The New York Times magazine editorial “Throw Out the College Application System” by Adam Grant (2014) introduces readers to an additional method to apply for college applications. The article first gives a reader the common knowledge of what most people do to apply for college; such as writing essays, taking the SAT, and ACTS. Grant (2014) says that such tests and essays does not express a person’s other talents outside of perfect grades and memorization skills, thus the introduction to assessment centers. The assessment center is introduced by going back to its origin during 1942 for the O.S.S to create a perfect spy through training by psychologists. By using methods these psychologists created, assessment centers were formed to get a better insight of a “student’s values, social and emotional skills, and capacities for developing and discovering new ideas.”
Further on into the article, Grant reports the pros and cons about assessment centers such as how going through tests at an assessment center would be effective in showing colleges a student’s skills but would also be time-consuming and expensive. After reading this article, I was introduced to the existence and purpose of an assessment center in which supports a student’s chance of acceptance to a college however, readers should note that assessment centers are not available equally or to all students. Grant (2014) states that the common methods of writing “essays, recommendation letters and alumni interviews provide incomplete information'” for all students in which most cases are true. So assessment centers would be the available solution for thousands of students to show more of their abstract skills to colleges they are applying for. The overall article was able to point out the advantages of an assessment center, such as how it can break the habit of colleges judging whether a student gets accepted or not only through their GPA and SAT scores. Instead, colleges can also find that students who seemed to struggle grade wise are talented in the creative area. Assessment centers gives both student and colleges a chance to have a glimpse of the “student’s values, social and emotional skills, and capacities for developing and discovering new ideas” with confirmation that all skills shown during the assessment are a hundred percent original.
By starting off with a brief introduction of how assessment centers were first created and stating several facts of how helpful they are, the article was overall helpful in bringing out the advantages of going to assessment centers. Though Grant (2014) could have strengthened his thesis by mentioning or giving examples of specific activities done by students during the assessment. He may have stated positive points of these centers but readers are left clueless on how the assessments are done and how an individual’s results are measured; such as how SAT scores are measured by points. Despite the fact that information about the unfavorable parts of going to the centers were kept to a minimum, Grant (2014) was not totally biased in his article. He briefly describes that there will be an increase in cost and depending on the cost, the quality of the assessment center would be different for the students. This would mean that the wealthier would have an assessment of better quality that could observe a student’s skills with more depth and with more pleasing results. This would lead the costlier assessment results to have a higher chance of receiving acceptance letters than cheaper results, from the desired universities.
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Assessment centers may be able to support students to have a higher chance of admission but they distribute untfairness to many other students. These centers may have existed since 1942 in America, but it is still uncommon and unknown in many other countries. The SATs are much more common and taken all over the world, the cost of the SAT would not improve its quality due to the fact that all the tests are similar in form. And as an international student who took practice tests in South Korea and the real SATs in Kenya, I can say that they are very similar no matter where they are administered. Though SAT cannot measure a student’s abstract skills, it is still much more common and fair compared to assessment centers.
It is easier for a student anywhere in the world to look online or through a teacher, to find the nearest center, or school in my case, to take the SAT. But assessment centers are not as widely available which places interational students at a disadvantage. If an international student wishes to take the assessment but is not available where they are, the student would have to fly to America. This shows that such students would have to pay even more for plane flights without confirmation that even after the assessment they would get admitted to their desired college. Every year, America is accepting hundreds of students from all over the world and many of these students did not have the opportunity of showing their abstract skills.
Assessment centers may be able to help students have a higher chance in acceptance, but the inequality and the fact that not all students are able to get such opportunities would seem unfair to millions of other students. Grant (2014) states that these assessment centers are the breaking of the college admission system and are the solution for better admission. This is true but we should not ignore that there are disadvantages to these centers such as financial expense and ufairness to all students. There are possibilities for the spreading of assessment centers all over the world but it would take years until it is available for the majority of the world’s students. The progress may be slow but the true breaking of the admission system would start when everybody has the opportunity to show colleges that they are more than just book smart.
