Grade 6 Science Form A Measures Of Student Learning Common: Fill & Download for Free

I've posted this before, but here you go:Courtesy of the Marshall Memo:2. When Students Study On Their Own, What Works and What Doesn’t?In this extraordinarily thorough fifty-four-page monograph in Psychological Science in the Public Interest, John Dunlosky and Katherine Rawson (Kent State University), Elizabeth Marsh (Duke University), Mitchell Nathan (University of Wisconsin/Madison), and Daniel Willingham (University of Virginia) report on their review of the effectiveness of ten different study techniques that students use for independent study. Each is a plausible method for improving achievement and several are very common – but only two are highly effective and three moderately effective. Here is the authors’ overall assessment of each one, with details on how generalizable the technique proved to be in research studies:1. Re-reading – Going over text material two or more times after an initial reading is one of the most widely used study techniques.• Overall assessment – Low utility• Impact in different learning conditions – One key variable is the amount of time between initial reading and rereading, with a longer lag-time producing better learning.• Impact with different students – Almost all studies of rereading have been done on college students, so we don’t know much about K-12 applications.• Impact with different learning materials – Researchers have looked at the effect of rereading across a variety of school materials.• Impact with different ways of measuring student learning – Studies have not shown robust learning gains in various kinds of assessments.• Effects in representative educational contexts – Rigorous research on this technique in different classroom settings is virtually non-existent.• Implementation issues – Students need no training to use this strategy except knowing to wait a little while after initial reading before rereading.2. Highlighting and underlining – Marking potentially important portions of to-be-learned materials while reading; this technique is widely used by students at all levels.• Overall assessment – Low utility• Impact in different learning conditions – Research has found this technique to be unproductive in a wide variety of classroom settings.• Impact with different students – Studies have found highlighting and underlining to be ineffective with students from the primary grades to Air Force basic trainees. The problem is that students often don’t highlight the most important material or over-highlight so they can’t see the forest for the trees.• Impact with different learning materials – With difficult material, highlighting and underlining may actually hurt students’ performance on higher-level tasks that require inferential thinking.• Impact with different ways of measuring student learning – Research shows weak results.• Effects in representative educational contexts – Several studies found that when teachers highlighted important parts of texts, students did better on assessments, but this did not put highlighting into the front ranks of effectiveness.• Implementation issues – Students often highlight in ways that are not helpful to learning, and the time spent highlighting is time not spent on more-effective techniques. Extensive training can improve students’ skill at highlighting the most important material, but this is time-consuming and detracts from other approaches that would be more productive.3. Summarization – Writing summaries of to-be-learned material, capturing the gist and not unimportant or repetitive material:• Overall assessment – Low utility• Impact in different learning conditions – The key question is whether students have the material in front of them while they summarize or put the text aside and test their memory. The research is mixed on both conditions.• Impact with different students – Most of the research has been on college students; younger students have difficulty writing accurate summaries and this makes the technique less effective for them.• Impact with different learning materials – Most studies have looked at students’ summarizing of prose passages, and more research is needed on other types of materials.• Impact with different ways of measuring student learning – The research here is mixed, with some studies showing benefits to long-term learning and others showing students performing worse.• Effects in representative educational contexts – The concern here is whether students have learned to accurately summarize material.• Implementation issues – This technique is relatively easy for students who know how to summarize, but for those who don’t, extensive training is required.4. Keyword mnemonic – Using keywords and mental imagery (visualizing the material to be learned in your “mind’s eye”) to associate and remember material; this time-honored technique has been studied since the late 1800s. An example: to learn the French word la dent (tooth), the student thinks of an English word that will be helpful (dentist) and forms a mental image of a dentist holding a large molar with a pair of pliers.• Overall assessment – Low utility• Impact in different learning conditions – Researchers have found that this technique is widely used and appears to help students remember the studied material. However, other techniques work better.• Impact with different students – Studies have covered numerous ages and types of students using this approach.• Impact with different learning materials – Researchers have looked at numerous subject areas and types of materials, and many don’t lend themselves to the easy association of la dent with dentist.• Impact with different ways of measuring student learning – Although using keywords and mental imagery appears to work with short-term memory and transfer, the research suggests that it doesn’t produce durable learning – in fact, it leads to “accelerated forgetting.” This is probably because there are so many steps students have to take and multiple opportunities for errors in retrieval.• Effects in representative educational contexts – The research is mixed in studies in different types of classrooms, but overall it’s not positive.• Implementation issues – Developing keywords involves skill and time (which is why the keywords are often supplied by the teacher), and research suggests that students’ time is better spent on more-productive study techniques.5. Using imagery for learning text – Attempting to form mental images of text materials while reading or listening:• Overall assessment – Low utility• Impact in different learning conditions – Studies have found that using imagery works better when students are listening to a teacher reading a passage aloud than when they are reading it silently.• Impact with different students – Research has been done on different age students, and the results have been mixed, with benefits depending on the type of material and whether students are good at forming mental images.• Impact with different learning materials – This technique works best with learning material that is “image-friendly” and not so well with more-abstract subject matter.• Impact with different ways of measuring student learning – Using imagery is helpful with free-recall or short-answer tests but ineffective with tests with comprehension, inference, and application questions; there isn’t research on long-term retention.• Effects in representative educational contexts – Research is thin in this area, but the authors say that using imagery is a “relatively inert strategy.”• Implementation issues – Students need to learn how to form images as they read, and researchers haven’t established how much time this would take.6. Elaborative interrogation – While studying, asking oneself why a fact or concept is true and coming up with an explanation:• Overall assessment – Moderate utility• Impact in different learning conditions – This technique works best with lists of facts, but there are questions about how well it works with longer or more complex material.• Impact with different students – Studies have shown it works from university students down to the upper-elementary level but not as well in the primary grades; it’s also less effective with students who have low levels of prior knowledge in the domain.• Impact with different learning materials – The technique seems to work with many different types of factual material.• Impact with different ways of measuring student learning – Short-term memory of facts is improved, but research needs to be done on whether this technique works with long-term retention.• Effects in representative educational contexts – Research is lacking in this area.• Implementation issues – Students need only minimal training to use this technique – for example, prompting themselves to ask “Why is this true?” every 150 words in a textbook passage.7. Self-exploration – Explaining how new information is related to known information, or explaining steps taken during problem-solving – for example, a student asking him- or herself, “What parts of this page are new to me? What does this statement mean? Is there anything I still don’t understand?”• Overall assessment – Moderate utility• Impact in different learning conditions – This technique does well across a range of school conditions.• Impact with different students – Research has found this technique to be effective among younger and older students, but more study is needed on its utility with different achievement levels.• Impact with different learning materials – This technique has been effective with a wide range of materials.• Impact with different ways of measuring student learning – Studies have shown it to be effective across an impressive range of learning outcomes including memory, comprehension, and transfer.• Effects in representative educational contexts – More research is needed here.• Implementation issues – Although students don’t need a lot of training to use this technique, it is relatively time-consuming for students to implement well.8. Interleaved practice – Implementing a schedule of practice that mixes different kinds of problems or materials within a single study session. The opposite of this, which students use most often, is studying each topic in a block and then moving on to the next one – for example, looking at a series of paintings by one artist, then a series of paintings by another artist. The authors say the interleaved technique has great promise but research on it is less robust than it is for most of the other techniques.• Overall assessment – Moderate utility• Impact in different learning conditions – Interleaved practice is often used in conjunction with distributed practice, but its efficacy is not dependent on the spacing between study sessions. It’s most effective when students have attained a level of mastery with each skill so they can move from one to another with some facility.• Impact with different students – Most of the research has been done on college students, but a few studies have looked at interleaving with upper-elementary students.• Impact with different learning materials – Researchers have studied interleaving with students learning about artists’ painting styles, mathematics, and other subjects and found different impact in different areas. It is highly effective in mathematics and less effective with learning foreign-language vocabulary.• Impact with different ways of measuring student learning – An intriguing fact is that when studying, students using blocked practice do better than students doing interleaved practice, but on tests, students who used interleaved practice do significantly better. This may be because interleaved practice helps students compare different types of problems and get better at shifting from one to the other. Interleaved practice may also make greater demands on long-term memory and strengthen those neural links.• Effects in representative educational contexts – A few studies have found that motivated students can learn to use interleaving quite quickly.• Implementation issues – Interleaving may take slightly more study time than blocked practice, but the time is well spent, say the authors. They recommend that when teachers present a new skill or topic, they should have students practice that one first, then do a mixed practice with skills from previous units – ongoing, cumulative, interleaved practice throughout the year.9. Practice testing – Self-testing or taking practice tests on to-be-learned material. “Testing is likely viewed by many students as an undesirable necessity of education,” say the authors, “and we suspect that most students would prefer to take as few tests as possible… This view of testing is… unfortunate, because it overshadows the fact that testing also improves learning.” What does this look like? Students working on their own to test themselves on the target material, either with actual or virtual flashcards, completing practice problems, or doing practice tests – all in a low-stakes environment.• Overall assessment – High utility• Impact in different learning conditions – Researchers have most often used cued recall (students write down as much as they can remember about a passage without looking back), but other formats have been studied.• Impact with different students – Students of various ages have been studied, but the research is thinner on different student achievement levels and amounts of prior knowledge.• Impact with different learning materials – Studies have affirmed the efficacy of practice testing with a variety of materials.• Impact with different ways of measuring student learning – Research has shown practice testing produces robust learning gains on a variety of short-term and long-term tests and applying information in new settings.• Effects in representative educational contexts – Practice testing has been studied in a wide variety of classrooms with positive results.• Implementation issues – Practice testing is not particularly time-consuming and requires minimal training. The Cornell note-taking method, for example, is quick to learn (students take notes on half of each page and leave a blank column to jot down key terms and questions shortly after taking the notes for self-testing later). Of course feedback on the practice testing is important – either students checking themselves or the teacher providing correctives where necessary.10. Distributed practice – Implementing a schedule of practice that spreads out study activities over time, versus being massed in a short period of time. “Although cramming is better than not studying at all in the short term,” say the authors, “given the same amount of time for study, would students be better off spreading out their study of content? The answer to this question is a resounding ‘yes.’”• Overall assessment – High utility• Impact in different learning conditions – Studies have shown that the key variable is how much time passes between practice/retrieval sessions. For example, to remember something for one week, sessions should be 12 to 24 hours apart. To remember something for five years, sessions should be 6 to 12 months apart. Another variable is how deeply students are processing the information in each practice/retrieval session.• Impact with different students – Researchers have documented the effect of distributed practice on a wide range of ages and student characteristics, but there isn’t good research on different learner characteristics (for example, prior knowledge and motivation).• Impact with different learning materials – Studies have tested the impact of distributed practice on a wide variety of learning materials. It does well with most assessments but less well with complex tasks like airplane control.• Impact with different ways of measuring student learning – The results of distributed practice are strong with all kinds of assessments and strongest with assessments conducted after some time has passed.• Effects in representative educational contexts – Researchers have seen positive results from distributed practice in many types of classrooms.• Implementation issues – One factor that makes it more difficult to get students using distributed practice is that textbooks tend to bunch topics together and not return to them. Another factor is “procrastination scallop” – the tendency of students to increase study time just before an exam rather than spreading it out over the semester. Distributed practice doesn’t use more time than other study techniques, but students need to be convinced of its efficacy and have a little training on how to do it. Teachers can also help students distribute practice by giving frequent, short tests.“It is obvious that many students are not using effective learning techniques but could use more-effective techniques without much effort,” conclude the authors, “so teachers should be encouraged to more consistently (and explicitly) train students to use learning techniques as they are engaged in pursuing various instructional and learning goals.”“Improving Students’ Learning with Effective Learning Techniques: Promising Directions from Cognitive and Educational Psychology” by John Dunlosky, Katherine Rawson, Elizabeth Marsh, Mitchell Nathan, and Daniel Willingham in Psychological Science in the Public Interest, January 2013 (Vol. 14, #1, p. 4-58),http://psi.sagepub.com/content/14/1/4.full.pdf+html?ijkey=Z10jaVH/60XQM&keytype=ref&siteid=sppsi

I'll speak up for Caltech here.Going through undergrad at Caltech is the hardest thing you'll ever do.Before I can talk about anything else, you have to understand what I mean by this.Caltech is a place that was built up to take the best scientific minds in the country and push them harder, faster, and further than they'd ever experienced before. It manages this through a couple key points:There are almost no introductory classes. The 'normal' class track for most majors has you taking graduate level courses starting in your sophomore or junior year.The core curriculum requirement is incredible. Every undergrad at Caltech is required to take courses in analysis, multivariable calculus, linear algebra, differential equations, probability and statistics, classical mechanics, special relativity, electricity and magnetism, waves and optics, thermodynamics, quantum mechanics, general chemistry, physical and organic chemistry, chemistry lab, a second lab class chosen from the likes of nanofabrication labs, physics labs, etc, the biology and biophysics of viruses, and a 'breadth' or 'menu' course chosen from the likes of introductory astronomy, geology, information science, energy science, etc. Everyone takes all of these. No matter your major. Yes, even the premeds have to pass quantum mechanics.You take many, many classes. Taking 5-6 courses simultaneously is considered normal. This doesn't count any 'small' course listings like playing for the athletic teams or somesuch. No, we're talking 5-6 full-blown, hardcore science courses. Taking anything less, even just 4 courses, makes it difficult to remain a full-time student, and difficult to fulfill all the requirements you need in order to graduate on time. On the other hand, many students find themselves taking 7 courses at once in some terms.The classes move extremely quickly. Some time ago, Caltech moved to a quarter system where each quarter lasts 10 weeks. Rather than simply teach less material than a corresponding semester-long course, the professors adopted the policy of just accelerating the coursework so that each quarter-long course covers a full semester's worth of material.Add onto all of this what can be a somewhat insular social environment that can be as challenging to deal with as your courses, and you can begin to understand what I'm talking about.To put things into a Silicon Valley perspective, when I came to Mountain View to start a software startup, I asked around to a lot of the alumni contacts I knew for advice. One thing that was often repeated was the warning that "I'd like to say that starting a startup will be the hardest thing you'll ever do, but you were an undergrad at Caltech, so I can't. Instead, it'll be the second hardest thing you'll ever do."Now for the rest of the experience:Like many world class universities, the faculty are amazing. You take courses from people who literally wrote the book in their fields. I won't belabor this point because by now you've seen it reiterated many times in the other answers to this question, but it's pretty neat, and worth mentioning once.The laboratory access is unparalleled. It is literally as easy to get a spot in a world-class lab as walking up to a professor after class and expressing your interest. This includes research gigs at national labs, JPL, and associated research facilities. Almost every single student does some form of research work while at Caltech. Most do research work over the summer—when no classes are offered—but many continue their laboratory involvement full time during the school year, on top of the 5-6 classes they have to take as a full-time student.The Caltech Honor Code is sacred.No member of the Caltech community shall take unfair advantage of any other member of the Caltech community.Every Techer knows those words by heart. The attitude of the honor code permeates the school, and every interaction within it. It is taken so seriously that cheating is almost unheard of, despite take-home midterms and finals (more on this later), and when cheating does happen, investigation and punishment of any offense is left to the undergrads. Specifically, there is a group in the student government called the Board of Control (abbreviated BoC), which is responsible for policing academic dishonesty. Their decisions, though reviewed by the dean of students, are almost always upheld, and may include 'corrective' measures that range from nullifying a student's grade on an offending exam, to nullifying a student's grade in a class, to placing a student on involuntary leave or even expelling a student outright from the Institute.Advantages of the seriousness with which the Caltech community takes into mind the honor code include the ease with which students can gain personal keys to buildings and laboratories on campus, and extreme levels of comfort and safety around your fellow students. Though it's not advised, you can basically leave the door to your room open for hours without being personally present, and expect to find nothing missing or misplaced upon your return.It is literally a violation of Institute policy to administer a proctored exam. Midterms and finals are take-home, almost without exception. The only time I ever had an in-class final was for a humanities class where the professor didn't want us to spend too much time worrying about the final paper. He walked in the door, wrote the prompt on the chalkboard, told us we had two hours to write and after that, he'd be back to pick up the papers, and walked right back out the door again.Take-home exams include specified time and resource limits. For example, they might say "This exam must be taken in four hours, in one sitting, and you may only reference your own hand-written course notes." or "This exam may be taken over the course of six hours, with a single thirty-minute break not counting against that time limit taken at any time. This exam is considered closed-book, and you may not reference any outside materials." The worst exams, though, have descriptions that go like this "This is an 'infinite-time' exam. You may work on this exam throughout the entirety of finals week, but must turn it in at 5pm on the last day of the week. You may reference anything you like, including any textbooks, Google, or other internet resources, but you may not discuss problems on this exam with anyone else." Infinite-time, open-Google exams are legendary and terrible, because the more resources the professor has made available to you, the more you can be sure that those resources won't help you. It's not uncommon for professors to put open research problems in the field on exams like this.Another note about Caltech exams is that often, when professors run out of time to teach additional topics in their courses, they'll include those topics on the final exam anyway, expecting students to use the open-book policy to learn the topics from the textbook on the fly, during the exam, and to then answer difficult questions relating to them.Caltech requires its students to take a great number of humanities courses. Little known in the outside world, Caltech has a significant (12-courses, which averages to one every quarter) requirement in the Humanities and Social Sciences that every student must complete in order to graduate. While you have great flexibility in choosing the individual courses you take, you are required to spread them out among several broad categories. Courses eligible for fulfilling this requirement include—beyond the expected literature, foreign language, history and philosophy offerings—those offered in anthropology, business and economic management, economics, law, and political science. It should be noted that many of the courses offered in these latter categories have a particularly 'Caltech' approach, often involving significant levels of mathematical analysis, e.g., game theory in economics courses, or options pricing models in related business classes. Despite the unexpected nature of this requirement, many of the best classes I ever took at Caltech were humanities courses.Years of the Caltech course load give you an incredible ability to focus and to learn new fields extremely quickly. Like I mentioned earlier, there are very few introductory classes. Most of the time, you're dropped into courses alongside graduate students in the relevant fields. The difference is that all the grad students have had lower-level, introductory courses at their previous institutions. The undergrads? Not so much. A consequence of this, and of the often 60+ hours a week of problem sets you have to deal with, is that the only way to survive is to develop an incredible ability to focus on the tasks at hand in conjunction with the ability to rapidly learn new fields. The core curriculum helps immensely here, because through it, every student has some basic familiarity with almost every concept in science.To put it another way, at Caltech, you spend almost every single day for four (or five, or six, or seven) years straight facing problems that you don't know how to solve. The idea of being faced with a problem that you don't understand, then, isn't a scary thing anymore, and instead becomes familiar. Since giving up is not an option, through such repeated exposure to problems you don't understand you develop a method of dealing with them. You learn how to break unknown problems up into parts, to categorize and classify them, to make powerful analogies to situations you are already familiar with, to learn to use new techniques and methods of thought, and to invent a hundred crazy approaches in a row when nothing else seems to work. Problems that you don't, initially, have any clue how to solve are par for the course, for every course, for every problem set.There is a special kind of intelligence among the undergrads at Caltech. I hope the idea that Caltech undergrads are extremely focused on scientific fields will come as no shock to anyone reading this. I should stress, though, that that same focus does not imply a corresponding lack of interest in non-scientific fields. Like most schools, students at Caltech have a wide variety of interests, and like most world-renowned schools, students at Caltech take their outside interests very seriously. The result, though, is curious in a way that I suspect is probably only really duplicated at MIT. You see, at Caltech, like many other schools discussed in this question, you often get into fascinating discussions with your fellow students about everything from political events to philosophy to popular culture. However, unlike most other schools discussed in this question, when debate occurs at Caltech, it is a very particular kind of debate indeed. At Caltech, real-world evidence and logical thought processes are of paramount importance in a way that can only be true at a place with such a singular focus on science. Blind conjecture, unfounded assertions, emotional exhortations, or contradictory beliefs will get hounded out faster than a fox at a beagle convention. In many cases, it's exhilarating. In some, it's annoying. But it always keeps you on your toes.The social atmosphere:There are enough details that go into this to make it worth its own section in my answer.The house system.Caltech has no dorms and no fraternities or sororities. Instead, there is the house system. There are eight houses, each of which contains between about 70 and 120 students. The houses have membership rules similar to frats, and select new members from among the freshmen during a week-long event at the beginning of each school year called Rotation. Each house is self-governing, extremely close knit and has its own personality, traditions, and quirks. A recent student experience trip conducted by the Caltech student government found that Caltech's house system promoted a greater degree of interaction between students of different years than was commonly found anywhere else among the other schools toured across the nation.Each house organizes social events for its members, sports (and other) challenges against other houses, and parties for the entire campus. It's often said that Caltech is very much like Harry Potter, except we have eight houses instead of four, and no talking hat.To get an idea of just how important the houses are at Caltech, consider that alongside class-year reunions, Caltech's alumni association organizes House-specific reunions for each of the eight houses.Caltech parties are legendary. Take two parts brilliant engineers, five parts stressed-out students needing a release, three parts wild and crazy ideas, and one part easy access to money and construction equipment, and what do you get? Students spending months building, painting, and decorating parties for a single wild night. Past parties have included flooded courtyards and floating dance floors, snow machines and giant submarines, huge pyramids, rope bridge entranceways extending out of roof-level stairwell windows, programmable LED nets, fifty feet on a side, underground passages, and more. It's unbelievable.Nevertheless, Caltech is extremely emotionally challenging. Years on end of exposure to the pressure cooker environment, to incredibly challenging work, to all-nighter after all-nighter—the most depressing thing is when your all-nighters are regularly scheduled every week by the dictates of your coursework—to, in a nutshell, an environment where your best is never good enough, because nothing is ever good enough, and you're running as fast as you can just to barely be able to keep up with everything and you're desperately hoping that nothing goes even the slightest bit badly—like getting sick for a weekend, or, god forbid, during the week—because then you'll be forced to play catch-up, and it's almost impossible to catch up once you've fallen behind, and it's a victory when you get six hours of sleep one night because that's the most you'll sleep this week until Saturday, and you've just gotten your midterms back, but you can't relax because you've got finals in three weeks, and you're trying your hardest at your sports practice, but it's not going so well because you're sluggish on the court because who has reflexes worth a damn when you're lucky to average five hours of sleep a night, and the prof whose lab you're working in expects new experimental results on Monday, and your friend is having a breakdown because of relationship issues that you're hearing no end of, but you want to help because they're your friend, and another friend you know is in a serious depression because god damn, the stress level is through the roof, and how the hell are you supposed to finish soldering your project together at five in the morning when your hands are shaking and your vision is blurring, and you can hardly keep your eyes open anymore, and you know that you'll be sick to your stomach all day tomorrow because that's what always happens after nights like this.During my time at Caltech, I knew more than a dozen people who spent time at the local mental health clinic's suicide watch ward. I would be surprised if any Caltech undergrad never had a friend end up there.Finally, I should mention that the small size of the school opens up many opportunities. Because the school's population is so small (only about 850 undergrads) and so selective, the faculty and administration are incredibly accessible, and treat the students with a great deal of respect. It's not unusual for a student to be able to schedule a same-day sit down meeting with any member of Caltech's administration or faculty. Further, students sit on almost every Institute committee, from the search committees for new vice presidents of the institute to the freshman admissions committee and beyond. It's incredibly easy to make connections to members of the faculty and the administration, and I know many fellow undergrads who have found those connections to be absolutely invaluable.In conclusion, while I haven't discussed every detail and aspect of attending Caltech as an undergrad, I believe I've hit on the most important points. I've left out innumerable crazy stories and weird traditions (throwing liquid-nitrogen-frozen pumpkins off of the roof of a ten story building on Halloween night, anyone?), as well as some of the finer details of the way the school runs, but I hope I've been able to impart some visceral understanding of what the school is like for most of its students.

Jacques Steinberg’s The Gatekeepers is one of the best books published on what it is like to work at a highly selective college or university admission office. Steinberg was given almost unheard of access to the way Wesleyan conducts the business of selecting students who best fit their institutional needs.My short answer is pretty simple: Yes and No. I will try to show why this seeming contradiction forms a larger frame that has room for both ways of painting the picture.Given that the book, at least by today’s standards, is old, the first thing to address is whether the book still accurately describes what goes on in admission at Wesleyan. For those who have not read the book, a bit of plot summary might be useful. I use the word plot because although the book is not a novel, it does trace the story of one particular admission officer, Ralph Figueroa, and the fates of a number of students too.The focus on one office and one person allows Steinberg to let the life he depicts stand for the larger admission office staff at Wesleyan and for selective admission officers as a whole. We follow Ralph through an admission season, which includes recruiting trips to schools that in some cases are looked at as among the best in the US, and others that serve the Native American population who have tremendous challenges in front of them. We also see that “reading season’ is a several month journey into the stats, words and activities of thousands of talented students. There is little else that goes on in an admission officer’s life except evaluation during this period of time. However, once the reading season ends there are recruitment activities that are necessary for helping to enroll the lucky few who have been admitted. And shortly after that the whole cycle begins again. The book was originally a part of Steinberg’s excellent NY Times Choice Blog. (Unfortunately, he no longer writes the blog. It is still a great resource; even the old entries are useful.)We also get to follow the admission process through the experiences of students who have applied to a variety of selective schools and we discover what their outcomes are. We come to root for some as we read the book and we share in the good news and are moved by how hard it is when some get told no. As a whole, the book lets people in on some inside views of both schools and students as they go through what has become a much more complicated and much more competitive process than it used to be even a generation ago. Most parents say, and rightly so, that they would never get in to most of the highly selective schools that they were accepted to given the huge increase in applications from around the US and the world. Acceptance rates have fallen dramatically at top schools, something I have addressed before. It is not only much harder than it used to get accepted in to top schools, it is much harder to predict who will get in top schools too.The book, which came out in 2002, nevertheless, still rings true in a number of important ways. In fact, Wesleyan had Mr. Steinberg back on campus not that long ago (2013) and listed ten things he got right about the admission process. I won’t list all of them, but there are three that I think need a bit of a gloss.Wesleyan practices “holistic” admissions. There’s no SAT cut-off or minimum GPA to get into Wesleyan. Nothing as staunchly empirical as the University of Michigan’s longtime admissions formula. Instead, admissions officers combine numbers like GPAs and test scores with raw, human decisions regarding abstract qualities like “character,” “diversity,” and “merit.” (Of course, that’s not to mention the obviously charged negotiations over legacy admits, athletic recruits, celebrity children, and talented oboists.) Steinberg intimately examines an unscientific, complicated admissions process whose (largely antisemitic) origins Malcolm Gladwell later traced in a popular New Yorker article, “Getting In.” It’s messy stuff, and sometimes there are no easy answers, as in the case of Mig Pensoneau, a Native-American applicant with a rough academic history who ends up dropping out of Wesleyan.I applaud the writers of the Wesleyan overview for being far more forthcoming about the quirks that are a part of ‘holistic’ admission. From a shady past that was part of an effort to suppress Jewish students from going Ivy (the better place to find out about this is to read the long but worth reading book The Chosen), holistic admission is the screening process that lets them look at more than just numbers. Most student and families support the abstract notion of holistic admission until they find out how much falls under this rubric. Holistic admission can mean a legacy at a school gets a boost, and in some schools this boost is huge, Holistic admission can mean that an athlete with less than stellar academics in virtually every measurable way may still be invited to join one of the most elite schools in the US. Each school has its own institutional priorities and holistic admission gives them leeway to pursue what they think is in the best interest of the school. It's important to remember that schools are first and foremost about what is best for them even if this means that some students will discover that despite having doe all about anyone can do to get into the school, they still will end up short. What drives some parents and students to distraction (and a few to law suits) is that they “know” another student with much weaker credentials got accepted. And it is likely true that there are students on the most elite campuses whose academic credentials are far weaker. Wesleyan, again with uncharacteristic openness, admits this:Wesleyan really wants more science students and more athletes. Wesleyan remains one of the few top liberal arts colleges where science majors can expect to do original research as undergraduates, and Steinberg’s book reveals how a proven interest in science can give you a huge boost in the admissions process. (A former admissions officer tells Steinberg, “Someone once asked me, ‘Would you take a kid with high physics scores and nothing else?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ The faculty wants them, and the faculty needs them.”) It also reveals Wesleyan’s longtime struggle to be taken seriously on the athletic fields. Steinberg interviews former Dean of Admissions and current Vice President for University Relations Barbara-Jan Wilson, who apparently went to great lengths to improve communication between the admissions officers and coaches. (“I always believed that if the New York Times wanted to write about a draft dodger, they’d call us,” Wilson tells Steinberg. “If they were looking for a good student athlete, they’d call Williams.” But this is a source of frustration: “At Wesleyan you could find a great student athlete,” she protests. “It’s a stereotype.”)These words are one place that helps to answer your question in specific terms. Wesleyan is different than some of the other highly ranked schools in its commitment to giving an edge in admission to students who have a passion for the sciences. As the school is more well known for its arts and humanities and social science the school wishes to increase the number of science students to make sure there is a balance and to ensure there are enough students talking classes in the sciences as majors. This would certainly not be true at a place, for example, at a school like MIT. They might give an edge to the poet or the artist over a strong science student. Each of the top schools has slightly different institutional priorities and so what Steinberg writes about applies in specific terms to one school. Nevertheless, each school does have its own way of giving certain individuals or groups an edge in admission.The last of the things that Wesleyan says that Steinberg gets right is in some ways the most controversial:Wesleyan admissions officers are often in close contact with guidance counselors at top prep schools. If you went to Exeter or Trinity or whatever, chances are your guidance counselor told Wesleyan about you. The Gatekeepers traces a long-term friendship between Ralph Figueroa and college classmate Sharon Merrow, who becomes a dean at the Harvard-Westlake School. Merrow frequently gives Ralph hints about her favorite students, and nudges him for insider tips when they end up applying to Wes. In the case of Julianna Bentes, Ralph had been secretly tracking her since she was in ninth grade. (Creepy? Don’t hate the player, hate the game.)There are many stories in the media about how students from privilege get all sorts of advantages when applying to the most selective schools. The data is there to show that students whose parents make above the top 1% have a distinct edge in admission. Some argue that this should happen as the students attend great schools and have the opportunity to do things outside of school that costs a lot of money (summer camps, travel, internships via networking etc.). The things I have just mentioned should certainly be looked at as ways a student may stand out in ways those who cannot afford these opportunities cannot. This is simply, to me, the way that life is unfair to those who are not at the high end of the income bracket.What The Gatekeepers shows, however, that not only does attending a great school provides wonderful educational opportunities, it also provides the student with access to admission officers that the vast majority of students do not have. If an admission officer has a great working relationship with a counselor and the counselor calls an admission officer to lobby on behalf of an individual or group of students this does seem an unfair advantage. The final comment from Wesleyan’s writers "don’t hate the player hate the game", sounds like a nice sound bite but it still makes it easy to overlook what a small group of students get that most don’t. Having said this however, a number of the top schools have made great efforts to visit schools and communities that are primarily low income. Harvard, Princeton and Yale have done this for years. Other schools, who do not have as much money set aside for financial aid, simply cannot afford to do as much. But The Gatekeepers also shows that Ralph makes a special effort to encourage Native Americans to apply to Wesleyan. Most schools do not target this group, but some target low-income students and almost all target other under-represented groups. Once again, each school will have a slightly different approach depending on what it feels will best support their needs academically, on the playing field, in certain academic majors ad among targeted groups of students.NoIf The Gatekeepers still has much to teach us about how selective admission works, it also does not address in a substantive way a number of things that have become much larger issues since the book was published. It also does not address how far apart some schools are from each other in using these things that affect admission decisions. I will mention just a few.Early Decision/EarlyAction:One of the factors that is a part of US News rankings is selectivity. The more applications a school gets is one part of the equation but the other is what the response rate of those students who are offered admission. At about the time The Gatekeepers came out there was a rush for the top schools to get rid of early decision. This came about after stats were published that demonstrated that the vast majority of all ED students were not eligible for financial aid. Needy students often shop for the best package they could find, so applying early could limit their choices. Remember that Early Decision is a binding agreement. If a student applies Early Decision and is accepted then the student has to withdraw all other applications. The advantage for early decision for schools is that the more they take early (which happens in November/December) the fewer they will have to offer to in regular decision.Regular decision notifications go out in March or early April and at that point a student will typically have a number of schools to choose from. Getting students to apply ED means that they will have no other choice if accepted and this increases the yield (the percentage of student who accept offers). Harvard and Princeton tried to get the movement going, but it did not filter down and a few schools that did follow have backed off in some way. In almost every other case when HPY does something big, others scramble to follow the leader but not this case. Very few changed (and some that did change have since changed back to either early decision or early action.) Why? It was not in their best interest from an institutional perspective. Harvard, Princeton and Yale's yield is already very high.1 Harvard has the highest yield rate of any school (see chart) other schools not that far down the top schools list do not have that luxury.Wesleyan, for example, has two ED plans. One has a November 1 deadline and the other Jan1. This dual strategy helps them because while some students may have applied to other top schools early in November they have heard whether they have been admitted by Mid-December. If they have been turned town at their original top choice they still can apply ED by Jan 1. Why would a student want to apply ED? The answer is simple. The acceptance rate for ED students is much higher than it is for regular decision. It is a significant advantage because the schools benefit from enrolling many strong students who are locked in as enrolling students. Duke, this year filled almost 50% of its class through ED. This means that the competition for regular decision candidates will be far, far tougher than it was for the ED students. Places like Penn make it clear that ED is an advantage too.Early action, which some schools, like Harvard, Princeton and Yale offer, also has a November deadline, but should a student be offered admission they are not required to withdraw all other applications and commit to enroll. A student will hear a decision before the Jan 1 application regular decision deadline from other schools, but almost anyone who gets in to the HYP early action will go. This is not as true for most other schools that offer EA. However, they use the time they have from December to the May 1 national reply date (when deposits to schools are due) to woo students. They invite them for special programs and send unending emails etc. They recruit in ways that were largely unheard of a decade ago including Tweets, Facebook pages, Instagram, blogs etc.I tell students who are looking at places like the Ivies, Stanford, and Wesleyan that they should plan on applying to a school early. ED is a bit trickier as it is binding, but the benefit in terms of getting in now weighs so heavily that it may be worth it. See chart for differences in acceptance rates for early vs. regular decisionAs already mentioned, low income students do not apply early nearly as often as those that can pay because they want to weigh the aid options they might get. Low-income student may face more challenges because of early programs but schools with lots of aid money try to give low-income student a break in admission and provide generous funding too. This year Harvard, for example, offered to a significantly higher proportion of low-income students EA than they did the year before.Profile:If there is one easy way to see how top schools are different from one another in terms of admission and, as a consequence, in terms of the make up of the study body, it is through a document called the profile. Typically, a profile describes the applicant pool, the students who have been offered admission and the students who have accepted the offer. It is meant to give families, students and educators a snapshot of the kinds of students who fit in the mix of enrolling students. While what I have just written is accurate as far as it goes, it is also far from comprehensive. A profile is also a marketing tool. Students and families can learn a lot about what the school values by looking at what information the schools include in their published profiles ad what information they leave out too.Harvard, for example, on their official admitted student profile does not list any academic numbers. There is nothing listed about Rank in Class, GPA or SAT/ACT scores. Instead they list the number of applications, the number admitted, where the applications apply from, the race of the students and financial aid information. Why would they leave out the stats that most would want to see when deciding whether a student has much of a chance of being admitted? Harvard is smart. If they listed the numbers I have just mentioned it would discourage many students form applying. Don’t believe me? Here are the stats that were left out as published by The Harvard Crimson, the student newspaper:The average self-reported unweighted GPA on a 4.0 scale was 3.94. Fifty-four percent of students reported a perfect 4.0.Freshmen reported an average composite SAT score of 2237. The reported average subject score was consistent across the three sections, with an average of 748 in the math section, 746 on writing, and 744 on critical reading.Source: Harvard CrimsonThese daunting numbers might discourage students that Harvard wants to apply (and in some cases enroll. For example low income and under-represented students, have, as I have mentioned, lower scores in the aggregate compared to other groups. Harvard wants to recruit more of these students and posting numbers that say that only near perfection gets in will discourage applications. Remember that schools' rankings are affected by how many applications they get, so Harvard is casting a wide net. There have been a number of stories condemning highly selective schools for encouraging applications from students who have no chance of getting in, something I have written about (and actually defend when it comes to the decision of schools to encourage or dissuade students from applying). Given the institutional priorities of enrolling a diverse student body it makes sense for Harvard to downplay how hard it is to get in.Wesleyan’s profile is far different than Harvard’s. While they too list the number of applicants, number accepted and enrolled, they also provide some numeric data. For a small school like Wesleyan and for ultra competitive schools like Harvard they are trying to make each space count. How they count however, is somewhat different.Here are some details from the Wesleyan profile:SAT: 2100 averageClass RankingClass Rank Reported 31%Top 10%: 63% of enrolled studentsTop 20%: 83% of enrolled studentsSecondary SchoolPublic 49%Other 51%Wesleyan demonstrates that they are a school that looks for most of its student to have high test scores. Despite all the critics of the SAT/ACT, standardized tests doe predict well at the end of the bell cure. Both Harvard and Wesleyan look for students who are near the top of the testing spectrum. What is different, however, between Harvard and Wesleyan is how many students at Wesleyan were not necessarily at or near the top of their secondary school class It needs to be noted that most private high schools and many highly ranked public schools do not rank students as they know that many students outside the top 1o% are often penalized at this statistic is used by the US News rankings. While many schools will simply turn down students who are not in the top 10%, Wesleyan does not follow this model. It is rare indeed for a top ranked school to enroll nearly 40% of its ranked students out of the top 10%. Harvard on the other hand, has almost an entire class in the top 10% and of those many are in the top 1%. The majority of its students have perfect grades. These differences between the schools are significant. Wesleyan looks to enroll students who are great testers but may not have had perfect grades.Another difference between Harvard (I am using Harvard as shorthand for all the Ivies, Stanford and a few other of the most selective universities and colleges) and Wesleyan is the percentage of public school students they enroll. Less than half of the class comes from public schools at Wesleyan. Over 61% of Harvard’s students come from public schools; small liberal arts colleges often draw many of their students form private schools. These students are used to the Harkness table and other seminar classes that are small, and they know they will find this in many of their classes at places like Wesleyan, Williams, Amherst, Middlebury etc.Finally, schools will have will be differences between male/female percentages and racial composition.. Small Liberal Arts Colleges (LACs) tend to draw far more female applicants than males. Males, the theory goes, often want to go to places that have big time sports programs (This statement applies only to the aggregate. I know some female fans that are as rabid supporters of their school as any 10 men put together). There is sort of an unwritten law however that highly selective Liberal Arts Colleges will never enroll a class over 61% female. This brings up the issue as to whether it is harder for females to get in and the answer, it seems, is yes.There is some good data about this but since holistic admission permits schools to keep at least some institutional priorities under wraps, Wesleyan and 56% females They do list this on their profile, as it is, for a liberal arts school, a good statistic. It will not discourage males from applying. (Surprisingly, perhaps, applications from males tend to drop when the female percentage at schools is too high.)Harvard does not even list the male/female percentage on their official profile. The student newspaper posts it: 50.1% male. If I had to guess why this statistic is not included, it is because it is too perfect. The institutional goals again affect individual students. I could be wrong and it is random that the percentage is perfect, but if I had to guess the Harvard admission office uses data on male/female offers, acceptance rates and lots data analysis to try to achieve the ‘perfect’ mix.While gender balance at schools may differ or may be perfect, there is another issue that The Gatekeepers does not address in any detail that has become an increasingly reported to the public --the percentage of Asians that are a part of each entering class. Both Harvard and Wesleyan have about 20% Asians populations in the their incoming class. This percentage is far higher than it used to be for both schools, but given the performance of Asians in class and on the SAT the percentages it could (and some would say should) well be higher. Asians score better on the SAT than anyone else by a wide margin and there is now a law suit that has been filed on behalf of Asians who were not admitted to Harvard. I won’t go into detail as I have written about this issue before, but from the stats that have been gathered it looks like, from the outside, that it is far harder for Asians to get a spot at the Ivies. Whether this is true at some other schools is harder to tell. At schools like Berkeley that are largely number driven for admission, Asians comprise nearly half the class.Deep DataWhile The Gatekeepers show the human side of admission officers’ jobs and how they advocate for individual students, it does not address in detail what has now become a reality in any “business” today—deep data. Schools can now run numbers and stats that vastly improve the information they need to recruit students they most wish to enroll to meet their institutional needs.In addition, they can run data to help enroll the students they accept. The human touch is certainly still an important part of the process, but now it is supported by much more information than was available even a few short years ago. The most selective schools are not dependent on deep data to enroll great students, but they can use the information to get exactly what they want. Schools that are out of the group of the most elite institutions now need the deep data as they have issues with finding enough students to enroll to meet enrollment goals (getting enough students and enough students who can afford the costs).Ability to payAt schools like Harvard, Yale and Princeton, they have enough money set aside to support any student they admit who does not have the ability to pay. But the number of schools, even highly selective schools, who have this ability shrinks each year. There are schools that say they meet full need, and that is accurate, but they can say this because they are “need aware” when making decisions. The cost of education at the most selective schools now is in excess of $60,000 a year. There are few schools left that have the resources to pay for all the qualified low-income students who might add to the mix of students. The high cost of education has now become a much bigger topic than it was when The Gatekeeperscame out. The debt load on students now, in the aggregate, exceeds the debt during the housing bubble. Changes need to happen and while the new Obama plan may help some attend community college for free, those still hoping to get into the most selective schools without adequate funds will, except for the very elite schools, face tougher odds.Marketing, enrollment management, demonstrated interest, The Common ApplicationThe last series of things that have changed since The Gatekeepers came out logically follow from several things I have already mentioned.. Schools are trying to market themselves in ways that will improve their rankings. They are using data to do this but also have been given large budgets and increased staff to attract the students that will help them fulfill their mission. One of the big changes that has come about is something I have mentioned in other posts—the deans of admission have gradually been replaced at many colleges and universities by enrollment mangers. This is not the case at the Ivies the most selective LACs, but at many selective schools, the deans of admission are not the ones in charge of the much more broad based and bureaucratic effort to get exactly the mix of students they both want and need. For example, schools look increasingly at a students’ “demonstrated interest” in the school. Those who have not visited, have not opened emails sent by the school, and who have not shown other ways that they know the school and see it as a fit may not be offered admission as the schools think the student has probably put their particular school low on the list of places to enroll.Remember that yield of students is a crucial part of what drives rankings. Part of what has happened since The Gatekeepers has been a significant rise in the number of applications an individual student applies to. It used to be 6 or 8 was perceived as more than enough. For those seeking admission at highly selective schools this is a low number now. The competition to get in has increased so much that it is hard to tell if a student will be admitted; therefore, students will submit more applications in hopes that at least one top school will say yes. There are many students now who submit more that 12 applications and this has been aided by The Common Application. In the last few years the number of schools that use this form has rise significantly. Students go to their portal and fill out information that can then be sent, with a push of a button, to hundreds of schools. The most elite schools use The Common Application, although most also have supplements that require additional essays and other information. Nevertheless, the technology has made it much easier to apply to more schools which in turn makes it more difficult for schools to know how serious the student is about enrolling. This cycle brings us back to what I said above: early decision and early action numbers have risen as students use this to demonstrate interest and schools use it to increase yield.All told, the whole process has taken on a much more bureaucratic and business like approach. At the same time, schools can now craft individualized emails and tweets and other marketing efforts to woo students. Schools are reaching larger audience all over the world and the crafting marketing strategies that speak directly to individual students. Some call the whole admission process arbitrary, but the way schools at the top select students is anything but.For those trying to get in, the whole process has become a huge time commitment and it is incredibly complex and confusing .As a result, families are seeking extra help. There has been a huge increase in the number of private counselors who help families negotiate all the variables. When The Gatekeepers came out, private counselors were often looked at in negative terms by schools, but the reality now is that the schools (in some cases) depend on these counselors to help great students stand out (and even in some cases to provide the schools themselves with information that will help them with decisions. I feel sorry for students and families now. The process which was already full of stress on these wonderful students who Steinberg so movingly portrays in his book has now increased by orders of magnitude. Students keep continue to ask directly or indirectly what the top schools look for and what is the ideal student.Each school has different answers, but at the most selective schools the answers are far more complex than they used to be. How much more complicated can things get? It is hard to know the answer to this very tough question. My answer will have to wait as I really do not know. I only hope that there might be a slowing of the arms race that are the rankings games so that students could begin to worry more about finding the best fit rather than the highest ranking school. I am not optimistic this will happen any time soon.***********************************************************************1: It surprises some people to see the vast differences in yield rates but it should not. Most students tend to accept the offer of the school with the highest ranking. I wish more students would think about match and also about whether it is in their best interest to compete with many of the most successful secondary students in the world for 4 years. The stress of trying to keep up is high