(2017-05-11) Top Private High Schools Start Campaign To Kill Traditional Transcripts And Change College Admissions

Top private high schools start campaign to kill traditional transcripts and change college admissions

The group is called the Mastery Transcript Consortium.

In some ways, the project sounds like the "digital locker" the Coalition for Access, Affordability and Success is promoting as an option for college applicants

the product it hopes to create is the mastery transcript. It would not include courses or grades, but levels of proficiency in various areas

The organizers of the effort believe all kinds of high schools and colleges are ready for change, but they argue that it will take the establishment to lead this particular revolution. Organizers believe that if more than 100 such elite private schools embrace a new transcript, they will attract supporters in higher ed who will embrace the approach for fear of losing top applicants (both in terms of their academics and ability to pay). And then the plan could spread -- over perhaps a decade -- to public high schools as well. Along the way, the group hopes to use the ideas of competency-based education

He pledged one thing amid the pilots and work ahead: "We will design this intentionally to make it impossible to distill a student into a single number."

The original idea for the project came from Scott Looney, head of school of the Hawken School, a private institution in Cleveland. In an interview, he said that he wanted to experiment with a transcript of the sort the consortium is designing. When he spoke to contacts in the college admissions world, they said that if his school acted alone, they would hate the idea, as they would need to figure out how to read the new transcript and how to compare applicants using it with those at schools with more traditional transcripts. So he asked them how they would feel if he got 25 other schools to join in the effort, and they liked the idea.