Wednesday, October 08, 2008

"Honor System" For College Admissions?

This sounds OK, but I'm still somewhat suspicious.

Starting with those applying this fall for admission to all three Rutgers campuses, high schools will no longer be asked to submit applicants’ transcripts. Instead, applicants will themselves enter all of their grades and high school courses in an online application form. An official transcript will eventually be reviewed for every applicant who is admitted and indicates a plan to enroll...

There is evidence that some combination of honesty and fear can in fact work to keep the self-reported transcripts accurate. The University of California, the pioneer in this type of admissions system, reports extremely low rates of transcript errors.


If it works, there's nothing wrong with such a system, I guess. I can imagine it would save time for high school registrars.

6 comments:

Ellen K said...

Yeah, that's going to go over big. And next we are going to take it on faith that the kids graduated from high school, speak a foreign language and spent the summer on mission trips to Third World countries. Are we so afraid of hold people accountable for what they claim that we are willing to deny any proof to be offered? And how is that going to go over with the IRS?

Darren said...

It's important to not that once they decide to accept someone, *then* they'll check official transcripts. So it's kind of "trust, but verify".

Anonymous said...

Come on Darren…we all know a teenager will never lie….

Anonymous said...

What's tougher to catch is when the policy's dropped. You can bet that'll occur to the accompaniment of much less in the way of public attention and you can bet it'll happen or Rutgers will disappear.

Anonymous said...

The UCs did this last year when I applied.

Anonymous said...

Seems it would be less work for the colleges to just get real transcripts, and not have to deal with the inevitable do-overs when a few applicants do lie about their grades to make themselves seem like desirable students.