We should stop accepting foreign students from China and it's allies. Why are we training and educating them to take that knowledge home to use against us?
This is a really fantastic article. I do hope it gets a wide audience.
The only quibble I have is with grading on a curve. This may work for general req classes with large attendance. But small, specialized classes will not have sufficient knowledge distribution statistics among students to allow such grading.
Great article! Regarding abandoning college application essays: I was an SAT tutor and occasionally reviewed the college application essays of my students. In many cases the essays they gave me to review were terrible. Sometimes I was able to guide them to fix them up, change topics etc. but in some cases I ended up doing so much editing/rewriting and reorganizing that the essay really no longer represented the work of the student. I never wanted to do this but the students were really poor writers or had no inkling of how terrible the topics they chose were--and we were usually up against deadlines. I have heard of many students just hiring someone to outright write the essays for them with almost no input from the student. Since it is almost impossible to know if an essay is actually written by the student, it may be an unfortunate reality that we should disregard essays, even though I do believe they could be quite useful to an admissions committee if they are the true work of a student. This plagiarism issue will only become much worse with ChatGPT/AI etc.
This is a separate problem from the content of essays biasing admissions committees. There is so much in a personal essay that will convey wealth level, race, religion, political viewpoints, privilege etc. The personal biases of the admissions committee are very likely to influence decisions which necessarily interferes with admissions based on academic merit alone.
And yet, perhaps I got into Yale Law School because my essays (all written completely by me) conveyed leadership, demonstrated excellent writing skills, and gave the admissions committee insight into some of my positive qualities. I am glad I had the chance through my writing to actually stand out as I was coming from Brooklyn College and competing against Ivy League graduates.
Good thing this monster does not write the rules.
We should stop accepting foreign students from China and it's allies. Why are we training and educating them to take that knowledge home to use against us?
This is a really fantastic article. I do hope it gets a wide audience.
The only quibble I have is with grading on a curve. This may work for general req classes with large attendance. But small, specialized classes will not have sufficient knowledge distribution statistics among students to allow such grading.
Great article! Regarding abandoning college application essays: I was an SAT tutor and occasionally reviewed the college application essays of my students. In many cases the essays they gave me to review were terrible. Sometimes I was able to guide them to fix them up, change topics etc. but in some cases I ended up doing so much editing/rewriting and reorganizing that the essay really no longer represented the work of the student. I never wanted to do this but the students were really poor writers or had no inkling of how terrible the topics they chose were--and we were usually up against deadlines. I have heard of many students just hiring someone to outright write the essays for them with almost no input from the student. Since it is almost impossible to know if an essay is actually written by the student, it may be an unfortunate reality that we should disregard essays, even though I do believe they could be quite useful to an admissions committee if they are the true work of a student. This plagiarism issue will only become much worse with ChatGPT/AI etc.
This is a separate problem from the content of essays biasing admissions committees. There is so much in a personal essay that will convey wealth level, race, religion, political viewpoints, privilege etc. The personal biases of the admissions committee are very likely to influence decisions which necessarily interferes with admissions based on academic merit alone.
And yet, perhaps I got into Yale Law School because my essays (all written completely by me) conveyed leadership, demonstrated excellent writing skills, and gave the admissions committee insight into some of my positive qualities. I am glad I had the chance through my writing to actually stand out as I was coming from Brooklyn College and competing against Ivy League graduates.