( reposted from this weblog, December 23, 2010, because it still hasn't been fixed. )
Zen and College Admission Webform Flaws
So, it seems the widely-used on-line college admission form has a substantial flaw. I think the real flaw is a little further upstream. Today's New York Times describes the situation.
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With Common Application, Many Find a Technical Difficulty in Common, Too
By JACQUES STEINBERG (Dec 22, 2010)
The Common Application, the admission form accepted by more than 400 colleges and universities, was created in part to ease the burden on high school seniors. No longer must applicants fill out a dozen different forms to apply to a dozen schools, including the nation’s most selective.
So it was frustrating for Max Ladow, 17, a senior at the Riverdale Country School in the Bronx, to discover this fall that he could not get his short essay answers to fit in the allotted 150 words on the electronic version of the application, even when he was certain he was under the limit.
When he would follow the program’s instructions to execute a “print preview” of his answers — which would show him the actual version that an admissions officer would see, as opposed to the raw work-in-progress on his screen — his responses were invariably cut off at the margin, in midsentence or even midword.
This technical glitch in the Common Application has vexed an untold number of college applicants, not to mention their parents, at a moment in their lives already freighted with tension.
Considering the stakes, Max said he was left with two head-scratchers: Why can’t the Common Application be better, technologically, given the caliber of the institutions involved? And, at the very least, why can’t the nonprofit association of colleges that produces the form fix this particular problem?
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I wrote this comment:
>> Asked why the problem had not been fixed, Mr. Killion said, “Believe me, if there’s a way to do it, we’d do it. Maybe there’s a way out there we don’t know about.” And this has been going on a decade?
Wow. What a metaphor for what ails the USA today. How many employees, faculty, or students, doctors, nurses, etc. have questioned some absurdity and been told, basically, to shut up, there's nothing that can be done about it?
First, of course there's a way to make a web-based application that doesn't have this problem. In fact, most don't have it, which is why the students are so unprepared for it.
Second, it's trivial to find out what's wrong and find a dozen different ways to fix it or even get volunteers to write working software for zero cost -- publish the source code and describe the problem on the web and ask for solutions. SourceForge would be an excellent place to start looking at examples of "open source" software that is superb.
Third, maybe students should take note that their own educations and lives will be similarly filled with absurd flaws if they don't learn successful ways to seek and obtain help when they run into a problem.
Fourth, maybe students should note that their own generation has already found web-based social media ways to deal with such trivial problems that are still viewed as "unsolvable" by their parents and institutional decision-makers who come from the old generation.
Fifth, welcome to the world, students can learn that "adult" institutions are quite ready to "teach" lessons but almost incapable of being taught themselves, or turning into learning institutions.
Essentially every person in the country will be affected by this class of problem, as so called Electronic Health Records are pushed into every health care provider's face, despite every such system having many problems exactly like the glitch the admissions system has -- which doctors and nurses are told to put up with, because they're impossible to fix.
Enough with the "impossible to fix" song, people. You people have a combination of institutional clinical depression and very poor self-improvement skills.
Time to move over a bit and let youth show you how it's done.
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