Professor Adam Grant at Wharton with 70 publications in leading management and psychology journals has written an opinion piece that questions how useful the current college application system is and suggests some alternate methods to gather information about candidates.
The college admissions system is broken. When students submit applications, colleges learn a great deal about their competence from grades and test scores, but remain in the dark about their creativity and character. Essays, recommendation letters and alumni interviews provide incomplete information about students' values, social and emotional skills, and capacities for developing and discovering new ideas. This leaves many colleges favoring achievement robots who excel at the memorization of rote knowledge, and overlooking talented C students. Those with less than perfect grades might go on to dream up blockbuster films like George Lucas and Steven Spielberg or become entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs.
Perhaps the system favors easy metric to measure rather than the most accurate metric. Rewarding the ability to quote back sections of a science book, over being able to think up and implement new ideas on how to map new processes of a protein folding, that's intellect, not retention of knowledge. The system is perhaps shaped by corporations that want to hire employees pre-molded for the Dilbert style environment.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 09 2014, @01:36AM
How the hell are you supposed to evaluate creativity and characters of thousands and thousands of applicants in the short period of time allotted?
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday October 09 2014, @02:29AM
The fact that a better solution is supposedly impossible within the given constraints doesn't mean the currently adopted solution is not broken (the lack of evidence should not be interpreted as a proof of the absence).
At the best, it means that indeed the constrains imposed make the solution impossible and somebody should look into relaxing those constraints to allow for a solution that works. To validate this is the case would require a demonstration that, positively, the solution is impossible.
At its worst, it may mean the current solution is half-arsed for the present conditions (for various causes, e.g. maybe the system outgrew what was traditionally effective) and a solution may exist within the constraints (but dumbass whiners complain is too hard to search for one)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 09 2014, @03:16AM
College admission is not math, you moron. Go ahead and try to define "creativity" and "character" in a measurable fashion.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday October 09 2014, @03:41AM
Number of creative solutions the subject has come over the years to "thinking out of the box" tests? Surely solutions to measure creativity do exists.
Otherwise, maybe it'll help to recall the "cheap, fast and good: pick any two" aphorism. Assuming you have the decision authority, if you insist on all three then it is your fault that the solution is impossible (and, potentially, the crisis develop).
(perchance, have you considered a job in public administration? Based on the intellectual level shown by your answer and the attitude, I reckon you would fit nicely).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 09 2014, @03:58AM
I ask you to define "creativity" and you answer "thinking out of the box"? Fucktard.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday October 09 2014, @04:31AM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by Dunbal on Thursday October 09 2014, @03:08AM
Not only that - what does a bureaucrat know of creativity?
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday October 09 2014, @04:00AM
No, I'd venture into saying bureaucrats are perhaps as creative as entrepreneurs, except that their creativity is oriented towards minimizing the risks they take as well as the efforts they need to put into their jobs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Thursday October 09 2014, @04:12AM
Truely, the sarcasm is strong in this one! His middlelevelclorians count must be off the scale. Could c0lo be the one to bring balance to the Farce that is higher education?
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday October 09 2014, @04:44AM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Thursday October 09 2014, @06:08AM
Of course, Master cOlo! Sarcasm is what lets those persons who are suddenly too full of themselves realize that they are, in fact, full of shit. Now if we, as their loyal colleagues, we to point out to them, as I am just about to point out to you, that pedagogy as an academic discipline is a complete, utter, total, and absolute failure, then of course we would be dismissed. (This is where the whole thing puzzles me; it is so obvious to anyone with the capacity for rational thought that this is true, so how could it be grounds for dismissing criticism? Ah!) Sarcasm. If they are too stupid to get it, and of course this starts in American Academia with the asihaghakhgashf Wharton School (any one who thought that "business" was an academic subject should have various organs removed. This is the beginning of the end for higher education in America, and G. W. Bush is only a harbinger of what is to come.) We take their premises, run them out to their logical conclusion, which is predictably absurd, and we make them own it. This is what they are proposing to do to us. And, it is wrong. "Education" as a discipline, and "pedagogy" is what has destroyed primary education in America, and whereever else it has managed to spawn. Standardized testing is only the latest gift from "Business" departments and "Schools of Education". (I mean really, if what you are teaching is just teaching, what the hell are you actually teaching? It really is all about content, you damn bureaucrats!!! Opps, sorry.)
Sarcasm is the only thing that can save us. It is the only thing that can make educational bureaucrats realize how profoundly stupid they are. You remember the NSA contacting a Principal? Yes, he bought it: profoundly stupid. Girls wearing breast-cancer awareness apparel disrupting education? Profoundly stupid. And the problem with profound stupidity, as one of our members points out in this sig, is that it cannot recognize itself. Sarcasm is the mirror. Doesn't always work, but at least then we know who to incarcerate. But first we must mock them, because they are dangerous, not just because they are idiots.
I hope this answers the question. My short answer would have to be, even if sarcasm does not solve a real world problem, it is our last best hope short of violence. And it has the advantage that unlike violence, it cannot be turned against those capable of rational thought. Stay thinking, my friends!
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday October 09 2014, @12:50PM
Until "sarcasm, the last hope before violence", there are other thinks to try, Before giving some examples, let me emphasize you were quite seduced by sarcasm and maybe failed to notice when I said the bureaucrats are mostly risk adverse and lazy (well, with the notable exception of the top, which are mostly "predators": otherwise they wouldn't be on top). Where is this relevant: if you want to correct the things in education, you can start at the grassroot level and you need to start there and take it slow: the bureaucrat won't notice and when they notice their primary reaction will be to ignore you.
So what can be done? Set the constructivism [wikipedia.org] in action, don't forget about the zone of proximal development [wikipedia.org] (this is where you need time, don't expect an overnight revolution), use a lot of common sense and forget behaviorism and operant conditioning [soylentnews.org] (in other words, ignore the bastards, they don't deserve even the fraction of a second required to switch into sarcastic mode). You say I mentioned examples? Well
* maker faires/shops
* hackfests
* game building [mit.edu]
Yes, I admit: those alone are not education, but they are a start and they're more "learning" than rote memorization to pass some meaningless grid tests.
BTW: one of the most satisfying exams I stayed (towards the end of) my uni time took 5 hours. It was an open-book exam with a single problem to solve - design a radiation protection enclosure of some sort given some temperature and pressure requirements. It was an elective, it was engineering (I was attending uni, not a technical institute) and I spend 3 day before the exam browsing about 5 textbooks to know what's all about and where to find what I need. In the end, I barely passed: I made a mistake just at the beginning and finished with a concrete wall 3 times thicker than required - so, yes, there is value in spending time practicing within a topic, just don't waste your time with pure memorization
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by Dunbal on Thursday October 09 2014, @11:47AM
Amazing, both his reply and your post. Still laughing.
(Score: 2) by keplr on Thursday October 09 2014, @05:04AM
You can't, and any system which tries to find some middle ground is going to end up treating someone unfairly. I've been through it, I know how disheartening it can be.
So since any system is going to be unfair to some people, we might as well just level the playing field. Establish some minimum application requirements, GPA, application fee, etc. Let everyone apply who qualifies. EVERYONE who applies goes on a list and every semester they select randomly as many people as they can take in for that term. So everyone will get in if you wait long enough. It's arbitrary and random, but it is absolutely fair. I think this is absolutely necessary for public universities. Private Unis should be allowed to do whatever they want, but public institutions belong to EVERYONE. Everyone deserves access. People who really don't want to be there will self-select out of the system, and that's where we are now anyway. I had friends get into top schools based on their high-school performance only to spend a year or two studying the effects of cannabis and alcohol on the human nervous system--then dropping out.
Sortition also has the advantage of being incredibly low-budget and very fast. No going through thousands of applications by hand. No lengthy appeals processes. Students know sooner, and everyone who really want to get an education gets in eventually.
I don't respond to ACs.
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Thursday October 09 2014, @02:09PM
Look, this entire discussion is bullshit. You all should know better.
Good grades at the high-school level are indicative of doing the fucking work. You do the fucking work, putting aside your partying or playing WoW, you get decent grades. Extracurricular activities are just more work, which is why the admissions staff look for 'em.
Yes, it is true that doing more work does not necessarily make one a smarter person. I was one of those C-student types who was of above-average intelligence, but intelligence does not necessarily equal conscientiousness. I'm not going to make excuses about the public education system not being "stimulating enough for my advanced intelligence" because the truth is that I chose in-the-moment-hedonism over the boring and tedious preparation for my future, and I paid the price.
College is hard work. Universities want to be sure that you have demonstrated that you can tolerate hard work, and unfortunately that means they want to see that you jumped through all those boring and tedious hoops. The more hoops you jumped through, the better. It doesn't matter how much of a special snowflake you think you are, if you can't suck it up and do the work in high school, then chances you are you'll be eaten alive in college. You don't just magically jump from shit study habits and a lack of resistance to distractions to being the perfect student. It took ten years of community college before I finally developed decent study habits and got accepted into a B.S. program.
Honestly, I always thought going straight to university out of high school was a stupid idea anyway, unless you're some rich kid. Community colleges ease you into college-style study at a much lower cost, and when you've done your two years there it's much easier to get into the big leagues as a transfer student rather than compete with every wide-eyed raisin-sacked high-school grad in the country.
TL;DR: quit making excuses for your shit study habits, pry yourself off the fuckin' WoW and hit the books.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Friday October 10 2014, @03:22PM
You're missing the point. The argument is that "Sit down, shut up, and do what I tell you" is the exact opposite of what universities should be about. It's a bit overused and trite, but there's that quote from Einstein: "We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them." But when you completely standardize the education system, you standardize the thinking that comes out of it. Universities aren't supposed to do that. That's why they make engineering students take art classes. That's why they have study abroad programs. That's why they promote so many various student organizations. And *maybe* that's why they should accept the brilliant C-student over the straight-A robot.
Of course, for that to actually happen, we need to stop using universities like they're vocational training. That's the real issue. The admissions process sucks because there are too many applicants, and there are too many applicants because so many people are constantly told that a university is essentially the only option for any kind of further training or education. You'll also probably end up with far fewer universities going this route -- which is bad for business.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Kell on Thursday October 09 2014, @01:37AM
As junior faculty at a major engineering school, I can tell you that this is absolutely true. We get lots of good book learners who test well, but when asked to do anything creative or use basic critical thinking skills they completely fall down. I have literally had students tell me "I couldn't find the answer in the textbook so I didn't know what to do". Now, perhaps its a blindspot in our curriculum (which we're actively trying to fix), perhaps it's a problem with high school or perhaps it's just a generation of people who are used to easy answers and effortless immediate gratification... who knows. Whatever the case, we need to take care to pick people who don't just have the exam skills but who also the aptitude and temperament to be an engineer. Far too often students choose engineering because it's a "good job" that pays well, rather than because they're passionate about building and maintaining. Give me a handful of talented and enthusiastic students and they will do far more for society than a whole class of disinterested salary droids.
Scientists ask questions. Engineers solve problems.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Sir Garlon on Thursday October 09 2014, @02:04AM
I attended a talk by Eric Mazur of Harvard (physics) where he made a good case that the lack of creative thinking in today's students is a curriculum problem, or more accurately, a pedagogical problem. Better thinking and problem-solving can be taught, but traditional teaching methods are not well suited to do so.
I would add, without meaning to point the finger, that most university faculty have little formal training in pedagogy and have done little reading of the relevant scholarship. They do have on-the-job experience generally having come up through teaching assistantships. So, they learn to teach by apprenticeship. Who thought that was a good way? I was a teaching assistant myself and I think I learned more about teaching in that one-hour lecture by Mazur than I did in all my years of watching professors teach.
Here's one of Mazur's papers [harvard.edu] that looks like it will give you an idea of his thinking and research on the subject of science education.
In my opinion, the problem with the education system failing to teach people how to think begins in junior high school (based on anecdotal, personal experience). Trying to fix the problem in university seems a like needless delay, but it's an imperfect world. Better late than never.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
(Score: 1, Troll) by aristarchus on Thursday October 09 2014, @02:19AM
I was a teaching assistant myself and I think I learned more about teaching in that one-hour lecture by Mazur than I did in all my years of watching professors teach.
Wow! You must have had very bad profs that you were TA-ing for, or you must have been asleep with the students! Not your fault, however, everyone knows that the lecture format is dead, because it is boring and requires engagement and critical thinking and problem-solving.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Kell on Thursday October 09 2014, @02:24AM
I agree that the way we (academia as a whole) teach teachers to teach is lacking. I think my uni is a little more tuned into the issue than most, since we run regular series of workshops and training programs (including a grad dip in education) for teaching staff. I'm all too aware that the way material is presented can have a huge impact on the quality of learning and engagement. I use a seminal textbook on nonlinear control theory as a great example of easy concepts taught badly. As the text is written, it's impossible for anyone even with a decent engineering background to grasp what it's saying without a great deal of struggle, but when you provide a little physical intuition and step through it methodically, it's actually trivial When you show academics how hard simple ideas can be when presented badly (eg. from the textbook) you can almost see the penny drop.
Apprenticeship is needed because a lot of the skills you need as a teacher are interpersonal and not readily transferred via classroom education. As a young faculty member I take a lot of time to poll the senior profs on how they handle various issues that arise. I think mentoring is very important. The problem is that mentoring isn't enough on its own; there are a lot of 'assumed knowledge' elements that aren't necessarily present in someone who may not have taught large classes until they secure their job offer. It's good to get those core skills in a structured way and then fine tune as they get practice.
The natural bugbear is, of course, that teaching teachers also costs time and money.
Scientists ask questions. Engineers solve problems.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday October 09 2014, @05:33AM
“If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.”
Derek Bok [wikipedia.org]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by carguy on Thursday October 09 2014, @02:09AM
This won't help with the admission problem, but it will help find good candidates for engineers--
Does your engineering school have a Formula SAE or Mini-Baja team? That is one place to look for engineering students that like to solve problems. Probably some of the other collegiate contests are also similar, but I'm not so familiar with them. One part of the problem is that practical engineering is almost always multi-diciplinary, but academics are typically highly specialized.
(Score: 2) by Kell on Thursday October 09 2014, @02:15AM
We do have Formula SAE - coincidentally, I'm the faculty advisor. The problem is not retaining or inspiring the keen students, but rather attracting and selecting those students in the first place.
Scientists ask questions. Engineers solve problems.
(Score: 1) by siwelwerd on Thursday October 09 2014, @02:23AM
Now, perhaps its a blindspot in our curriculum (which we're actively trying to fix), perhaps it's a problem with high school or perhaps it's just a generation of people who are used to easy answers and effortless immediate gratification... who knows.
In my experience, it's all of the above. It seems to me a systemic problem from the bottom to the top. We see this a lot over in the math department as well; the students we get are wonderful at blindly following algorithms, but if you change the problem in the slightest bit so that it requires a tiny bit of thinking first, they are hopelessly lost. The present culture of high stakes testing encourages this; pre-college education has optimized to teach people how to do well on these high stakes tests, which is not the same thing as teaching people how to think.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Thursday October 09 2014, @02:37AM
There's probable two ways to get around this. Not a solution but two starting points:
(0) Present opportunity for applicants that seek out something by curiosity rather than being an academia machine.
(1) Enable applicants to show creativity.
Route #0 may be found through clubs and other activities that are interesting but doesn't contain any grading awards. People that are curious about labs etc are more likely also.. curious. Route #1 may be costly, so outsource a real problem some research group have and award the best solution with a placement.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by c0lo on Thursday October 09 2014, @02:52AM
IMHO.... blame Skinner [wikipedia.org] and the fucking bureaucracy for which number-crunching is the way of life, reality be damned
Skinner's two mortal sins (mortal for whoever take them as gospel):
The bureaucracy sin (including the teachers): buying totally into Skinner's theory and promoting a "you learn to pass the tests" behaviour ("No child left behind"?) - that's not "learning", that's conditioning: "Tell me how you measure me and I tell you how I behave"
(Yes, I know, it's very convenient to them: if you can't measure creativity, you don't need to put in any effort to develop it. If you don't put extra effort, then teaching will be cheaper - less budget for the govt, less cost/better profit for the "diploma vendors")
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by hash14 on Thursday October 09 2014, @04:58AM
Speaking as an engineer, I ask, what is wrong with this? Not everyone has to be a creative genius or even a creative novice to be a good engineer. Frequently, problems which arise don't require a creative solution, and they can simply be resolved by applying basic, textbook techniques and expertise, so I feel that even non-creative individuals can be useful in these situations.
Another point I feel is worth mentioning is that engineers always work in teams. Large problems are broken into smaller ones and each member who feels most competent handling a particular portion takes care of that. On a team like this, a non-creative individual can still benefit the group with technical experience while others with creative inclinations can fill his/her gap.
Even if someone wants to go into engineering because it's a "good job" as you describe, it doesn't mean that they won't do a good job in that position. That can come from other traits like work ethic and integrity as well. Enthusiasm and creativity are great, but I don't feel that they are mandatory criteria for being a good engineer.
(Score: 2) by Kell on Thursday October 09 2014, @07:42AM
It's true, not every engineer is going to be a designer or a systems architect - some will be process engineers and maintenance supervisors. However, even at this most basic level I challenge you to find an engineering job that mandates no creativity whatsoever. Even if you are just doing the same thing every day, tightening the same screws, you should still be looking for ways of improving your processes, reducing cost, increasing yield, bettering safety and generally trying to enhance the quality of performance. The ethical standards of most engineering societies hold their members to a notion of "continuous improvement".
More generally, creativity allows the engineering professional to find synthetic solutions that out perform the naive approach. Harnessing that creativity also go hand in hand with critical thinking, since not all approaches are equally good. Arguably, any engineering job that didn't require at least some combination of critical thinking and creativity would have been automated a long time ago. :)
Scientists ask questions. Engineers solve problems.
(Score: 3, Informative) by kaszz on Thursday October 09 2014, @02:27AM
I found some interesting links when reading about the surplus of PhD:
* College Daze links (was Re: : FlossedBk, "Free/Libre and Open Source Solutions for Education") [p2pfoundation.net]
* University Secrets:Your Guide to Surviving a College Education by Robert D. Honigman [archive.org]
What Makes Mainstream Media Mainstream by Noam Chomsky [chomsky.info]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by dcollins on Thursday October 09 2014, @02:34AM
There's an article by New Republic last month that argued exactly the opposite. Here's Scott Aaronson summarizing and expanding on it:
- "Standardized tests were invented as a radical democratizing tool, as a way to give kids from poor and immigrant families the chance to attend colleges that had previously only been open to the children of the elite. They succeeded at that goal—too well for some people’s comfort."
- "We now know that the Ivies’ current emphasis on sports, “character,” “well-roundedness,” and geographic diversity in undergraduate admissions was *consciously designed* (read that again) in the 1920s, by the presidents of Harvard, Princeton, and Yale, as a tactic to limit the enrollment of Jews. "
- "I’d say the truth is this: spots at the top universities are so coveted, and so much rarer than the demand, that no matter what you use as your admissions criterion, that thing will instantly get fetishized... So, given that reality, why not at least make the fetishized criterion one that’s uniform, explicit, predictively valid, relatively hard to game, and relevant to universities’ core intellectual mission?"
- "I admit that my views on this matter might be colored by my strange (though as I’ve learned, not at all unique) experience, of getting rejected from almost every “top” college in the United States, and then, ten years later, *getting recruited for faculty jobs by the very same institutions that had rejected me as a teenager.*"
Then at the bottom there are links to two anecdotes like this: Teenager is a math prodigy, has already professionally published papers in math, is strongly lobbied for by math faculty to get them in their program... and is refused at multiple schools by the undergraduate admissions officers (because they are "insufficiently well-rounded"). Has to go abroad in order to get an undergraduate degree. Acceptable or not?
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/119321/harvard-ivy-league-should-judge-students-standardized-tests [newrepublic.com]
http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=2003 [scottaaronson.com]
(Score: 1) by tirefire on Thursday October 09 2014, @12:41PM
Mass abstract testing, anonymously scored, is the torture centrifuge whirling away precious resources of time and money from productive use and routing it into the hands of testing magicians. It happens only because the tormented allow it. Here is the divide-and-conquer mechanism par excellence, the wizard-wand which establishes a bogus rank order among the schooled, inflicts prodigies of stress upon the unwary, causes suicides, family breakups, and grossly perverts the learning process - while producing no information of any genuine worth. Testing can't predict who will become the best surgeon, college professor, or taxicab driver; it predicts nothing which would impel any sane human being to enquire after these scores. -- John Taylor Gatto
I don't know what the solution is, but I think one important goal should be to use apprenticeships as alternatives to college (still a strong tradition in Germany, ironic when you consider that Prussia is where our research university with strong corporate ties comes from). I also like what I hear about MIT. They have a bit of a reputation for ignoring bullshit and focusing on what works (isn't that what engineering and basically anything remotely "STEM" is all about?), accepting high school dropouts who spent their teenage years making video games in their mother's basement.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 09 2014, @01:53PM
> to limit the enrollment of Jews
LOL. How did that work out for them?
(Score: 2) by umafuckitt on Thursday October 09 2014, @06:48AM
...George Lucas and Steven Spielberg or become entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs.
The TFA appears to not get the irony that Spielberg and Jobs dropped out of college, and Lucas studied stuff tangential to his later film career. The point is that for many students, college is just a hoop to jump through before getting a job.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 09 2014, @09:26AM
If only
*Hitler was admitted to that graphics artist school he applied for.
*Jobs had been dealt with (in any way) in time...