College Admissions: the Quest for Objective Assessment

Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, and in the first quarter of the twenty-first century, American universities have wrestled with the question of how to assess applicants. Of the many variables and many data points on an application, which most effectively reveal a student’s achievements and aptitudes? And how are they to be interpreted?

Admissions departments were faced with large increases in enrollment after WW2. This necessitated new ways of processing applications.

The numbers of applications and enrollments continued to increase throughout the remainder of the century.

New admissions processes were often less personal. A century earlier, great weight was laid on letters of recommendations. Teachers and other adults wrote letters describing not only a student’s academic successes and aptitudes, but also personal character.

In the new era of mass processing, grades on transcripts, and results from standardized tests, came into being and took on greater significance.

The hope and intent was for a more objective measurement. To some extent, that hope was fulfilled.

But, as in the case of every system, clever eyes soon began to find loopholes. Standardized tests could be taken over and over again to get better results. Special “prep courses” gave students test-taking strategies which had less to do with academic knowledge and more to do with the structure of the test questions. Tests were offered on a mix-and-match basis, whereby a student could take the best results, on each part of a test, from different administrations of the test and paste them together to make a single result.

Grades on high school transcripts could also be gerrymandered. Students enrolled under “Section 504” plans could be given modified or accommodated assignments (e.g., extra time on tests, or the opportunity to re-take quizzes on which low scores had been earned). In more than a few instances, however, this was not noted on transcripts, and so admissions officers were left to assume that the grades had been normally earned.

Likewise, essays submitted with applications are supposed to the original and unaided work of the student, yet there is a booming business among coaches who work with students to craft such writing samples.

There is, then, an endless dance, move followed by countermove, as admissions officers seek objective measurements of students, and as students and their parents work to manipulate whichever measuring system they encounter.