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Our Next Quarantine Lesson: We’re Blowing it for This Fall

Posted on June 24, 2020 by Patrick O'Connor

It isn’t just the seniors who missed this year’s scholastic rites of passage.  Students may be the stars of this show, but there’s something about weak lemonade, folding chairs, and speeches about pursuing your passion faculty and administrators find just as assuring as the honored students.  It’s the closest we get to winding down a year and taking a breath before taking up the task of deciding how the coming year could be smoother, better, or more effective. And if ever there was a year when that breath was needed, it was this year.

We didn’t get it.  Instead, pundits and parents, who had spent the spring seeing first-hand what educators really do, were banging on academia’s gates, asking about the resumption of “school as usual” in the fall with a keen level of expectation.  They may have been saying “Will schools reopen?”, but they meant “Schools had better reopen.” Unaccustomed to making such deep decisions on the fly—and, frankly, a little exhausted from having made two months’ of such decisions on the fly—K-12s and higher ed begged off.  Let’s see what the numbers look like, they said, and we’ll have an answer soon.

Wow, did we blow it. One of the best ways to convey confidence in leadership is for leaders to make decisions with some sense of anticipation and planning.  Given all the seemingly spontaneous decisions this spring required, how much better off would we be in the eyes of the public if we had used April and May to say what really needed to be said in three key areas:

“We’re going to review our entire application process.”  School counselors are exhausted by June, but word that hundreds—that’s right, hundreds—of colleges were not requiring SAT or ACT scores for this year’s juniors created a groundswell of euphoria unknown to the summer months.  The arguments for ridding college admissions of these tests are better articulated elsewhere (like here).  Now that quarantine had added one more point to the argument—that the students just can’t take them—colleges succumbed to the reality in hordes, leaving counselors hopeful that, as long as they were checking under the hood of their admissions policies, admissions folks would toss out some other policies that deny college access to many students who need it most.

That bigger review doesn’t seem to be appearing.  In his typical fashion, Lawrence U dean Ken Anselment was the first to suggest in a Tweet that colleges should use this opportunity to clean up the entire admissions process, instead of taking an approach centered on the question, “So, how do we make admissions decisions without test scores?” If anyone can make major revisions to their application in two months, it’s Ken and the Lawrence crew.  It would have been better if, as a profession, all colleges had committed to this in April, creating more time and space to ask the bigger, better questions.

“We’re going online, and it’s going to be great.”  Colleges also tried to buy some time this spring when they were asked how instruction was going to occur.  As a group, they intuitively demurred, sure that any answer involving pure online courses would turn off students looking for a “full college experience,” sending them into the arms of community colleges, and leading many small private liberal arts four-years with weak decades-long financial struggles to close.

These same considerations are evident in the early announcements some colleges have made about Fall classes.  Hoping that reduced sizes of in-person classes and cancelled Fall breaks will contain the health risks, these colleges are ignoring the realities of some of their own football teams, where summer scrimmages are leaving up to twenty-five percent of the team COVID active, and at least one re-opened bar in a college town, where a quarter of all patrons are now on self-quarantine (and this is before students show up). It’s clear the best health option for all is to stay completely online—but how do you sell that to a student who just had a slew of online classes at either college or high school that, by and large, were less than they could have been?

Enter the professors.  It’s easy to see how parents and students don’t want to pay for weak online learning.  On the other hand, professors and high school teachers had about a week this spring to turn their classes into an online version of its face-to-face self, a task most colleges give professors an entire semester (and time off) to do.  Now that the summer is here, college instructors can give their courses the firepower they need to be more vital, more individualized, and more like the face-to-face thing.

If colleges connected the professors to families who rightfully see online learning as dubious, the profs could bring their websites along and show how these courses are more robust than their springtime counterparts.  Smaller colleges have long tried to get faculty involved in discussions with students, because good profs create an excitement about learning that closes the enrollment deal.  The same could have applied to online learning, if we had started sooner.  Now, we’re forced to play catch up again.

“We want your kids to be healthy.” The teachers at a local kindergarten decided they wanted to run a quarantine version of kindergarten graduation.  They made a giant rainbow arch, a few lawn signs, and went from house to house of every one of their students.  They’d set up the display, have their student walk through the arch, and created a composite video of the whole event.

A success?  Not really.  The edited video didn’t show what really happened: that the excited students broke every safe-distancing rule in the book when their teacher showed up.  Kindergartners love their teachers (thank goodness), and two months apart led to a euphoria that was shown by hugging everything in sight, a scene that’s reassuring to everyone but the Health Department.

In a nutshell, that’s why reopening K-12 schools to any kind of face-to-face learning is a bad idea.  Wal Mart can’t even get “adult” customers to wear a mask; what chance does a teacher have making a dozen five year-olds practice safe distancing?

A joint effort by state and federal officials in April, devoting dollars and expertise to developing nationwide broadband access and best practices in K-12 online learning, was the best answer to teaching students.  It also would have given time for working parents to develop resources for child care.  Instead, K-12 is left with a continuation of the catch-as-catch-can policies that allowed them to limp to June in one piece, thinking that a couple of days in the classroom each week will placate parents.  It might, until school closes again for quarantine—and if you think of the last birthday party you attended for a seven-year old, you’ll understand why that’s a certainty.

Parents: Don’t Become Aunt Becky During Your Child’s College Admissions Process

Posted on May 5, 2019 by Craig

At the root of so many parents’ anxieties about their children going through the college admissions process is not dread over the eventual act of sending their children off to live on their own. Instead, what inspires some parents to cheat on behalf of their children is some parents’ frightful realization that their the children will actually earn what’s coming to them. This is another way of saying that maybe, just maybe, the children won’t get into a colleges the parents want them to get into unless the parents insert themselves into the process in order to “augment” the college applications of their children in some way, shape, or form.

With that in mind, parents, as we head into summer, and your rising seniors enter into the climatic months of the college application process, please watch the video below. I hope it saves you from the perils of not embracing whatever outcome may await your child in the college admissions process based on what your child – the student – is willing and able to put into the process without breaking any rules, cutting corners, and/or taking advantage of any unethical “application supplementation.”

 

To receive additional sage, and quite humorous, advice from the perspective of educator Gerry Brooks, click here.

12 Reasons Scattergrams Lull Students Into a False Sense of Security

Posted on August 18, 2018 by Craig

Scattergrams, the ubiquitous x/y axis graphs that have caught on like wildfire over the last twenty years because of their inclusion in Naviance Student, the online college counseling tool used by thousands of American high schools, purport to show a student’s chances of admission at different colleges and universities by plotting previous students from a particular high school on an x/y axis graph based on such students’ GPAs on one axis and their test scores (ACT or SAT) on the other.

Below is an example of a scattergram for a particular high school showing current students (and parents) at that high school how alumni from that high school fared when applying to University of Maryland College Park from 2010 through 2014.

Note that the below scattergram plots the SAT on the x-axis using the old 2400 SAT scale; however, the SAT is now scored out of 1600. Similarly, the high school in question clearly plots GPA based on a 4.0 scale, but some schools’ scattergrams will have very different numbers of the y-axis because scattergrams can have any sort of GPA scale on them (100, 20, 6, etc.) depending on a school’s grading scale.

The typical student seeing the above scattergram assumes, if he or she has a 3.6 GPA and an SAT score of 1860 he or she is definitely going to get into University of Maryland College Park. Most of the rest of students with that combination of grades and scores would assume, after seeing the above scattergram, that Maryland is at least a huge safety college for them. After all, all students from this high school in the past few years who land in that GPA/score range got into Maryland, as illustrated by all of those green squares.

STOP RIGHT THERE!

The problem is a student with this GPA/score combination could easily get rejected from University of Maryland College Park for any number of reasons that a scattergram will not be able to display. The most common reasons scattergrams lull students into a false sense of security are as follows:

  1. Many selective colleges get more selective every passing year, rendering antiquated past years’ admissions statistics.
  2. Scattergrams don’t show the quality of past applicants’ extracurricular resumes.
  3. Scattergrams don’t show the quality of past applicants’ essay writing skills.
  4. Scattergrams don’t show past applicants’ demographics (rich, middle-class, poor, black, white, Hispanic, Asian, International, etc.). College admissions officers for American colleges – especially selective institutions – often care quite a lot about their applicants’ demographics.
  5. Scattergrams don’t show incredibly important (again, in the eyes of college admissions officers) background information about past applicants’ beyond their demographics. Here we are talking about characteristics like an applicant’s legacy status (Did a past applicant’s mom or dad attend the same college?), athletic prowess (Was a past applicant a highly-sought athletic recruit?), and/or his or her parents’/grandparents’ proclivity for giving money to the college on the scattergram in question.
  6. Most high schools set their scattergrams to hide from current students/parents whether or not past applicants to the college in question applied Rolling Decision, Early Decision, Early Action, Priority Admission, and/or Regular Decision. That’s important information! This is because colleges that offer different admissions plans/deadlines often have very different standards for each such plan/deadline. You can also forget about a scattergram showing whether a past applicant applied for and/or was accepted to the college for fall, spring, or winter term (if such varied options exist at the college in question).
  7. Scattergrams don’t show the quality of past applicants’ teacher and counselor recommendation letters/evaluations.
  8. Scattergrams likely don’t account for whether or not past applicants submitted their ACT scores, SAT scores, both, or neither (in the case of test-optional colleges) to the colleges’ scattergrams on which they are plotted.
  9. Unless the scattergram’s GPA axis is a weighted GPA, the GPA axis is not capable of communicating to students and parents the past applicants’ curricular rigor.
  10. Scattergrams don’t show past applicants’ grade trends in high school (colleges care so much about this).
  11. Scattergrams show past applicants’ final GPAs in high school, not their GPAs when they applied to college (usually in the beginning of a student’s senior year). Senior slumps in the final months of past applicants’ senior years often slightly (and sometimes greatly) deflate their final GPAs relative to what their GPAs were in October of their senior years.
  12. Directors of college counseling (the leaders of college counseling offices) can be applicants’ best advocates or worst enemies depending on whether or not these directors have written a strong and compelling high school profile and done everything else they can do to encourage particular colleges to accept their students. Scattergrams don’t note when certain directors’ regimes began and ended; therefore, in a field where many directors of college counseling only stay in their roles for a few years before moving on, a five- or ten-year scattergram could be capturing admissions statistics for students applying from a particular high school under very different college counseling regimes. Some directors write bang-up high school profiles (which are sent to all colleges to which students apply in a particular admissions cycle) and some don’t. Sadly, at some schools, the high school profile is written and designed by the communications team and/or individuals in the admissions, advancement, development, head of school, principal, and or central office! The further removed from college counseling the writers of the high school profile are the more likely the profile will not provide college admissions officers the information they are looking for in a high school profile. Meanwhile, some directors of college counseling make calls for their students or their colleagues’ students, others simply don’t. Some are on a first-name basis with Ivy League admissions officers, some don’t know any. Some act as PR agents for their students, others are real in their recommendation letters, which leads to such letters carrying more weight with admissions officers than those that only share glowing reviews. Scattergrams lull students and parents into thinking (just like point #1 above) that each student plotted on the scattergram had the same college counseling team behind him or her and faced the same college admissions rates from year to year. The fact is, high schools change and colleges change, and as a result, scattergrams fail at capturing subtle or quite large subjective changes to students’ chances from year to year based on how high schools and colleges change.

In summary, so much of what colleges will ultimately base their admissions decisions on is NOT captured in scattergrams; therefore, don’t use them as the end all be all when it comes to determining whether a particular college on your list is a Safety, Possible, or Reach. Any college counselor, student, or parent who tells you otherwise has no idea what he or she is talking about.

I frequently get irate parents telling me that I am too pessimistic about their student’s chances at a particular college or university based on what the family sees on a particular college’s scattergram on Naviance Student. I remind them that I often know the back story on each applicant on the scattergram and/or that there are at lease twelve reasons why the scattergram is only part of the story – especially at the country’s most selective colleges and universities. Sadly, this does not often calm the parents down, and as a result, a few parents hold months-long bouts of resentment towards me – usually until all admissions decisions are released in April, at which point reality sets in – for good or ill. With that said, I am happy when I have a student get into a college that I classified as a Reach that the parents and student thought I should have classified as a Possible or a Safety. It’s my job to help turn all colleges on a student’s list into offers of admission; yet, I need the student’s cooperation and effort if I can make this happen. Sometimes that happens, and sometimes it doesn’t.

Scattergrams are trustworthier for colleges that primarily base their admissions decisions on applicants’ grades and scores only. Theses types of colleges are usually those that accept over 50 of applicants and/or large state universities that ask for the perfunctory essay and extracurricular list but which don’t have the actual manpower to review these subjective aspects of students’ applications. Such colleges usually simply default to determining whether or not to accept a student based on his or her scores and grades. Yet, even in such cases, a student who is quite deficient or exceptionally strong in one or more of the twelve areas listed above could easily become an exception to the rule that the scattergram seems to convey.

Bottom line: strong college counselors always explain this important, complex, and as you can now see, somewhat time-consuming information to students and parents. Such college counselors tend to lean towards being more conservative with their Safety, Possible, and Reach classifications for colleges on their students’ lists than those college counselors who take a relatively two-dimensional approach (x,y axis, anyone?) to college acceptance/rejection prognostication. If you are a student or parent going through the college application process now or in the future, please remember to be skeptical of scattergrams. Though they have valuable data on them, scattergrams only capture some objective data, and they certainly don’t capture the subjective strengths or weaknesses of past college applicants or their college applications.

Fail to get Noticed

Posted on September 17, 2017 by Amy Feins

This morning I was listening to the radio and heard a segment about a new museum that just opened in Sweden. The Museum of Failure. Brilliant! There are all kinds of cool failed ideas like Google Glass and the Apple (fig) Newton. I could add a few others…olestra (that oil alternative that has the unpleasant side effect of violent diarrhea) or maybe these hoverboards that explode into flames (I have two in my garage). The point is, in order to succeed one has to fail first. The problem is, everyone likes to say that, but find me the parent who is happy to have their child get an F in Algebra. Not happening.

So how can we allow our kids to fail (and learn) without screwing up their chances for college admission? You don’t want to fail an AP class, or any class for that matter; yet, there are plenty of other opportunities for failure, and you should make them available to your kids ASAP. Here’s how.

1. Start early. Let your child NOT make the team. Let them lose the race, the game, the contest. Let them flub up the recital (especially if they didn’t practice). Give them lots and lots of opportunities to try, fail, and then try again. Penelope Trunk writes about the importance of practice in an article in Business Insider, and we all know that “practice makes perfect,” but how many of us really force that issue?

2. In school, encourage plenty of “low stakes testing.” These aren’t those God awful state assessments. Low stakes testing (the best way to prepare for the SAT by the way) consists of frequent, short, low stress quizzes that help to decrease test anxiety due to their frequency and the fact that they DO NOT COUNT for much. They are LOW STAKES. Sure, your kids may fail a bunch of them, and then they start to figure out that the world isn’t ending, and they figure out how to best learn the material (not by cramming the night before) and after a bunch of failures they start to PASS the tests. Imagine that.

3. As a child gets older, he or she is willing to take intellectual risks because he or she knows that A) the world won’t end with failure and B) that failure leads to new ideas and eventual success. Once a young adult, he or she will learn to collaborate and look at – and deal with – problems in different ways.

I could go on and on, but you get the idea. Failure is good. Just ask Thomas Edison, or just about any theoretical physicist, or any of those folk who discovered a cure for one disease because the one they were working on didn’t cure the original disease.

And read one of Wendy Mogel’s books. Start with The Blessing of the Skinned Knee. It will go over great at cocktail parties when you are trying to explain to people why it is okay that your little Charlie was just cut from the travel soccer team (that’s fine, soccer is overrated).

Seniors, Remember to Always Express Appreciation

Posted on March 25, 2016 by Craig

Seniors are often so busy completing college applications, taking standardized tests, leading clubs, playing sports, and completing high school coursework that they forget to thank the people who have helped them get where they’re going.

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