

Dirty Secrets of College Admissions - antiform
http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-01-09/dirty-secrets-of-college-admissions/full/

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tokenadult
I'm curious about what HN readers would suggest for a better approach to
college admission. Of course, pg recently put himself on record

<http://paulgraham.com/credentials.html>

as favoring reducing the role of family wealth in college admission decisions.
_History suggests that, all other things being equal, a society prospers in
proportion to its ability to prevent parents from influencing their children's
success directly. It's a fine thing for parents to help their children
indirectly--for example, by helping them to become smarter or more
disciplined, which then makes them more successful. The problem comes when
parents use direct methods: when they are able to use their own wealth or
power as a substitute for their children's qualities._

What specific changes would help college admission practices improve in this
regard?

~~~
patio11
_I'm curious about what HN readers would suggest for a better approach to
college admission._

Maybe I'm biased because I code systems for Japanese universities for a
living, but I've always really liked examinations.

We have a system we sell as consultingware to many Japanese colleges,
installing the base of what is considered acceptable here, with customizations
per request. By default, it provides:

1) No way to even tell if a student is legacy, plays soccer, etc

2) Strict auditing of everything. First text in the design document, in 48
point font: OUR OVERIDING PRIORITY IS TO NOT COMPROMISE THE PUBLIC'S TRUST IN
THE OBJECTIVITY OF THE EXAMINATION.

3) Affirmative action? Not supported or encouraged (I won't say impossible,
but its pretty close -- you'd have to use manual overrides of examination
results after turning off the failsafes preventing you from doing so
accidentally, which causes BIG RED ANNOUNCEMENTS to appear to the other people
responsible for the system).

4) Some schools have particular needs for X number of Y students. (For
example, a school with a historical association with a particular
church/temple might need X priests per year). They can accomplish it in one
very transparent way: say "We are looking for X priests. Please apply to the I
Want To Be A Priest exam if you're interested", and then the top X wants-to-
be-priest candidates are accepted. Note that, importantly, this has absolutely
no effect on the general applicant pool, and is not an effective way to get
out of the general admissions standards (since if you elect that sort of
treatment, you WILL be tracked straight into the Becomes A Priest major and
you will not really be allowed to change).

5) Transparency for everything. The school starts the year by saying "English
Department seeking 12 students. History Department seeking 16...." Then, after
the exam is over, all scores are published (anonymized) with aggregate
statistics: the English Department filled 12 spots out of 127 applicants
having an average score of 187 points. The minimum passing score was 214, and
students scoring above 212 were added to the wait list, from which 2 were
offered admission.

The stats are also broken down by test load: say you're told to take two
subjects out of three, your pick. The University will publish the
distributions of scores for every possible combination (3 in this trivial
case), letting you know if any combination was harder or easier than others
(which they do A LOT of work to avoid, incidentally).

And the icing on the cake of full transparency: the university maintains five
to ten years of these stats and prints it right in the bloody admission
handbook itself. Because that's how confident we are that the process is not
corrupt.

I want American universities to be like that. Heck, fine by me if they want to
put a thumb on the admissions scales. Just publish how big the thumb was:

"15 black students admitted with average SATs of..."

~~~
patio11
Incidentally, in the category of "I'm not exaggerating, really", here's one of
hunreds of pages provided by Tokyo University, who I am using as an example
because they're indisputably the #1 university in the country and not because
they're a client of ours (which they may or may not be).

<http://www.u-tokyo.ac.jp/stu03/e01_01_j.html>

What it tells you:

Last year, for these majors, we had X applicants, Y students pass the exam,
and Z students accept the offer of admission to the University. A special
examination was offered to graduates of foreign high schools. The number of
students taking the special examination is reported in two groups:
Japanese/permanent residents of Japan and everybody else. (The numbers are
less than one percent of admitted students.) We additionally allowed Q
students into this major as a result of the government-sponsored Japan/Korea
Engineering Student Exchange (and two other exceptions).

The full exams from last year:

<http://www.u-tokyo.ac.jp/stu03/e01_04_07_j.html>

And on the subject of ballsy transparency: "Here's how many students got jobs,
how many went into further schooling, and how many have neither jobs nor
education prospects as of graduation, broken down by major and industry
employed in."

<http://www.u-tokyo.ac.jp/stu04/e09_01_j.html>

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tokenadult
Best comment to the submitted article:

 _This is yet another fairly shallow treatment of the college admission
process._

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wallflower
For every single not-as-qualified VIP or preferential student they admit, at a
highly competitive school like Harvard that means they have to reject _nine_
qualified non-VIP candidates.

Read that in an article, don't have the link handy.

