Where does your kid rank among his high school class? You may not be able to find out:
In the cat-and-mouse maneuvering over admission to prestigious colleges and universities, thousands of high schools have simply stopped providing that information, concluding it could harm the chances of their very good, but not best students.Canny college officials, in turn, have found a tactical way to respond. Using broad data that high schools often provide, like a distribution of grade averages for an entire senior class, they essentially recreate an applicant’s class rank.
The process has left them exasperated.
Admissions directors note that without ranks, the alternatives are...standardized exams like the SAT. A good thing, I say, but perhaps not what the schools were intending. One principal insists that refusal to rank forces universities to look at "the whole child." Putting aside the argument for a moment that many, many aspects of an entire child have little to no impact on how they may do in a college setting, how likely is this to happen for students wanting to attend a local university - like, say, the University of Miami, which receives 18,500 applications a year?
I'm not saying there's no room for improvement in the college admissions process, especially now that college degrees have gone from being superfluous to being useful to being required. But the withholding of useful data isn't necessarily going to produce the results the high schools are hoping for.
Posted by kswygert at March 6, 2006 01:05 PM