Nominate A Star Athlete! No Nerds.

And here’s the thing: nobody outside of the admissions depatments really knows what those weighting systems entail. Public schools at least offer some degree of transparency, but private schools have no particular incentive to be forthcoming. These calculations can get complicated. I spoke to a former college admissions officer once who told me that his school created mathematical profiles of all the students who had previously applied to his college from a given high school. As this was an elite college, they had a large dataset for many of the more elite high schools. And apparently they used the GPA data of students from the same high school who had applied in the past to help weight the GPA of new applicants. That is to say, if most of the applicants from a given high school had higher GPAs, this would likely result in a downward adjustment of the GPAs of future applicants. Is this the right approach? Is it an equitable approach? Is it an approach consonant with basic fairness? I don’t know, and I don’t know if anyone else knows, either, because we don’t have a national conversation about this dynamic. These practices are almost never discussed in our national educational debates, despite their obviously loaded consequences, in part because they’re precisely the kind of proprietary information elite schools hate to share. (Look at how it took a major federal lawsuit to pry open Harvard’s books.)