - and we are several years away from this process for my children so I don't know everything about it at all - no student, however academically excellent they are, could feel like getting into a top school is "achievable". Without the legacy/sports etc things, getting in feels like a huge longshot even for the most academically capable students.

another European person with young kids and I agree with this. This board makes it sound like even the most academically capable students with all kinds of extracurriculars (a requirements that itself is absurd and clearly detracts from the academic focus) need “hooks” to get into Harvard etc (is Oxbridge equivalents). I don’t know if this is true, but if it is, then yes, it’s an inferior system.

You can call it inferior, but it is simply the product of a numbers game. Harvard is going to admit about 5% of applicants but I would suspect that at least another 5% or 10% are essentially equally as qualified in standardized tests and academic performance. The hook is the tie breaker.

but they are not equally qualified - that’s an illusion because they score the same on tests that require little studying. but only a very small fraction of students admitted to Harvard would be able to pass an properly constructed entrance exam in, say, math. add a few kore subjects and it will be clear who is in fact academically qualified to study a certain subject. this is what Oxbridge method mostly successfully determines. our, not so much.

Equally qualified by the criteria of GPA and SAT. You can say the Oxbridge interview adds another dimension, but the other dimension it may be adding is susceptible to influence by the independent school system dominated by the wealthy and influential.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I really don't get the Oxbridge booster on this thread. I lived in the UK for years and the idea that Oxbridge is any more meritorious is laughable.

I'm one of the PPs talking about Oxbridge - there are definitely several of us - and I'm not a booster, I'm just a British person and a Cambridge graduate who has experienced that system. The reason it seems more meritorious to me is that in the UK, if you get excellent GCSE results and then excellent A level results (or predicted results), and can explain yourself coherently in an interview, you stand a fair chance of getting in. It's still really competitive and there are still more applications from excellent students than spots, but it feels achievable if you are academically excellent. Here, from what I am reading - and we are several years away from this process for my children so I don't know everything about it at all - no student, however academically excellent they are, could feel like getting into a top school is "achievable". Without the legacy/sports etc things, getting in feels like a huge longshot even for the most academically capable students.

another European person with young kids and I agree with this. This board makes it sound like even the most academically capable students with all kinds of extracurriculars (a requirements that itself is absurd and clearly detracts from the academic focus) need “hooks” to get into Harvard etc (is Oxbridge equivalents). I don’t know if this is true, but if it is, then yes, it’s an inferior system.

You can call it inferior, but it is simply the product of a numbers game. Harvard is going to admit about 5% of applicants but I would suspect that at least another 5% or 10% are essentially equally as qualified in standardized tests and academic performance. The hook is the tie breaker.

but they are not equally qualified - that’s an illusion because they score the same on tests that require little studying. but only a very small fraction of students admitted to Harvard would be able to pass an properly constructed entrance exam in, say, math. add a few kore subjects and it will be clear who is in fact academically qualified to study a certain subject. this is what Oxbridge method mostly successfully determines. our, not so much.