How Not to Get Into College:
The Preoccupation with Preparation

by Alfie Kohn

Copyright 2002 by Alfie Kohn
(www.alfiekohn.org). Reprinted with the author's permission.

(continued from page 3)

The list goes on. Schools don't have to give out awards or otherwise create artificial scarcity. Learning doesn't have to be turned into a quest for triumph, and students don't have to be made to regard their peers as rivals. In fact, there's good reason to think that students truly flourish, intellectually and otherwise, in schools that are less (or even entirely non-) competitive, those that feel more like a caring community than like a rat race. Query: What policies in your school might contribute to an adversarial mindset that could be changed without costing a single student a single college acceptance?

Class rank is one answer that comes to mind. True, plenty of admissions committees seem to be looking for winners rather than learners. But relatively few colleges actually insist on this practice. When a survey by the National Association of Secondary School Principals asked 1,100 admissions officers what would happen if a high school stopped computing class rank, only 0.5 percent said the school's applicants would not be considered for admission, and four out of five colleges said it would have absolutely no bearing on students' prospects.

The next step is to look at grades themselves, and especially pressures to raise them, which likewise may be based on false assumptions (see SIDEBAR: "Grade Expectations"). Some schools have eliminated grades entirely -- all the way through the upper school -- as a critical step to raising intellectual standards, and they have done so without jeopardizing their graduates' chances of getting into selective private colleges or large public universities. To find out what it means to shift the balance of a school from grade-oriented to learning-oriented -- and, yes, research does confirm that these tend to pull in opposite directions -- speak to the folks at the Poughkeepsie Day School (New York), the Carolina Friends School (North Carolina), the Waring School (Massachusetts), Saint Ann's School (New York), or other schools that offer thoughtful assessments of students' accomplishments without traditional letter or number grades.

The preceding paragraphs make a relatively nonthreatening argument: Even if preparation for college is paramount, it's still possible to phase out some of the most egregious school practices. Students may even be better prepared for college as a result of an education that isn't defined by tests, grades, competition, and the like. But in the final analysis we must concede the possibility that there will occasionally be a trade-off. In some instances, the most efficient way of getting into certain colleges may be to do dubious things, and, conversely, the activities most conducive to intellectual, social, and moral development may not give them an edge with an admissions committee. What then? What matters most? Here we return to the place we began, to a question that defines who we are as educators.

* If this portrait seems too dark or melodramatic, consider that it is now corroborated by empirical research as well as anecdotal evidence. Affluent, suburban teenagers exhibit higher rates of substance abuse and anxiety than their counterparts in the inner city. A brand-new report entitled "Privileged but Pressured? A Study of Affluent Youth," published in the academic journal Child Development this past fall [2002], confirms the prevalence of drinking (especially among boys) and depression (especially among girls) among wealthy middle school students. The researchers explicitly link these symptoms to the pressure these kids are already feeling to get into college. Moreover, seventh graders who reported that their parents place a lot of emphasis on academic achievement were considerably more likely (as compared to those whose parents were more concerned about their children's well-being) to show signs of distress and "maladaptive perfectionism."

[SIDEBAR]

Grade Expectations: Examining a Chain of Assumptions
(Adapted from The Schools Our Children Deserve: Moving Beyond Traditional Classrooms and "Tougher Standards" (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999), pp. 188-89.)

To read the available research on grading is to notice three robust findings: students who are given grades, or for whom grades are made particularly salient, tend to (1) display less interest in what they are doing, (2) fare worse on meaningful measures of learning, and (3) avoid more difficult tasks when given the opportunity -- as compared with those in a nongraded comparison group. Whether we are concerned about love of learning, quality of thinking, of preference for challenge, students lucky enough to attend schools that do not give letter or number grades fare better. Where grades are still given, students benefit from a concerted effort to make them as invisible as possible. The more they can forget about grades, the better the chances they will be engaged with ideas. (For more details about all this research, see The Schools Our Children Deserve, or the article "From Degrading to De-Grading.")

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