The High School Admissions Essay
Henry Margasak (11-4)
When Superintendent William Hite announced the changes to the admissions systems of five Philadelphia schools, parents and students were both relieved and furious. Some were certain that the new change would bring equity to our school, while others insisted that current middle schoolers be rewarded for their hard work, and have a better chance at admission Masterman. Despite the shocking nature of the announcement, the guidelines for the process itself were very vague: there was now a lottery open to all students above a grade cutoff and an essay used to measure student’s writing abilities.
It wasn’t until a few weeks later that the details of the mandatory essay were made clear, when the opinion of the admissions changes became more uniform. The essay was graded by an AI software, and students would receive their scores immediately. Graded out of 30, Masterman and Central applicants would need a score of at least 21.5, while the other three schools had a cutoff of 16.9 There would be no human involvement in the process except for proctors in testing rooms. The software that the district selected, MI Write, has been cited in the past as made for purely editing purposes, and MI Write’s parent company, Measurement, Inc, have stated themselves that the software shouldn’t be used for actually grading writing. While experts have said that the software is safe to use, skeptics have noted that Measurement, Inc. has made no official statement on whether or not using the software for admissions essays is appropriate.
On December 1st, when the first attempt at administering this test failed, student and parent outrage reached new heights. When the timer began, the prompt only appeared for a small number of the 185 students. Oliver Kraut (8-4) noted that some students “got a message saying that they were ‘timed out,’ and no prompt showed up for them.” It took proctors and administrators a while to respond to this issue, and by the time that the decision was made to stop the test altogether and try again another day, many of the students whose software had functioned correctly had already finished first drafts of their essays.
Though the test was eventually administered successfully on multiple different dates, many students still had grievances with the process. Many 8th graders seemed to think that some prompts were significantly harder than others, and that writing an adequate essay depended heavily on something outside of their control. Emma Glaser (8-4) was dealt a difficult hand. “I didn’t love the prompt I got,” Glaser explained. “I thought it was harder than some of my classmates.” Nadia Solomon (8-4), who didn’t even get a prompt the first time around, also thought there might have been some disparities in the system. “For a lot of us, spelling was the part of the essay that brought our score down the most. Then we found out that our school was the only one who had to disable Grammarly (a chrome extension that helps correct spelling and grammar mistakes).”
Whether or not the admissions process was fair remains a topic of contention, but the consensus around the school was that this process was not. Difficulties with technology continue to get in the way of administering the test, and parents and students will likely work tirelessly to have the process changed in years to come.