Elite High Schools Plot to Undermine College Admissions

> However even if we assume that the consortium’s model of evaluation would work at scale, it still has the core function of obscuring concrete academic achievements and shifting emphasis toward vague notions of character.

Is the entire American educational system a Gordian Knot of wealth extraction? It seems like every actor is out to make life harder for students and extracting as much money as possible from the other actors in the system. Schools will no longer have to consider the grades their students receive (a somewhat objective measurement of their quality) but can now focus on mostly being "character-building".

How long before the pendulum swings in the other direction, and the only thing that matters - maybe even legally so - are hard-earned grades and SAT scores?

> The main advantage of the consortium’s new transcript model is not that it provides more information than grades by virtue of nuance and detail, but that it provides less, by means of not having a readily commensurable scale. The proposed system will make it harder to compare prep students with each other. It will make it almost impossible to compare prep students — summarized with a radar plot of character traits and a “featured credit” of “exhibit moral courage in confronting unjust situations” — to the plebs who are still reporting that they earned a 3.9 GPA including an “A” in AP Calculus.

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> This would be one more step in a long-standing trend in college admissions, as described in Jerry Karabel’s book The Chosen. From 1898 to 1919, Harvard, Yale, and Princeton opened up their admissions requirements by adopting the College Entrance Exam Board and abandoning a Greek-language requirement. These reforms made admission more open to non-elite boys, who as a rule were unable to take the schools’ proprietary entrance exams and attended high schools that did not offer Greek. As a result, the Ivies saw a sizable increase in Jewish students, and Columbia even experienced WASP flight, which its peers dreaded. Although Harvard discussed an explicit Jewish quota in 1922, this proved unpalatable, and so between 1922 and 1926 the big three Ivies adopted admissions boards that gave a heavy emphasis to qualitative evidence of “character” (read: WASP culture emphasizing muscular Christianity, club membership, and athletics over book learning) as a pretext to limit Jews.