America’s not-for-profit College Board is a membership organization of 6,000 educational institutions that creates and administers tests used by college admissions offices. But it “operates as a near monopoly” with tests “which have a stranglehold on their student-customers…an organization under serious strain, run by an elitist, tone-deaf chief executive,” according to a new article shared by long-term Slashdot reader theodp: The…
Tag: college admissions
College-Bound Students To Miss Out on Billions in Financial Aid Due To Pandemic
This year, students may need extra help to make college a reality. From a report: Amid the coronavirus crisis and sky-high unemployment rates, less than half of families feel confident in their ability to meet the costs of higher education, according to education lender Sallie Mae. About 69% of parents and 55% of students entering college in the fall said Covid-19…
University of California Will Stop Using SAT, ACT
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Wall Street Journal: The University of California board of regents voted Thursday to stop using the SAT and ACT college admissions exams (Warning: source paywalled; alternative source), reshaping college admissions in one of the largest and most prestigious university systems in the country and dealing a significant blow to the multibillion-dollar college admission…
Should Colleges Preserve the Idea of Meritocracy?
“Is Meritocracy an Idea Worth Saving?” asks The Chronicle of Higher Education, reporting on a special forum held recently at the University of North Carolina’s Program for Public Discourse. “This discussion took place before Covid-19 changed everything. But the topics — the definition of meritocracy, the role of universities in a just society, the composition of socioeconomic class, and the real…
College Board Drops Plans For SAT Student ‘Adversity Scores’
The College Board is abandoning its plan to assign an adversity score to every student who takes the SAT college admissions test, after facing criticism from educators and parents. Instead, it will try to capture a student’s social and economic background in a broad array of data points (Warning: source paywalled, alternative source). The new tactic is called Landscape and doesn’t…
NYT ‘Op Eds From the Future’ Launch With Sci-Fi Writer Ted Chiang
Slashdot reader Lasrick tipped us off to the first installment in a new series at the New York Times called “Op-Eds From the Future.” Science fiction authors, futurists, philosophers and scientists write op-eds that they imagine we might read 10, 20 or even 100 years in the future. The challenges they predict are imaginary — for now — but their arguments…