I remember how it was -- JR
College Essay Prompts Get Absurd. ‘So Where Is Waldo, Really?’
This throws the door open to a lot of arbitrariness in admissions. Guess who is likely to be given the benefit of the doubt. SCOTUS looks likely to crack down on racial preferences in admissions. Enough said
Rachel Quaye-Asamoah is heading into her senior year at Brooklyn Technical High School in New York. She is eyeing several top-ranked colleges, and intends to major in economics. She is already preparing her personal statement for college applications, describing how her upbringing shaped her worldview around money and capitalism.
But some colleges, she is learning, are more apt to throw curveballs than gauge what applicants think of, say, budgets and bear markets.
Take the University of Chicago, which asks among its 2022-23 application essay questions: “What advice would a wisdom tooth have?”
“What am I supposed to do with that?” says Rachel, who is 16 years old and still weighing where she will apply.
Back-to-school season is approaching, and for many rising high-school seniors, so is the grinding process of applying to college. Most college applications—including the Common Application and the Coalition for College—opened on Monday. A key part of the frothing madness of college-admissions season: crafting the perfect essay.
Essays might now carry more weight in the increasingly competitive admissions process since about 72% of schools have already made college entrance exams optional next year, a shift away from standardized tests that accelerated during the pandemic.
These teenage treatises are a chance to shine creatively, and often, to stare bleary-eyed at a blank computer screen.
Advice offered by colleges makes clear the pitfalls.
“Proofread, proofread, proofread,” cautions Carleton College in Northfield, Minn., under essay tips on its website. “There’s a difference between ‘tutoring children’ and ‘torturing children’ and your spell-checker won’t catch that.”
Then there is the tortuous business of tackling the essay questions themselves. Some schools stick with fairly standard snoozers, such as “Why this college?” or “How did you learn from and overcome an obstacle?”
Others get more eccentric, though—schools say—with a purpose.
Peter Wilson, the University of Chicago’s director of admissions, explained what whimsical prompts, such as the school’s wisdom-tooth query, can drill down and extract from the applicants: “How do they think? How do they play with ideas?” Off-the-wall prompts, which have long been a tradition at the school, also tell the applicant something about the university. “Constantly pushing boundaries and creativity, that’s the type of culture we create here.”
The University of Maryland, College Park, has asked students to detail their favorite thing about…last Tuesday. That’s a tough one if your Google Calendar shows a lot of white space. One college-admissions consulting blog advises, “If you laid in bed all day Tuesday, but went for a beautiful hike on Wednesday, write about the hike.” The school says it continues to ask that question, but changes the day each year.
Chapman University asks applicants to name one dish they would cook for the school’s admission team. Princeton University, meanwhile, has asked “What song represents the soundtrack of your life at this moment?”
To get into Pomona College, last year’s seniors had to answer, in 50 words or less, “Marvel or DC? Pepsi or Coke? Instagram or TikTok? What’s your favorite ‘this or that’ and which side do you choose?”
The University of Vermont asks applicants: ‘Which Ben & Jerry’s ice cream flavor (real or imagined) best describes you?’
Wake Forest University has asked students to give a top 10 list with the theme of their choice. The University of Vermont asks applicants a brain freezer, related to a Vermont brand: “Which Ben & Jerry’s ice cream flavor (real or imagined) best describes you?” The school says about a quarter of its applicant pool chooses this prompt.
Ava Eros, who faced the essay question, picked the limited-edition “Chip Happens,” a chocolate-ice-cream base with fudge chips and swirls of potato chips. The combination served as a metaphor for her twists and turns in adolescence, from losing a track and field race to gaining self-confidence.
“Honestly, I’ve never tried Chip Happens before,” she says. “I usually get Half Baked.”
The University of Vermont accepted her but she chose to attend the University of Pittsburgh, where she will be a sophomore in the fall.
Rice University has a longstanding tradition—a prompt known as “The Box”—to ask applicants to submit a captionless image that appeals to them, in lieu of an essay.
Yvonne Romero DaSilva, vice president for enrollment at Rice, says more than a few applicants have sent a photo of rice—the actual grain.
“One might consider that clever,” she says. “But it’s been done so many times that it proves to be unoriginal.”
The University of Chicago might get Latin honors in unconventional essay prompts. Each year, applicants must answer one of a few essay questions. The queries are drawn from ideas submitted by admitted, current and former students.
Applicants can also dig through the school’s essay-prompt archives and pick questions from previous years, including: “Who does Sally sell her seashells to?” and “So where is Waldo, really?” One came from a student more than a decade ago: “Find x.”
More here:
https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/college-admissions-essay-prompts-11659451147
**************************************************Elite all-girls school in Nashville now admits anyone who identifies as female
Harpeth Hall, an elite girls school in Nashville, Tennessee, has implemented a new policy to allow applications from anyone who identifies as female, not just those who are biologically female.
In an email sent to parents, the school announced it would be following a new policy that allows biological males who identify as female to be admitted to the school, reported OutKick. The email included a “Gender Diversity Philosophy” document explaining the admissions policy.
“Harpeth Hall is a girls school. The school culture is unique and distinctly about girls, complete with the use of references to students as girls and young women and the collective use of female pronouns,” the Gender Diversity Philosophy read.
“Any student who identifies as a girl may apply to our school. Students who join and remain at Harpeth Hall do so because our mission as a school for girls resonates with them,” the document continues.
The document also stated that any student who “communicates a desire to be identified as male or adopt he/him pronouns” may not be served well at Harpeth Hall.
Harpeth Hall is not the only historically all-girls school to begin accepting biological males who identify as female. In 2016, Barnard College, an all-women’s college in New York City, implemented a policy to “consider for admission those applicants who consistently live and identify as women, regardless of the gender assigned to them at birth.” The decision made Barnard the last of the traditional Seven Sisters colleges to update their admissions policies.
Harpeth Hall dates its history to 1865, and is an elite college-prep school for girls grades 5-12. Notable alumni of the school include actress Reese Witherspoon and singer Amy Grant.
Harpeth Hall did not immediately respond to Fox News Digital’s request for comment.
*****************************************************
Forget the fads: Australian Math teachers urged to focus on traditional teaching methods
Math teachers should ditch “faddish” practices and focus on proven methods such as using clear and detailed instruction and teaching algorithms.
A new report from the Centre for Independent Studies says that teachers are often misinformed about how students learn and what works in the classroom.
The report, Myths are Undermining Maths Teaching, calls for a focus on traditional education methods such as explicit teaching, involving the explanation and demonstration of new skills, instead of “inquiry-based learning”.
Opposing education academics say teachers should be able to use their professional judgment to decide the best teaching methods on a case-by-case basis.
Australian student achievement in the OECD-run Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) has declined more steeply and consistently than any other country except Finland. This downward trend has been greatest in mathematics. Compared with the top-performer, Singapore, the Australian students who sat the most recent PISA test in 2018 were three years behind in maths.
The report was co-authored by Sarah Powell, an associate professor in the department of special education at the University of Texas. She said myths dominated the teaching of maths, harming students’ learning and leading to educational failure.
“They have become so commonplace because teachers are regularly misinformed about how students learn and what works in the classroom,” she said.
Among the “teaching myths” outlined in the report are that teaching algorithms is harmful, that timed assessments cause maths anxiety, that “productive struggle” is helpful for students, and that inquiry learning is the best approach.
Inquiry learning involves teachers starting with a range of scenarios, questions and problems for students to navigate, instead of presenting information or instruction directly.
“Helping teachers to substitute faddish and evidence-free practices with proven, effective teaching will lift outcomes of students,” Powell said.
The report argues in favour of explicitly teaching students mathematics skills first and later encouraging independent practice and application of skills.
“While some students may thrive with true inquiry-based learning, their success is an exception rather than the standard outcome,” the report said.
Australian Catholic University STEM research director Professor Vince Geiger said teachers should be able to incorporate both explicit teaching and inquiry learning into their teaching. He said the research paper appeared to be reflective of a very specific point of view.
“It does amaze me when people put these ideas up as a juxtaposition,” he said. “The best teachers I know take the position that you need to do some of both.”
Geiger said the PISA results indicated Australian students were not falling short in their procedural maths abilities but rather in reasoning and problem-solving.
“We’ve got to get our kids to be better at adaptive type thinking – taking what they learn in the classroom and being able to apply it in different situations and contexts and real-world situations,” he said. “Explicit teaching by itself won’t get them there.”
Debate over the merits of inquiry-based mathematics learning and explicit teaching split the profession during a recent debate about Australia’s proposed new national curriculum.
Northholm Grammar School head of mathematics Phil Waldron said his school had a strong focus on direct instruction, where every step of a maths problem was directly modelled by a teacher for students, which was producing excellent results.
“The report reinforces the idea that students’ understanding is developed by the teacher and that it’s easy for the teachers to take students’ knowledge for granted and therefore miss steps in instruction,” he said.
“The problem with inquiry learning is that students are often left to figure it out for themselves and it’s all based on prior understanding and contextual understanding for them.
“You always need a foundation, you can’t start with inquiry, students need a level of understanding before they start to think for themselves.”
Waldron said inquiry learning was promoted as best practice through his teacher training at university.
“I’ve been blessed with professional experience that was somewhat counter to what I walked away from university with,” he said. “And now the evidence is suggesting that what these older staff members were doing is, in fact, the best way.”
***********************************
My other blogs: Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
*******************************
No comments:
Post a Comment