Confessions of an Application Reader Essay

A high uply qualified schoolchild, with a 3. 95 unw eighted grade point average and 2300 on the SAT, was non among the hook-ranked directing appli brookts to the University of California, Berkeley. He had perfect 800s on his subject tests in math and chemistry, a score of 5 on five ripe perspective exams, musical talent and, in one of two personalized statements, had written a loving tribute to his parents, who had emigrated from India. Enlarge This form Brian Cronin for The novel York Times Related Go to Education Life Enlarge This Image Peg Skorpinski Sather Gate, a literal and symbolic portal on Berkeleys campus.Readers Comments Readers shared their minds on this article. Read All Comments (250) w presentfore was he non top-ranked by the worlds premier overt university, as Berkeley calls itself? maybe others had perfect grades and scores? They did indeed. Were they ranked higher? Not necessarily. What kind of student was ranked higher? Every case is incompatible . The reason our budding engineer was a 2 on a 1-to-5 scale (1 being highest) has to do with Berkeleys holistic, or comprehensive, review, an admissions policy adopted by most discriminating colleges and universities.In holistic review, institutions look beyond grades and scores to determine academic potential, drive and leadership abilities. Apparently, our Indian-American student indispensable more extracurricular activities and technology awards to be ranked a 1. Now consider a indorse engineering applicant, a Mexican-American student with a moving, well-written essay but a 3. 4 G. P. A. and SATs below 1800. His school offered no A. P. He competed in skip over when not at his after-school job, working the fields with his parents. His score? 2. 5. twain students were among typical applicants used as norms to train application lecturers like myself.And their different credentials yet remarkably close rankings illustrate the challenges, the ambiguities and the agenda of admis sions at a major public research university in a post-affirmative-action world. musical composition teaching ethics at the University of San Francisco, I signed on as an external reader at Berkeley for the fall 2011 admissions cycle. I was one of round 70 outside readers some high school counselors, some clubby admissions consultants who helped rank the nearly 53,000 applications that year, giving each about eight legal proceeding of attention.An applicant scoring a 4 or 5 was in all probability going to be disappointed a 3 might be deferred to a January entry students with a 1, 2 or 2. 5 went to the top of the pile, but that didnt mean they were in. Berkeley might accept 21 portion of freshman applicants over all but only 12 pct in engineering. My job was to help sort the pool. We were to assess each set up of information grades, courses, standardized test scores, activities, leadership potential and character in an additive fashion, looking for ways to boost the studen t to the succeeding(prenominal) level, as opposed to counting every factor as a negative. remote readers are only the for the first time read. Every one of our applications was scored by an experient lead reader before being passed on to an inner deputation of admissions incumbents for the selection phase. My new position required two days of intensive training at the Berkeley Alumni House as well as eight three-hour norming sessions. There, we practiced ranking under the supervision of lead readers and admissions military officers to ensure our decisions conformed to the criteria draw by the admissions office, with the intent of giving applicants as close to equal discourse as possible.The mathematical shape, however, turned out very differently. In principle, a broader inquiry of candidates is a great mentation some might say it is an honourable imperative to look at the bigger picture of an applicants life, as our mission was described. Considering the bigger picture has aided Berkeleys out of bounds of diversity after Proposition 209, which in 1996 amended Californias constitution to prohibit consideration of race, ethnicity or gender in admissions to public institutions.In Fisher v.the University of Texas, the Supreme Court, too, endorsed race-neutral processes aimed at promoting educational diversity and, on throwing the case back to lower courts, challenged public institutions to justify race as a factor in the holistic process. In practice, holistic admissions raises umpteen questions about who gets selected, how and why. I could see the fundamental unevenness in this process both in the norming Webinars and when alone in a dark inhabit at home with my Berkeley-issued netbook, reading assigned applications away from enormously unusual family members.First and foremost, the process is confusingly subjective, despite all the objective criteria I was clever to examine. In norming sessions, I remember how lead readers would raise a candid ates ranking because he or she helped build the class. I never quite grasped how to build a class of freshmen from California the priority, it was explained in the first days pep talk while seem to prize the high-paying out-of-state students who are so attractive during times of a ripening budget gap. (A special team handled international applications. )In one norming session, pose readers questioned why a student who resembled a throng of applicants and had only a 3. 5 G. P. A. should rank so highly. Could it be because he was a nonresident and had wealthy parents? (He had taken one of the expensive volunteer trips to Africa that we were told should not act us. ) Income, an optional item on the application, would appear on the very first screen we saw, along with applicant name, address and family information. We also saw the high schools state performance ranking. All this can be revealing.Admissions officials were careful not to mention gender, ethnicity and race during ou r training sessions. Norming examples were our guide. Privately, I asked an officer point-blank What are we doing about race? She nodded sympathetically at my wonder but warned that it would be illegal to consider were looking at again, that phrase the bigger picture of the applicants life. After the next training session, when I asked about an Asian student who I thought was a 2 but had only received a 3, the officer noted Oh, youll get a chain reactor of them. She said the same when I asked why a low-income student with top grades and scores, and who had served in the Israeli army, was a 3. Which them? I had wondered. Did she mean Id see a lot of 4. 0 G. P. A. s, or a lot of applicants whose bigger picture would give off to advance them, or a lot of Jewish and Asian applicants (Berkeley is 43 percent Asian, 11 percent Latino and 3 percent black)? The idea behind multiple readers is to prevent any single reader from make an outlier decision. And some of the rankings I gave a ctual applicants were overturned up the reading hierarchy.I received an e-mail from the assistant film director suggesting I was not with the broadcast Youve got 15 outlier, which is quite a lot. Mainly you gave 4s and the final scores were 2s and 2. 5s. As I go on reading, I should keep an eye on the percentile report on the e-viewer and adjust my rankings accordingly. In a second e-mail, I was told I needed more 1s and referrals. A referral is a flag that a students grades and scores do not make the fill out but the application merits a special read because of stressors socioeconomic disadvantages that admissions offices can use to increase diversity.Officially, like all readers, I was to exclude nonage background from my consideration. I was simply to notice whether the student came from a non-English-speaking household. I was not told what to do with this information except that it may be a stressor if the personal statement revealed the student was having trouble adjusti ng to coursework in English. In such(prenominal) a case, I could refer the applicant for a special read. Why did I hear so many times from the assistant director? I think I got lost in the unspoken directives. nearly things cant be spelled out, but they have to be known. diligence readers must simply pick it up by osmosis, so that the process of detecting objective factors of disadvantage becomes tricky. Its an extreme version of the American non-conversation about race. I scoured applications for stressors. To better understand stressors, I was trained to look for the helpful personal statement that elevates a candidate. Here I encountered through-the-looking-glass moments an inspiring account of achievements may be less helpful than a report of the hardships that prevented the student from achieving better grades, test scores and honors.Should I range consistent excellence or better results at the end of a personal struggle? I applied both, depending on race. An underrepresented minority could be the phoenix, I decided. We were not to hold a lack of Advanced Placement courses against applicants. Highest attention was to be paid to the unweighted G. P. A. , as schools in low-income neighborhoods may not offer A. P. courses, which are given more weight in G. P. A. calculation. to date readers also want to know if a student has taken ambitious courses, and will consider A.P. s along with key college-prep subjects, known as a-g courses, required by the U. C. system. Even such objective information was opened to interpretation. During training Webinars, we argued over transcripts. I scribbled this exchange in my notes A reader ranks an applicant low because she sees an overcount in the students a-g courses. She thinks the courses were miscounted or perhaps counted higher than they should have been. Another reader sees an undercount and charges the first reader with essay to cut this girl down. The lead reader corrects Were not here to cut down a student. W ere here to invite factors that advance the student to a higher ranking. Another reader thinks the student is costly but we have so many of these kids. She doesnt see any leadership beyond the students own projects. Listening to these conversations, I had to wonder exactly how elite institutions define leadership. I was supposed to find this major criterion holistically in the application. Some students took leadership courses. Most often, it was demo in extracurricular activities.