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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: 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.