> A growing number of colleges, in response to criticism of standardized tests, have made it optional for applicants to submit scores from the SAT or the ACT. Admissions officers have also tried for years to find ways to gauge the hardships that students have had to overcome, and to predict which students will do well in college despite lower test scores.
Taken to its logical conclusion, the SAT will cease to exist and the only thing the College Board will report to schools is a secret student dossier.
This dossier can contain anything. Think about the ways in which it might be possible to compute an "adversity" score.
What if we mix this "adversity" score with some factors indicating "deservingness?"
Today the dossier may be composed of mostly harmless stuff. In the very near future it may well become a terrifying concoction of privacy infringements.
There may be a silver lining in all of this, though. College today is increasingly a mere credential. The information conveyed through a degree can be obtained by those who want it from numerous sources.
If initiatives like the one in the article become widespread in admissions, then a degree will increasingly symbolize not accomplishment but rather something much less worth talking about. Colleges themselves would have precipitated their own well-earned demise.
Taken to its logical conclusion, the SAT will cease to exist and the only thing the College Board will report to schools is a secret student dossier.
This dossier can contain anything. Think about the ways in which it might be possible to compute an "adversity" score.
What if we mix this "adversity" score with some factors indicating "deservingness?"
Today the dossier may be composed of mostly harmless stuff. In the very near future it may well become a terrifying concoction of privacy infringements.
There may be a silver lining in all of this, though. College today is increasingly a mere credential. The information conveyed through a degree can be obtained by those who want it from numerous sources.
If initiatives like the one in the article become widespread in admissions, then a degree will increasingly symbolize not accomplishment but rather something much less worth talking about. Colleges themselves would have precipitated their own well-earned demise.