WSJ.com - Prep Schools Buff Images To Boost College Admissions

I went to Middlesex and this story is disturbing on two levels. First that the reason behind Tom's death was caused by college admission standards. Second, not wholly unrelated, is that the school liked to keep its average for the student body at a C+, all the while assuring us that colleges were aware that we had tougher grading standards and were able to "translate" that on our transcripts. Of course when, like me, you went to apply with solid B's and a few A's throughout your career and were told that the Ivy's were beyond your reach, it was a little prepelxing since they were supposed to know that my school didn't inflate GPA's and would look at me accordingly. That those two factors caused Tom to, in however minor a way, falsify the school's record in a publication and later commit suicide is truly tragic. It would seem that both Tom and the school were torn between the fact that it was in some way dishonest to inflate grades the way some of their competitors did and the fact that the students were being penalized for that practice in terms of acceptance to "worse" schools. To me the moral for the larger world is that the standardized tests (the SAT in particular) and the US News need to be abolished (in the case of the SAT) and forced to be accountable for their rankings (US News) and disclose exactly how it is they rank schools. All of it has gone way too far.
- posted by levinson @ 1/23/2001 08:10:00 AM