Next week we will wrap up the year by sharing some bullet points about the Class of 2014 and their college choices.
·
The
Common Application has changed its
essay prompts for 2013-2014, dropping the option of allowing students to choose
their own topic and increasing the essay word limit to 650 words.
·
The College Board is planning to
redesign the SAT. In a letter sent to College Board
members, David Coleman, the board's new president, said: "We will develop
an assessment that mirrors the work that students will do in college so that
they will practice the work they need to do to complete college. An improved
SAT will strongly focus on the core knowledge and skills that evidence shows
are most important to prepare students for the rigors of college and career. “
·
The Dartmouth College faculty has
voted to deny college credit for AP courses and tests. The Dartmouth admissions office
still strongly recommends students take AP courses and AP scores will be used
in course placement decisions.
·
Boston College saw its applications
decline by 10,000 after making a strategic effort to raise admissions
requirements. The
school added a supplemental essay to its application, with the goal of
attracting more serious students and deterring less interested candidates from
applying. In 2012, 34,061 students applied and this year, the number was closer
to 25,000. Many colleges are searching for thoughtful applicants as some students
continue to apply to a long list of colleges and it is harder for admissions
offices to predict where they will enroll.
·
More and more universities are
beginning to experiment with adding the new “massive open online courses,”
created to deliver elite college instruction to anyone with an Internet
connection, to their offerings. The courses, known as MOOCs, have enrolled millions of
students around the world. EdX, an online learning initiative founded in 2012
by Harvard and MIT, has already added Georgetown, The University of California
at Berkeley, the University of Texas and Wellesley to the list of universities
offering MOOCs through their platform.
·
In January, a group of private
college presidents drafted a pledge to publicly oppose the rising use of
merit-based financial aid and the decline in need-based aid. The pledge encouraged colleges to
move away from merit aid, which can typically benefit some of the wealthiest
students and instead focus more on need-based aid for lower income
students.
·
Five colleges drew national attention
in the last year for misreporting admissions numbers to various external
audiences through the Common Data Set, which organizations that rank
institutions, like U.S. News & World Report, use in
compiling statistics.
Bucknell University, Claremont McKenna College, Emory University, George
Washington University and Tulane’s Freeman School of Business all misreported
data such as SAT scores of applicants, omitting lower scores from their
submitted data. Higher SAT scores would impact a school’s ranking in U.S. News & World Report, and the
magazine even moved George Washington to an “unranked” college after they were
found to have significantly inflated admissions data for more than a decade.
Published by: TSM
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