Yesterday’s New York Times includes a surprising piece entitled “Confessions of an Application Reader.” It’s by a woman who spent a year reading applications for UC Berkeley’s engineering school. Instead of singing the praises of the school’s “holistic” evaluation methods, she found it to be “fundamentally uneven” and “confusingly subjective.” She admits to getting tired of reading what seemed to be professionally written essays and those filled with tales of woe.
When her evaluations didn’t suit the officials, she was told to adjust her rankings, which strongly suggests that they were more interested in getting certain percentages of students from various groups than in getting the best prospective engineers.