By JAMES K. FITZPATRICK
When I read the first few paragraphs of Gabriel Rossman’s June 7 article in the online edition of National Review, I was nodding in agreement with him. But I changed my mind, just slightly, after reading a bit further. See what you think.
Rossman, as associate professor at UCLA, describes a plan by some of the country’s most prestigious prep schools to stop reporting “concrete grades” to college admissions offices, substituting a “new model for transcripts and portfolios.” He calls the new model one that offers “vague bromides about their students.” The plan was described recently in the trade publication Inside Higher Ed.
Rossman sees the plan as “one more step in a trend going back a century toward introducing vagueness and, by extension, discretionary power into college admissions.” In this new plan, in place of standard grades, the colleges will be given, in Rossman’s words, student evaluations based on “what can be described charitably as character traits or accurately as self-actualization gibberish.”
He sees this new evaluation procedure as “a creature of elite prep schools” that are determined to gain admission for “a substantial fraction of their students” to the country’s “elite universities” and are convinced they must find a way to prevent their students from being lumped together with public and parochial students around the country with similar GPAs.
If this plan is implemented, Rossman continues, it “will make it harder to compare prep students with each other. It will make it almost impossible to compare prep students to the plebs” in public and parochial high schools “who are still reporting that they earned a 3.9 GPA including an ‘A’ in AP Calculus.”
I am not sure that I agree fully with Rossman’s criticism that the prep schools are doing something underhanded. The problem these schools face is one that teachers of honors classes have pondered for decades. A “B” in an honors class may indicate a higher level of talent and achievement than an “A” in a general level course. Might it not be that the same situation obtains in comparing the grades of prep school students with the public school a half-mile away?
Individual public high schools attempt to deal with this issue by “weighting” honors level courses so as to indicate their more rigorous content and grading standards than general level courses. Typically, they will add 3 or 5 points to the grades students earn in honors classes when calculating GPAs.
The prep schools signing onto the new grade-reporting plan described by Rossman are attempting to come up with something similar to “weighting.” We cannot assume that prep school administrators are not acting in good faith, or are mistaken, if they maintain that nearly all their students, even those with “B” averages, would be achieving “A” level grades if their academic performance were judged by the standards of a local public school.
No doubt, many public school teachers and parents would protest the “hoity-toity” self-image of the prep schools that think this is the case, but the prep schools may be correct, even though it can seem unattractive when they make their case.
I can remember a typing and stenography teacher at a high school where I used to work becoming indignant when it was suggested that students who earned an “A” in physics or chemistry should be given preference when class rankings were determined over those who earned an “A” in her class. She huffed and puffed about “elitists” and “snobbery.”
Rossman sees the new standards being proposed as a modern version of what the Ivy League colleges did in the mid-20th century, when they “adopted admissions boards that gave a heavy emphasis to qualitative evidence of ‘character’ (read: WASP culture emphasizing muscular Christianity, club membership, and athletics over book learning) as a pretext to limit Jews.”
He compares the new standards to the University of California’s effort in the late 1990s to bring “the undergraduate body a bit closer to the state’s overall ethnic composition” of blacks and Latinos by “switching to a system of comprehensive review greatly emphasizing qualitative evidence of character,” rather than standardized test scores and GPAs.
Using standardized test and GPAs had led to a large percentage of Asian-American students at the state universities in California. The change, says Rossman, had the “the desired effect of bringing the undergraduate body a bit closer to the state’s overall ethnic composition.”
I am not unsympathetic to Rossman’s point. My objection is only that there is a difference between what the modern prep schools are planning to do and the changes in standards used to limit the number of Jews at Ivy League colleges in the past and Asians in California’s public universities today. The emphasis on “qualitative evidence of character” was used to deny admission to Jews and Asians with superior academic records. In contrast, the prep schools that are placing less emphasis on “concrete” grades are doing so to prevent exemplary students from being disadvantaged in the college admission process.
Some may object that the SAT and ACT tests provide an objective standard that deals with this question. The problem is that more and more colleges are downplaying the SAT in the application process precisely because it accomplished that end: The standardized tests do not come up with rankings that reflect the country’s “overall ethnic composition.”
Rossman thinks this is a misguided rationale:
“Our suspicion of the SAT’s well-known association with household income provides an egalitarian rationale for the regressive turn to all variety of precocious ‘achievement’ as the basis of college admissions, as if test scores could be bought but résumé-padding could not. For all the wailing and gnashing of teeth about SATs, they are much less prone to class privilege than” the emphasis on character and civic-mindedness embedded in the new standards.
Rossman closes with what he calls the “shameful spectacle of Stanford admitting a young man whose essay consisted of writing ‘Black Lives Matter’ a hundred times, but who also was the son of a hedge-fund manager, attended a $33,400-per-year high school, and generally had a vita stuffed with what he describes as ‘activism’ but is more straightforwardly recognized as waiting in line for grip-and-grin photos at expensive political fundraisers. If you want a vision of the future, imagine a plutocratic elite preening to college admissions officers about how sophisticated and nuanced it is, forever.”
Ouch!
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Readers are invited to submit comments and questions about this and other educational issues. The e-mail address for First Teachers is fitzpatrijames@sbcglobal.net, and the mailing address is P.O. Box 15, Wallingford, CT 06492.
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