alt Hacker NewsSee: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-04-12/covid-co...
Excerpts:
UC admissions directors stressed that they evaluated students in the context of their own schools and communities to assess how much they challenged themselves and took advantage of available opportunities. A student who took all six AP classes offered at her school might be more impressive than the one who took six at a school that offered twice as many.
A campus might admit a student with a 4.0 GPA who ranked at the top of an underserved school over one with a higher GPA but lower class rank at a more high-achieving school.
Replies
> A student who took all six AP classes offered at her school might be more impressive than the one who took six at a school that offered twice as many.
Damn, this is as stupid as it gets.
They should just make this explicit, like the UT system does. The top X% of students are admitted automatically from each school.
Honestly, I don't know how do you even compare students with different backgrounds against each other.
That's why standardized testing is good - it gives everyone the same chance to excel.
This is a terrible system because it forces students and parents to start playing all kinds of games to navigate a non transparent process for admissions. What now? Are parents going to send their kids to good schools until it is time to apply to colleges? And then they are going to switch to the best school for applications?
That is, they are biased towards top performers, not just high performers, even if one student's "merely high" is formally higher than the ceiling the other student hit.
(The "winning" strategy then is to move to an underserved high school after an elite middle school, and hit the ceiling.)