There was an interesting collision of articles about college admissions in my RSS feeds the other day. Dave Munger at Cognitive Daily had a post about a proposal to make college admissions random. The idea is that we could reduce stress on students and parents by having colleges identify those students who meet their academic standards, and then select randomly from among them, rather than trying to find perfect matches.
At around the same time, Inside Higher Ed had an article about Davidson College's decision to eliminate student loans from their financial aid packages. Students who qualify for financial aid will receive a package of grants that will eliminate the need to borrow money from the college. They say that this isn't actually a major policy shift-- they were already strictly limiting the amount of loans in their aid packages-- but they made the announcement in order to encourage students from low-income backgrounds to apply.
The intersection of these two ideas is pretty amusing. Let's randomly select students to receive free tuition! Whee!
Of course, then Davidson pledge is not without its fine print-- they pledge to meet the "need" of eligible students with grants rather than loans. "Need" in a financial aid context is the end result of a complicated calculation about how much a student's family can afford to pay for their education. This depends not only on the financial assets of a given family, but also on how cleverly they managed their money to make themselves look needy. Two families with very similar incomes can have very different levels of "need" depending on how they have their money invested, and there's a thriving business in investment counselling for people planning to send their kids to expensive elite colleges (one of my father's cousins does this for a living).
So it's not like the students and families affected by this policy will escape entirely without debt. Many of them will be expected to pay something, and given the high cost of college these days, that may well require some loans. Still, having been lucky enough to receive a scholarship that covered my calculated need with grants rather than loans, I can attest that leaving college without tens of thousands of dollars of student loan debt makes a huge difference. And typical tuition has almost doubled since I graduated...
The random admissions thing is also an interesting idea. There's certainly a huge amount of effort sunk into trying to select exactly the right students to admit to colleges, and it's not entirely clear that it really makes that much difference. And if you talk to students about how they decided where to go to college, it sometimes seems like there's a random selection taking place already, on the student end.
A great deal of the college experience is determined by the "fit" between a student and an institution, and a lot of that is fairly random. Students choose between comparable colleges based on whether they had a good time on their campus visits, or whether the tour guides were cute, or whether they liked the food, or any of hundreds of factors that are completely beyond the control of the admissions department, or any member of the faculty. They're attempting to find a place where they "fit" well, or at least where they think they'll fit well.
And sometimes, that's completely deceptive. I chose Williams in part because I really enjoyed my campus visit, but the guys I stayed with when I visited were not people I ended up hanging out with when I was there. When I actually got to campus, I wound up in a completely different social circle-- I actually wound up hanging out with the loud drunk guys upstairs from the guys I stayed with when I visited...
To a large extent, the "fit" between a student an an institution is self-determined. On the student end, it's a combination of finding the place where you fit on campus, and becoming the sort of person who fits in the place where you happen to be. It's important to remember that college students are still fairly malleable, personality-wise, and will leave as very different people than they were when they came in.
On the college or university side, a lot of effort is expended in trying to find students who "fit" in a slightly different sense. There's a bit more of an academic emphasis, but at the same time, there's an attempt to ensure some social and economic diversity in the student body, in part to ensure that all students will be able to find a place where they "fit."
It's not entirely clear to me, though, that this is the best place to be putting the effort, given that college students grow and change a lot in four years. I left Williams a very different person than I was when I arrived, and I almost certainly wasn't exactly who the admissions office thought they were getting when they accepted me (particularly not during my sophomore year...).
So, while I'm sure the idea of choosing students to admit on a random basis probably horrifies admissions officers (at least when they're not in the middle of the admissions process-- in mid-February, they'd probably be willing to go for it), I'm not sure it wouldn't work just as well as the current process. In terms of getting the sort of college and community we want, it might almost be better to stop trying to pick out students who look like exactly what we're after, and instead choose students at random, and work on changing the campus culture so as to shape those students into the people we want them to be.
(This, by the way, may come off as totally hilarious to those of my colleagues who read this, given the job that I've agreed to do for the next three years... No, I'm not going to explain that.)
Anyway (and really, I'm mostly just thinking out loud, here), on a sort of theoretical level, I find the idea of random admissions kind of intriguing. On a practical level, though, I share Dave's concerns that this wouldn't actually do much to reduce the stress on students and parents applying for college, and would just shift the existing stress around. Particularly if some schools went to random admissions and others did not-- that could easily turn into a total nightmare.
It's an interesting suggestion, though.
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Re the random admissions, the New Yorker's Malcolm Gladwell had a popular article ('Getting In') a couple of years ago on a related topic. He contrasts going to college in Canada versus going to college in the US, and while application decisions aren't totally random, the process is quite different: "...there wasn't a sense that anything great was at stake in the choice of which college we attended. The issue was whether we attended college, and--most important--how seriously we took the experience once we got there. I thought everyone felt this way."
The random admissions thing is also an interesting idea. There's certainly a huge amount of effort sunk into trying to select exactly the right students to admit to colleges, and it's not entirely clear that it really makes that much difference.
On my cynical days-- which, granted, is most of them-- I tend to think that the college admissions process does actual harm.
There is this ethic amongst college-bound high school students that they have to do everything to make their college application look good. They don't just participate in the extracurricular activities that give them a charge, that they're going to put their heart into, but they participate in way too many things just to pad out their resumes. This, to me, is sad. First, it leads to overcommitted students without the time necessary for the things they want to put their heart into. Second, each activity is now loaded with students who don't really want to be there, diluting it for those who do. Finally, it means student resumes are all somewhat misrepresentations of who the students are.
This "box checking" mentality seems to be real, though, and my perception is that the college admissions process right now is encouraging that.
College talk a lot about diversity, but sometimes I wonder if they really mean it. Aside from gender and socioeconomic background, what about the nature of the students? Why are we mostly admitting "well-rounded students," instead of a mix of those and truly talented physics nerds, truly talented music nerds, and truly talented protopoets -- the latter three being people who focus almost entirely on their passion? Wouldn't that mix give you better diversity than having only "well-rounded" students with padded resumes?
I haven't really done "a study," so what I'm expressing here are my biases, substantiated only by anecdotal evidence I've read in magazine articles and I've heard from people who've served on honors scholars committees here.
But given all that.... Start with students above the bar academically, and then randomly admit them. Save a lot of effort, and it might serve to really produce a more well-rounded student body. Of course, we do need some provision for students who aren't "above the bar" in a bean-counter sense, but whose application as a whole would turn them into a student who should be admitted.
I guess it's complicated. The real danger is when you think you've got some sort of formula that really works in ranking students (just like US News is deluded in thinking that it has developed "the" formula for ranking colleges).
Need is quite subjective. For instance, I feel that I need much more than they will give me. Oh well, starting next year it will be tens of thousands of dollars of debt. Hooray education!
I'm not sure about the random draw thing, because how easy is it to determine people who are similarly academically qualified? For instance, I had a high 3 GPA (out of four), took a slew of AP tests, and basically the most advanced classes my school offered (oh, and a very high SAT). My roommates had no AP, similar coursework (more technical than mine), lower SAT scores, but went to Samoa for a geological survey and have built a number of ridiculous engineering projects. One has authored several Oceanography papers. Who's more qualified?
Granted, I know very little about exactly how admissions works, but it seems to me like the proposition of choosing randomly between similarly qualified people doesn't simplify things all that much. Perhaps I'm wrong.
I don't know how admissions work for "liberal arts" colleges/universities, but I do know that the epedemic of "box checking" students who are more focussed on trying to look good and well-rounded rather than doing what they actually enjoy is certainly a problem for the top technical schools (e.g., MIT). It has become suprisingly difficult to find a student, who even if they are just a big physics nerd, is willing to admit that and not try to make their application look like they are also an amazing musician who really just likes playing soccer. "Where have all the nerds gone??"
I interview applicants for my undergraduate alma mater, a highly selective private university, so I know a thing or two about making admissions sausage. One of the most important reasons for the interview is to address the resume padding issue Rob raises:
The admissions office specifically tells us to look for applicants who are passionate about what they do, so that they don't end up admitting a freshman class full of inflated resumes. In fact, an applicant with perfect grades and test scores plus oodles of extracurricular activities but who does not demonstrate passion for anything will almost certainly not be offered admission.
Does it work? Maybe not; even with this screen they get many more qualified applicants than spaces. But at least they are trying.
Wow, what an excellent idea-- now we'll go from a competetive system where kids do all they can to get into college, to a much less competetive system where kids will try to figure out the minimum reasonable effort they need to put in to get over that magic line, and then just spam all the colleges, everywhere to maximize their chances while minimizing their effort.
Sweet.
I am not afraid to call this a legitimately stupid idea.
The situation in Ireland is -
There's a central applications office, and you send in an ordered list of the courses you want to take.
You sit exams in 6 subjects at the end of secondary school (any 6 you want from about 25?, but see below)
Your grades in those exams are translated into points - this is relatively coarse, an A+ is 95 points, a D- is 40 points, and so on.
The CAO compares the number of applicants to each course with the points of each applicant, and calculates the points requirement for each course - eg, medicine in Trinity College = 560 points
Some courses/universities also have subject requirements - you can't study a science course without a minimum grade in a science subject, you can't do foreign languages without a minimum grade in a foreign language, you can't go to this college unless you sat Irish in your exams (but Irish doesn't have to be one of the 6 subjects used for calculating your points), etc.
Because of the coarseness of the points system, at each points level there will be more students getting the required points than there are places available, so the places are allocated randomly.
On the other point - tuition in Irish colleges (for Irish students) is free. The colleges sneak in some fees, for registration etc, but no more than about $2000 a year.
Wow, what an excellent idea-- now we'll go from a competetive system where kids do all they can to get into college, to a much less competetive system where kids will try to figure out the minimum reasonable effort they need to put in to get over that magic line, and then just spam all the colleges, everywhere to maximize their chances while minimizing their effort.
I have two responses to this. The first is "If you think this isn't already happening, I've got this bridge you might want to invest in..."
The less flippant response is that this isn't aimed at academic issues. It's intended to address the explosion of extracurricular activities that are such a drain on students and parents.
My picture of this is not that there would be a single national minimum academic standard, but that each school would set their own standards. Harvard would have a higher threshold than Directional State U., Williams would have a higher threshold than Amherst, etc. What you need to do academically to get into a good school would still be enough to force students to stretch a bit.
But what random admissions would do is to eliminate the idea that in order to get into Harvard you not only have to get straight A's, but you also have to be the student council president, leader of the marching band, a three-sport athlete, a volunteer at an old age home, a world-renowned pianist, and an outlaw in Peru. That's the stuff that really drives parents and students nuts, and also makes life difficult for admissions officers-- how do you sort out the kids who are genuinely outstanding in multiple areas from those who are just padding their applications to look like they're outstanding in multiple areas, because they think that improves their chances of getting in.
I do agree that application-spamming is the likely bad consequence of this policy, but I tend to think it would be a lesser evil than the current trend of activity spamming, which is running so many students and parents ragged.
The less flippant response is that this isn't aimed at academic issues. It's intended to address the explosion of extracurricular activities that are such a drain on students and parents.
Then the obvious answer is for colleges to spend less time worrying about extracurriculars, more time worrying about what's important to them, and to be open and honest about this with the student body. Some schools might chose one approach, others, another, depending on their academic philosophies. Some students would then target certain schools over others based on their tendencies.
This seems a good and workable system, replete with meaningful choices-- as long as the schools aren't misrepresenting themselves.
But it would take me more effort than I can spare right now to come up with a worse idea than abdicating everything to chance just because it's hard to effectively communicate what's really important to your prospective students.
I also agree with you that, no doubt, each school would set their own standards. But if they're all working on the same general template, I promise you that one and a half sigmas on either side of the mean are going to be pretty close to each other. Moreover, if all schools are setting their own standards, why ntot let them choose their own implementations as well... uh, like we do now?
If you're arguing that a school, or even several schools, should do this as an experiment, I'm all for it. Maybe it'll work and I'll be wrong. But the notion that that's the way it oughtta be, period, strikes me as goofy, and part and parcel of that characteristic arrogance that says, "I've got an idea, and it's so nifty EVERYONE must do it!"
It does occur to me that it is at least plausible that, beyond a certain point, what is being done to judge applicants becomes the equivalent of trying to analyze random noise.
Once you get to that point, you might as well use a random lottery since it would save a lot of trouble and have basically the same effectiveness.
Whether this is the situation in reality (and how to determine whether it is) is the key question.
It does occur to me that it is at least plausible that, beyond a certain point, what is being done to judge applicants becomes the equivalent of trying to analyze random noise.
Once you get to that point, you might as well use a random lottery since it would save a lot of trouble and have basically the same effectiveness.
What Mike said.
There is a further logical disconnect in your position, Chad, that did not strike me until later.
I think it is a fair statement to say that you believe that the current policies are causing students (and possibly parents) to burn all sorts of unnecessary effort in the order to maximize their chance of getting to college.
When I responded that the scheme under discussion is going to result in students minimizing their efforts while maximizing heir chances, and you in turn responded that that's already happening. So, um, which is it? Are they minimizing their efforts, or maximizing their efforts?
I'm not sure you can have this one both ways....
(And in any event, if colleges and students want to optimize noise, that would seem to be their choice. Presumeably there would be some actual benefit to doing it some other way, in which case, knock yourself and prove I'm wrong.)
In Sweden, you apply on your grade point average (you can remove some grades, like gym class, that aren't very academically relevant), or you can sit a kind of standardized ability test and apply based on that score (and you can resit the test as many times you want). Each course at each university gets filled from the top down, with the top GPA (or test score) first, then the second and so on. No essays, extracurriculars, letters of recommendation, previous attending family members or any of it. A few courses (like psychology and architecture, for instance) do add a course-specific interview or looking at work samples, but that's the exception.
Popular courses (like law school) attract lots of people with good grades, and so becomes difficult to get into. Les popular ones (like theoretical math) tend to become easier. Really, _really_ popular courses at the largest universities, like medical school at Karolinska Institutet, in fact attract enough people that they resort to a lottery among those with a perfect score. And rather unpopular courses, especially at small colleges, you can probably enter at will, as long as you fulfill the criteria for admission.
I can honestly not say that the end results are any worse than the extensive screening process you see in the US. People aren't completely stupid; even if you technically fulfill the criteria (passing grade in high school math) and can get in to do theoretical math at Lund university, you're not likely to do so unless you're really keen on math to begin with.
I think it is a fair statement to say that you believe that the current policies are causing students (and possibly parents) to burn all sorts of unnecessary effort in the order to maximize their chance of getting to college.
When I responded that the scheme under discussion is going to result in students minimizing their efforts while maximizing heir chances, and you in turn responded that that's already happening. So, um, which is it? Are they minimizing their efforts, or maximizing their efforts?
There are different sorts of efforts, and different groups of students.
A large number of students are trying to minimize their academic effort, by taking enough classes to look good, but not taking the sort of classes that would risk lowering their GPA.
A second group of students are putting insane amounts of effort into non-academic pursuits because they see this as crucial to getting into a good college. They're in the band, in student government, playing sports, volunteering in the community, and so on not so much for the intrinsic value of those activities, but because they see them as check-boxes on college applications.
There's some overlap between the two groups, but the problem is mostly with the latter. They're stretching themselves awfully thin, and taking their parents with them. If you follow discussions of college admissions, this is one of the main complaints people have about the process-- it's gotten a whole lot more intense since we were applying to college. It's misplaced effort that's making life unpleasant for students who would be a whole lot better off as people if they worried less about the way their activities will look to an admissions committee, and just focussed on doing things they enjoyed.
And then there's also a lot of time and effort on the part of the admissions officers who have to try to sort this whole mess out, which gets harder and harder as the students pile on more activities.
I don't really think that random admissions is a fantastic solution, but it's got some attractive points.
Janne: In Sweden, you apply on your grade point average (you can remove some grades, like gym class, that aren't very academically relevant), or you can sit a kind of standardized ability test and apply based on that score (and you can resit the test as many times you want). Each course at each university gets filled from the top down, with the top GPA (or test score) first, then the second and so on.
Sweden has a population of roughly nine million people, according to Google. The US is around three hundred million. Now, granted, we have many more colleges and universities than you do in Sweden, but as you note, even the Swedes need to run a lottery for the top schools and programs.
Multiply the pool by thirty, and, well...
Absolute population has little to do with it of course; it's the ratio of applicants to seats. Multiply the pool by thirty, and multiply the number of universities and colleges likewise.
And it is largely self-regulating. The very top courses can become a lottery, but people know this and apply for other, less prestigious but just as good, places as well. Or just decide they didn't want to study at that precise place all that much and go directly for a more realistic option.
A large number of students are trying to minimize their academic effort, by taking enough classes to look good, but not taking the sort of classes that would risk lowering their GPA.
A second group of students are putting insane amounts of effort into non-academic pursuits because they see this as crucial to getting into a good college. They're in the band, in student government, playing sports, volunteering in the community, and so on not so much for the intrinsic value of those activities, but because they see them as check-boxes on college applications.
And going to random admissions might help the first group slightly, but wouldn't it help more to just say outright, "We don't care about extra-curricular activities?" Or even, "We don't care past the first two?" The solution to a problem of communication and priorities is not to say, "Fuck it, we abdicate most of our ability to discriminate-- and destroy most of your ability to compete-- by choosing randomly after truly minimal standards are met."
The solution is to set priorities you believe in, and act transparently on them. Yeah, that's hard, but so is being a college bound teen-ager.
Now, granted, we have many more colleges and universities than you do in Sweden, but as you note, even the Swedes need to run a lottery for the top schools and programs.
They might not need to, if they were allowed to use criteria other than GPA.
It isn't about "setting priorities you believe in".
It's about whether, beyond a certain point, there IS any useful information that's worth the time and effort to obtain. IF there isn't any such useful information, then it's simply a waste to pretend that there is.
Well, see, I can understand the belief that you're trying to analyze noise when you try to magically optimize "fit" as determined by checked boxes on a list of extra-curricular activites.
At issue, though, is whether the correct response is, "Ah, screw it, let's set the bar at B- and draw straws," or, "How about we maybe tell the kids to focus on academics over extra-curriculars, and thereby reduce the noise?"
Yes, I'm aware that noise reduction is not noise elimination; I'm aware that there is still noise inherent in trying to evaluate the straight B from preppy Catholic upstate school vs the A- from inner city hellmouth; that trying to balance a GPA studded with non-AP physics and chem courses vs home ec and shop classes might present a challenge, etc. But it seems equally clear to me that there are other tools like standardized tests (I'm thinking AP tests in particular, although I suppose you could get some SAT and ACT mileage) that already exist to help in this regard.
Everything I've seen here in the vein suggesting that the colleges are trying to analyze noise has-- or so I believed-- made that suggestion in the context of analyzing extra-curriculars. So I'll ask specifically: Once we get rid of that particular bit of sillyness and get back to a much stronger focus on academic performance, do you *still* think it's pointless noise analysis?
Or, asked in the opposite way, do you think noise reduction is possible by the articulation of better, narrower standards?
I don't know how much of the information used in the admission process is useful and how much is random noise. I don't think that anyone really knows.
What I am saying is that it isn't at all safe to assume that the useful information will be sufficient to narrow the number of applicants down to anywhere near the number of available slots. And if it isn't sufficient, you might as well use a random process instead of pretending you have more useful information than you really do.
(A "stronger focus on academic performance" could be a good thing. I doubt it'll solve the problem of not being able to reasonably decide among applicants. Chad can probably tell me if I'm wrong, but I suspect that one of the reasons for the emphasis on extra-curriculars is that looking at academic performance alone simply doesn't reduce the numbers enough.)
(A "stronger focus on academic performance" could be a good thing. I doubt it'll solve the problem of not being able to reasonably decide among applicants. Chad can probably tell me if I'm wrong, but I suspect that one of the reasons for the emphasis on extra-curriculars is that looking at academic performance alone simply doesn't reduce the numbers enough.)
I haven't read admissions folders, so I have no personal experience with the process, but I have read a fair bit about what goes on in the college admissions process, so I can pass on impressions based on second-hand information.
My impression is that there are two reasons for the inclusion of extra-curricular activities: first, it helps to provide a little diversity in the enterting class, and not just the racial sort of diversity that gets Uncle Al's knickers in a twist. It helps identify and admit people who are good academically, but exceptional at something else-- music, sports, community service, whatever. Having people like that around makes for a more interesting experience for everyone.
Beyond that, though, I don't think there's enough real information available to make meaningful distinctions on academic criteria alone. That's the reason for the population comment above-- the number of students who pass any academic standard you might reasonably set is much too high for any college or university to admit them all. And attempting to reduce the numbers by tightening the standards on purely academic measures ends up triggering on noise, because available academic measures just don't allow sufficiently fine distinctions.
Could you design some better system of measuring academic performance to get that information? Maybe. I kind of doubt it, though.
If your tests can't differentiate between students, then they aren't very well-designed (given that the main purpose in designing and setting tests is to differentiate students).
It is hard to design tests that are applicable to all; quite often, that means producing more than one test. In the UK, in the relatively recent past, there were 'S' level exams that could be taken in addition to 'A' Levels. They were sufficiently hard that you wouldn't have the 'many students with perfect scores' problem, even through they only drew on the same source material as was in the 'A' Levels. Cambridge (and some other universities) set additional exams for admission called 'step papers' and they were really hard (I believe that Cambridge may largely have stopped using them but that other universities may still use them); they did, if I recall, use material that might have been outside of the main examined syllabus, however.
A 'one size fits all' test is easier to achieve with multi-choice questions because of the finer granularity, but I wouldn't stick exlusively to multi-choice, myself.
While I'm on the subject of differentiation, I might add that the way that percentage scores are awarded (including the mapping from grades to percentages) in the US makes no sense to me. If students, say, effectively have to get 80 percent or so for the grade to be 'good', that means that a fifth of the scale is used to differentiate the top end whilst 4/5 of the scale is reserved to describe how badly someone did.
I think I'm with Adam, here, but I suspect I'll say it much more harshly than he did: if, as a whole, the academic community cannot effectively place students in a ranking corresponding-- at least roughly-- to their past academic performance, then I think something is already significantly wrong with the academic community and processes.
(And, to sound like a broken record, I don't think lottery selection of students is going to fix it. But you knew that....)
Going back to address Michael's point: Yes, I see where you're going, but you have a bunch of conditionals in your set-up, and I just don't place much weight on those conditionals. You actually go where I was going to go next-- even if increasing the concentration on academics doesn't help the selection process (although I very strongly suspect it would because academic performance should be a lot easier to measure than something arbitrary and vacuous like "well-roundedness") it will still keep pressure on the students to actually perform.
I think lotteries are a bad idea in part, precisely because they take pressure off the students to perform to their best ability. If best performance gives them the same results as 80% of their best, they're going to slack! I know I would!
(To any high school students reading this: Yes! Suffer!)
I don't have doubts about the ability of "purely academic" means to make distinctions at the necessary level for admissions because I think it would be impossible to construct tests that would give some sort of distinction between students. I have my doubts because I'm not convinced there is a meaningful distinction to be made between them, at least for the purpose of admission.
If you consider the top, say, fifty liberal arts colleges in the US News rankings, they account for roughly 25,000 entering students a year (the typical size for a liberal arts college is somewhere around 2,000 students total, or 500 per class). My impression is that any student who winds up attending any one of those schools could perfectly well make it at any of the other schools in that set. (Other than the fact that a handful of those schools are single-sex...)
(I base this on having attended the school at the top of list, and teaching at a school toward the lower end of that range. I don't think I've dealt with any students at Union who strike me as completely incapable of surviving at Williams, given some of the jokers I knew when I was a student...)
That's 25,000 students who are academically qualified for 500 spots. You might claim that legacies and axtracurricular preferences somewhat inflate that number, but that's not even going to get you a factor of two reduction in the number of academcially qualified students.
I don't believe we have the ability to distinguish real differences between these students at the level that would be required to cut a potential applicant pool of 25,000 down to 500. I wouldn't be surprised if the same student taking the same standardized test on two different days got scores that differed by 5%, and a 10% swing would be only mildly surprising.
At that point, you're just measuring noise.
To anticipate an obvious objection: Admission to college and grading in college are two different things. When I say that I don't think we can distinguish between students at the necessary level for the purposes of deciding who gets in, that doesn't mean that we can't make finer distinctions once they're in college, and all taking the same class from the same professor.
Well, the situation in the UK is aided by the existence of national exams (although the US has SATs, even if they are, as I have heard from some colleagues, now too easy). And although there can be variation, well, at least you're picking based on merit on the day. People will whine about it but people always whine. Also, I don't think, at least from my experience as a schoolteacher and an examiner, that a 10% variation from one day to another would be at all normal. You'll get big variation based on illness or other effects, but not very often. 5% I could see at a stretch, although I prefer exams with components taken on different days, which will wash things out a bit.
The problem in the UK is that colleges make offers before the final exams, although nowadays they do have access to some reasonable evidence (as the A Levels have gone modular and most schools put students in for modules before university applications go in). I'd favour a system of later applications, myself (which has been mooted by some in the UK from time to time).
Another thing that UK universities do (the oversubscribed ones, at least) is interview. That wouldn't be very easy to do here, though (it's a big enough hassle in the UK and that's only 500ish miles long).
Adam: Telephones work great for interviews-- I interviewed at my school, that way, in order to get my scholarships.
Selection based on a "difference" that's basically due to random variation isn't picking "based on merit". It's just a way of doing a random lottery while fooling yourself into thinking that you're doing something else.
I'd also add that selection based on a "difference" that isn't due to random variation but isn't really meaningful isn't any better than a random lottery either.
There seems to be an assumption in some quarters that if you design your academic tests and other criteria "correctly" that you "should" be able to make enough meaningful distinctions to winnow your applicants to somewhere close to your number of available slots. This is a STRONG assumption and (as far as I know) one not supported by solid evidence.
Michael, are you seriously suggesting that a test to differentiate between the strongest students can't be written? As I say, look at the former 'S' Level exams that were set in the UK, based on the same curriculum as the conventional 'A' Levels. Not that many students took them (they were known to be hard) but they pretty clearly differentiated between the students that did.
What is true, I think, is that if you want to be fair you need several tests taken over the course of a few days.
As long as good students get into a good school somewhere near the top of their list, there's not much point in weepig tears of blood over this, however. I'd be interested to know how many genuinely good students don't get any offers anywhere that they are very interested in.
I'm suggesting that a test that differentiates meaningfully between the top students in any way that has genuine relevance to admissions decisions is probably impossible to write.
If all you want is some way to fool yourself that you're making "objective" rather than effectively random decisions, that's a different matter.
I think that the Step Tests formerly used by Cambridge University were OK in that regard. Even the Oxford Entrance exams were OK (they were taken earlier, at about the time that I believe that American students take the SATs, and were used to help judge to whom offers should be made), although that doesnt mean that the old 'two Es' system into which they were incorporated made a great deal of sense.
Tests only test current performance, of course; if you want to judge potential, conduct lengthy interviews , using well-trained interviewers. Oh, and get a crystal ball.
I just don't buy the idea that these things can't be adequately tested. As to whether it is too much effort to do so, I'm openminded.