Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.
Stanford undergraduate students have begun to pepper their admissions office with requests to see their application files. While that seems harmless enough since these are the lucky students among the 5% who were admitted to Stanford, it is shaping up to be much more complicated. Because in addition to the letters of recommendation, guidance counselor reports, transcripts and essays, these file components also include notes taken by admissions staff readers during the selection process as well as any ratings assigned to the applicant. In short, students can read the very documents used to admit them.
it was only a matter of time before this idea, the brainchild of a group of anonymous Stanford students who produce an on-line publication called Fountain Hopper, occurred to college students, given the arcane nature of private college admissions process and all the insane speculation it produces.
At MIT where there are no scared cows, we’d been there, done that long ago.
Enrolled students have always been able to see anything in their original application files except documents they previously waived their right to see. Always ahead of the curve, in the 1990s MIT students began to demand to see not only their files, but also the internal admissions office notes and ratings on their cases. Shocked, we admissions officers were advised by MIT lawyers that we had to share that information since students had the right under the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) law to see everything attached to their names.
If you have ever been an admissions officer, you can imagine how embarrassing this could be for all concerned.
Admissions readers are tasked with reading literally thousands of applications within a very fixed timeframe of six weeks for the early selection process and 8-12 weeks for regular selection. That’s a lot of cases to read per day x 7 days/wk for weeks on end. After the 20th case in a day, one tends to get bleary-eyed. As the weeks go by, one also tends to get more efficient and more brutally honest in one’s assessment of the case. Depending on who the reader is (experienced or a newbie?) and when it was read (at the beginning of the cycle or toward the end, at the beginning of the work day or toward the end), summaries can be warm and glowing or cold and precise.
As with any team anywhere, admissions officers are colleagues who grow to know each other’s biases and personality quirks, which is why all decisions are made by committee so biases can be cancelled out. Since the admissions process at private US universities and colleges is 100% subjective, the preferences of each staff reader are taken into account in committee deliberations.
It’s a normal thing for any one staff’s opinion to be over-ridden by the group on occasion. This is a deeply human enterprise.
I watched many MIT students come into the office and read their files. Most came and went. But sometimes someone got upset by what was written by one of us staff members who got flippant in our summary comments written late one night in exhaustion. I, for example, was famous for my own little drawing of a round bomb with a lit fuse accompanied by the words “tick tick tick”, meaning that I thought for some reason the applicant was unstable and might explode if admitted. (I know I know, but gallows humor does release the steam of judging so many outstanding students.) It was impossible to explain the context of such comments to the student, one of those “you had to be there’ moments. It broke my heart that something that was never meant to be shared was now available and on occasion, when read, undermined the confidence of one of our students. Confidence is so important for college students.
As a result, we shredded all of our internal selection documents thereafter before the next class enrolled. We lost valuable information that faculty would often use to understand their classes better.
We also learned to be more politically correct which can be the death of trust among a team.
Admissions officers need to be truthful in their assessment of applicants and should somehow be protected from the Monday morning quarterbacks who do not admit students for a living. Admitting students is a tough and grueling job that is often deeply uncomfortable. There are months of 12+ hr work days within 7 day work weeks. During reading season social life disappears under the relentless crush of files to be read within fixed deadlines. It can be heartbreaking to fall in love with applicants who will never make the cut. It can also be heartbreaking to fall in love with applicants who are admitted and then choose to enroll elsewhere.
I’m guessing that Stanford admissions was taken by surprise by this and they are about to have their own embarrassing experience. Some Stanford students will be shook up by what they read and have no context to understand. It will raise more questions than can be easily answered and the process will be tweaked accordingly. I suppose that’s a good thing in the end, but in my opinion it’s all so unnecessary.
Even as I write this, college admissions officers are changing the way they write case summaries, cloaking them in caution in case they are read out of context. I’m also pretty sure that some students who are about to read what was written about their application long ago will be in for a surprise.
So my best advice to students is this: don’t look back – admissions comments and ratings were meant for one moment in time for the purpose of evaluating students for admission that year.
In all cases for the students in question, the process worked. There is no need to dig up and analyze the past when it helped launch the student forward.
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