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Title: Should College Application Essays Be Banned?

Link: https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/04/21/0215...

While college applicants are often required to write a personal essay for
their applications, political scientist/author/academic Yascha Mounk argues
that's "a deeply unfair way to select students for top colleges, one that is
much more biased against the poor than standardized tests." The college essay
wrongly encourages students to cast themselves as victims, to exaggerate the
adversity they've faced, and to turn genuinely upsetting experiences into the
focal point of their self-understanding. The college essay, dear reader,
should be banned and banished and burned to the ground. There are many
tangible, "objective" reasons to oppose making personal statements a key part
of the admissions process. Perhaps the most obvious is that they have always
been the easiest part of the system to game. While rich parents can hire SAT
tutors they can't sit the standardized test in the stead of their offspring;
they can, however, easily write the admissions essay for their kid or hire a
"college consultant" who "works with" the applicant to "improve" that essay.
Even if rich parents don't cheat in those ways, their class position gives
rich kids a huge advantage in the exercise... [W]riting a good admissions
essay is to a large extent an exercise in demonstrating one's good taste -
and the ability to do so has always depended on being fluent in the unspoken
norms of an elite community... Many on the left oppose standardized tests on
the grounds that they have a class bias, and that hiring a tutor can make you
perform better at them. But studies on the subject consistently suggest that
the class bias of personal essays is far stronger than the class bias of
standardized tests.... But the thing I truly hate about the college essay is
not that it is part of a system that keeps deserving kids out of top colleges
while rewarding privileged kids who (to add insult to injury) get to flatter
themselves that they have been selected for showcasing such superior
personality in their 750-word statements composed by their college consultant
or ghostwritten by ChatGPT... [W]hat I truly hate about the college essay is
the way in which it shapes the lives of high school students and encourages
the whole elite stratum of society - including some of its most affluent,
privileged and sheltered members - to conceive of themselves in terms of the
hardships they have supposedly suffered... [I]t is the bizarre spectacle of
those kids from comparatively privileged backgrounds being effectively
coerced by the admissions system to self-exoticize as products of great
hardship which I find to be truly unseemly... And this is why I suspect that
the seemingly innocuous institution of the college essay is more deeply
damaging - to the high school experience, to the self-conception of millions
of Americans, and even to the country's ability to sustain a trusted elite -
than it appears... [I]t drains the souls of teenagers and encourages a deeply
pernicious brand of fakery and breeds widespread mistrust in social elites.
The college essay is absurd and unfair and - ironically - unforgivably
cringe. It's time to put an end to its strange hold over American society,
and liberate us all from its tyranny.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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