The college admissions process is ‘unconscionably unjust.’ Here’s one way to help change that.
Late last month, the College Board announced that it was dropping a plan it had introduced a few months earlier to provide colleges with a single numeric rating of the adversity that students who took the SAT faced in their communities.
The original idea, called the Environmental Context Dashboard, was aimed at providing context to college admissions officers about the hardships that some students face as they go through school and try to get into college. Critics pounced, saying, in part, that the data would be questionable, and the College Board decided to change its plan.
The authors of the following post argue that despite its problems, the idea that the College Board introduced was a good one, and that some version of it could help improve “an unconscionably unjust process” — that being the college admissions process.
The writers are Brennan Barnard and Richard Weissbourd. Barnard is the college admission program manager at the Making Caring Common project at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and director of college counseling at the private Derryfield School in New Hampshire. Weissbourd is a senior lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Education as well as the faculty director of the Making Caring Common project and the co-director of the school’s Human Development and Psychology Program.
By Brennan Barnard and Richard Weissbourd
How do we measure human potential? And how do we do it in a way that’s both accurate and just, taking into account an individual’s advantages and disadvantages? Schools, college admissions offices, businesses and many other professions have always struggled with these questions, and now the College Board, the organization that owns the SAT, Advanced Placement program, and other educational assessments, finds itself in the thick of them. CONTINUE READING: The college admissions process is ‘unconscionably unjust.’ Here’s one way to help change that. - The Washington Post
