3 minute read
ACT’s Are Boring, But You Aren’t!
Why high schoolers should write college applications that are more interesting.
Christina English Staff Writer
On March 1st, 2023, most colleges offering a regular application were starting to close up shop, signifying that the process is now officially over. In the meantime, seniors everywhere are awaiting responses to the applications that they worked essentially all of high school for. But is this lengthy college application process even worth doing, and is there another way to apply for college than the standard resume and essay?
Some people say the college application process is flawed and that there is another way to apply. They state how talking about your passions or something that you are interested in depth will give you the exact same guarantee to getting into college as regularly applying with essays and boring lists of extracurriculars.
There are a number of different ways that the college application process is corrupt. One of these ways is the manipulation of ACT and SAT scores. There have been multiple cases across the United States of people cheating on the ACT and SAT that are getting federally charged. One of these instances is the case of William Singer, which was detailed in the 2019 Netflix documentary The College Admissions Scandal.
William Singer is a college counselor who had a consulting business. He is the mastermind behind helping 50 wealthy and elite families get their kids into ivy league schools by creating false test scores and faking athletic statuses. According to Isabel Thottam of higheredconnects.com, he did this by coordinating a dishonest testing practice: he either had someone to take the test in place of the student, or had the student take it with a bribed test monitor, or with the monitor changing incorrect answers after the student finished the test. Situations like these, while rare, make it hard to decipher between applications that are true and ones that are fake. It also makes applications more competitive than ever, which means rising college freshmen need to outshine others more than they are already attempting to do. However, what some people have been arguing in recent years is to instead focus on the things that each student is actually interested in versus only analyzing their academic scores. That way, the colleges that they are applying to are able to get to know their applicants a more personally and are not fed the same mundane lists of achievements.
One of the people who believes in assessing interests over academics is Cal Newport, an American author and professor at Georgetown University. Newport explains that “exceptionally impressive accomplishments are rarely planned out in advance,” and how they normally follow the pattern of “the student [choosing] something that seems interesting, the student
[following] through and [completing] the pursuit, and the student [surveying] the new opportunities this makes available,” (calnewport.com). By following this cycle, juniors and seniors in high school can develop activities that they are truly interested in for their college applications. This cycle can also be a destresser for high schoolers applying for college since they don’t have to worry about a huge list of academic and extracurricular goals that they have to accomplish in order to get into their desired school.
This process has been proven to work. Newport told the story of a girl named Olivia who wanted to go to the university of Virginia, but did not meet the school’s typical rigorous academic and extracurricular standards. Despite this, she decided to apply for the full-ride scholarship that Virgina offered.
Olivia had a gigantic passion for marine zoology, and she had a lengthy conversation with the committee that was interviewing her for the scholarship about it. The committee was so impressed by Olivia’s genuine interest that they gave her the full-ride. Newton described this whole situation as Olivia “[rejecting] the list quality hypothesis,” and instead embracing “the interestingness hypothesis,” (calnewport.com). In other words, Olivia put her passions over her academic and extracurricular ‘lists’ and was rewarded for it.
While there are many flaws within the college application process, there are ways to overcome these flaws, one of them by being yourself. Colleges should know who students are as people, not merely academic statistics. This method of showing passions and interests over academic scores and extracurriculars has been proven to work for different individuals, and there is hope of this method being able to spread across the country and used more in the college application process.
