Elite Boarding Schools Become Snowflake Factories

The SAT has been falling out of fashion for years now, with a growing number of colleges going “test-optional” and the College Board continuously “redesigning” the test to make it easier. Now grades may be following suit. Chester Finn of the Fordham Institute, an education think tank, writes about the effort at ritzy boarding schools to replace grades with platitudinous written assessments for each student:

A novel but truly nutty idea is now gaining adherents in the high-priced private-school sector, including such eminences as Dalton and Andover. A founding group of one hundred of them—dubbing itself the Mastery Transcript Consortium—has set out to eliminate the high-school transcript and the pupil grades that go onto it, seeking instead to press colleges (and presumably employers and graduate schools) to evaluate their applicants holistically, basing those judgments on subjective reviews of the skills and competencies that individual pupils are said to have acquired during high school.

The official rationale for the effort is to recognize the “unique” abilities of each student that supposedly can’t be captured with grades. But as Finn points out, there is a market incentive as well: Ultra-rich parents might be more willing to drop $50,000 per year tuitions if they are more confident their children’s academic weaknesses will be papered over by such qualitative criteria as the ability to “leverage social and cultural differences to create new ideas and achieve success.”

As with the diminishment of the SAT, these changes are sold with feel-good liberal language about recognizing differences and treating everyone fairly. In fact, objective measures like grades and test scores have long been a way for smart young people not already in the upper-class to give elites a run for their money. Without these tools, the talentless but privileged are even more impervious to competition from below.