For what seems like months now, an absolutely endless time, the media outlets in Chicago have positively obsessed over the admissions process at the University of Illinois (it's never clear from the stories whether their issues with it apply to the entire system or just to the main campus and I won't speculate but just leave it at the U of I). Some sort of magical practically mythical creature came across the positively shocking fact that admissions at the undergraduate level were not solely based on test scores and GPA. Actually, I don't know what all these people think admissions are based on and hence, why they're terribly upset, but I haven't laid out the story yet.
Issue here being that U of I had an identified class of applicants, something along the lines of, Class I, or something, that meant that someone someone cared about had inquired or written on their behalf. So the Tribune started with politicians, then looked at Trustees, has now gotten itself to faculty members and will eventually get to the heart of the issue, I must assume, which is that the only people who can really guarantee their children a place in college are people who can donate lots of money. The rather odd part about this, and something that was really only discussed in a table format in a Chicago Sun-Times interactive piece, is that we're not talking about a 100% acceptance rate. It's not as though you write a letter and you're someone important and this student is accepted. When I saw the acceptance level I was a little surprised actually at how low it was, since as a general rule, people don't call on behalf of people who are totally unqualified as it undermines their ability to recommend candidates in the future (see earlier, only rich people can really guarantee admissions - everyone else is just recommending that the admissions team review the documents again based on additional information about the candidate).
An alternative the school has would be to go to a strict GPA/ACT (because this is evidently the test the school accepts, which is odd just because it's sort of a ridiculous test, but whatever) standard. Of course, that's ridiculous, and something I've often had an issue with since comparing the GPA of someone who went to a good school to someone who went to a bad school is insane. They release these statistics saying X% of students were in the top 10% of their class. Which is totally irrelevant, since the entire population of some schools could outperform that 10% with a hand tied behind their individual backs. There's also the matter of complete disparate grading systems and the reliance on the "admissions team" (very very often, graduates of the school who could not get other jobs) to identify the academic strenousness of the individual schools and somehow rank them.
Of course, step back a moment and ask whether grades and test scores have anything to do with actual academic achievement, let alone life achievement (the latter, I believe it is a given, is unconnected). I've interacted with many extremely intelligent students who could have blossomed at a good school but who couldn't be bothered to prepare for a standardized test. I would even estimate that the majority of children who would do well in such an environment never even try. Some would blame the children for this, I assume they're idiots who've never left their middle-class suburban semi-gated communities and are themselves extremely unremarkable, but they need to recognize that a child of around 16 did not become disinterested in performing well on a standardized test as a result of a lack of effort or intelligence. The child either, doesn't live in a society that values/respects/understands the potential utility of this or is himself more or less alone and simply reacting to the negative influence of tyrannical teachers who would do anything to keep control over their classrooms and prove they are more intelligent than everyone else.
Yes, I went after the teachers.
Teachers, as a class, are people who think they are terribly important and deserve to be in charge of large numbers of people. Because they are unable to do this in reality, they become teachers so they can enforce their will on children and thereby reinforce their weak egos. Essentially, because they cannot be superstars among their peers, they look to the adulation of children to supplement this and treat it as though they were adults.
The rub is, the very intelligent child who actually is much smarter than the teacher. Or, moderately intelligent. Or, even, who will get a decent job and doesn't have significant control and ego issues. Teachers totally flip out on these children. They beat them down, grade them down, grade them disproportionally, and will even place them in remedial classes in an effort to minimize their ability to undermine the need for the teacher to feel superior. It's really extremely tragic.
There is also a tendency for teachers to engage in "relative grading," in which a student is not graded objectively, based on his/her abilities against say, someone with a 100 IQ score (also totally flawed and irrelevant test, but just to use as a basemark) but rather against what the teacher believes the student is capable of doing. While that is charming and could potentially have some motivational benefits assuming the student cared at all what the teacher thought of the student's work and was thereby motivated to work harder to improve grades, it completely obliterates the utility of the GPA as a way of measuring a student's ability to contibute to a school and gain from its opportunities.
These are a few things I've observed in schools over the years and the ways in which I have seen some of the brightest minds go off to do absolutely nothing with their lives.
But back to U of I, why this extended tirade above? The problem isn't so much that an important person called on behalf of an applicant but rather that all applicants aren't getting the second review that comes to such an applicant. It isn't the case that there is automatic admission (as is shown in the data) but rather that the admissions' team actually looks at what the grades the school gave mean, what other things the student does, where the student excels, and, to be controversial, how the student has interacted socially with people who know how to engage others and be successful in business even before the student attended college. That last one is not something to scoff at, not in the least. If you have an 18-year old that someone is willing to call on behalf of, that 18-year old left an impression. And that's a special kind of spark that no test will pick up and only a rare teacher will admit in a recommendation.
At the end of the day, U of I is simply too big. It needs to engage in a significantly more individualized process that has little to nothing to do with GPAs and standardized test scores. It also doesn't matter what grades the student gets in college (or now graduate school, as the Tribune continues its grueling investigation...) - no one can claim with a straight-face that those are a proxy for success. If newspapers would return to their obligation, investigative and informative journalism not based on sensationalism, then perhaps we could move forward as a society and recognize the gifts and values of what should be the top 10% of our country, almost all of whom are no where near that. It is terribly complex, but this nonsense about politics is not at all where the problem is.
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