A 'whole' new admissions process

Whole-language instruction.

Holistic medicine.

University of Washington admissions.

According to The Seattle Times, the University of Washington is switching its admissions criteria to consider the whole student.

Grades only part of picture for new UW admissions plan

By Nick Perry, Seattle Times staff reporter

Beginning this year, the University of Washington will no longer automatically admit top students based on their high-school grades and test scores.

The university is ditching a statewide student-ranking system called the Admissions Index, which it relied on to admit about half its students. The university is also getting rid of an internal system called the "grid," which ranked remaining students on a combination of academic and personal factors.

Instead, university staffers plan to read and review every one of the 16,000 annual freshmen applications to come up with a "holistic" assessment of each candidate. Besides academic performance, they will consider factors such as whether a student has overcome personal or social adversity, their leadership skills and their extracurricular interests.

This is a monumental shift in the admissions process in our state. No longer will a student with a great report card but no activites to speak of be an automatic admission to The U. Essentially, this is a thumb in the eye at the Washington Assessment of Student Learning, the state's standardized assessment that is a graduation requirement for the Class of 2008. No more checked boxes and percentage ranges. Now, prospective students will be judged as real people.

Probably, this will worry many of the people who shell out money for SAT prep courses and who take a dozen AP courses hoping to have a transcript that reads like a nice pedigree. Now they have to have passions and interests and hobbies and personalities? Good.

The Times' Nicole Brodeur used her Sunday space to support the changes. It's a nice read, too, and I'm posting it all here to avoid The Times' Web site, which is free anyway.

Nicole Brodeur
"Whole" students get chance

My mother was an English teacher who worked long hours and didn't get paid enough.

One of the perks of the job, though, was the live theater performed daily, right in front of her desk. Students would beg like the orphans in "Oliver Twist," stir up stories like the witches of "Macbeth," and threaten "Romeo and Juliet"-style peril, all for a better grade.

Their college admission, their parents' love, their very lives depended on my mother, her grade book, and one fateful flick of her Flair pen.

She rarely budged from the grade she had already given — and she paid for it with parental blowback, tears and threats.

So it was for my ever-patient mother, and those kids, that I celebrated the University of Washington's decision to take a "holistic" approach to its admissions process.

Instead of betting the house on grades and SAT scores — in keeping with a statewide student-ranking system called the Admissions Index — the school will instead pore over the whole student.

It will review academic performance, but also whether the applicant has overcome adversity, shown leadership and has extracurricular interests.

Now the kids who work after school, who tend to a younger sibling or an aging grandparent, who shut down when tests start up, or who just don't fit the pass-in-your-papers mold, have a better chance at a Husky education.

And the Oscar-worthy kids like my mother's students? They may learn to look up from their books and get a life instead of just a grade.

Adjusting the focus on grades is a welcome trend that we're seeing all over.

Starting in 2007, Roosevelt High School will name just one valedictorian.

The school had 24 in 2002; last year, about half that many.

But the school wants to restore meaning to the honor, according to a recent Seattle Times story. Roosevelt students still have to get straight A's but also must serve the community. The goal is to end the pressure and gamesmanship that make it a competition.

With the new UW admissions policy, "Maybe some of the dropouts will go back and get their GED" if they know there's a chance for a higher education, said Marsha Richards of the Evergreen Freedom Foundation, a conservative public-policy think tank in Olympia.

And while it may address the whole person to ease academic standards, the UW still should screen students "to be sure they are able to succeed," Richards said.

The new process won't come cheap. The UW estimates it will cost $200,000 to hire people to read through all those applications, and it plans to make the money back by raising the application fee from $38 to about $50.

But what will the students get in return? The ability to walk across a campus they have only driven past. To be a part of something they had maybe given up on, for reasons not entirely their own.

"History is full of examples of people who have overcome odds," Richards said, "and gone on to change the world."

Nicole Brodeur's column appears Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday. Reach her at 206-464-2334 or nbrodeur@seattletimes.com. State college. Majored in The Dead.

So buck up, all of you without a 4.0 GPA or a 1500 SAT (2200 new score). You still have a chance at the University of Washington. Just show how you are a real person, have done some interesting things in your life so far and maybe you'll get a spot at our state's finest research institution. Isn't that the role of the university?

-- Wenatchee, Wash.