Dartblog

Admissions Office Lies in Press Release

The lies are described in an op-ed in today’s Dartmouth:

The press release unequivocally states that 93.4 percent of students admitted “were ranked in the top 10 percent of their secondary school’s graduating class, including 38.5 percent who were valedictorians and 11.3 percent who were salutatorians.” What the press release fails to mention is that these percentages, which are said to represent all admitted students, actually correspond to fewer than half of the applicants admitted. According to a lengthy conversation between this writer and Dean Laskaris, less than 50 percent of high schools rank their students or even disclose the decile in which the students place. Yet there is no asterisk or footnote given for these pseudo-exact figures.

As for the publicized data concerning incoming valedictorians and salutatorians, these numbers are again based on fewer than 50 percent of applicants. Moreover, the vast majority of students our admissions office calls valedictorians or salutatorians have not, in fact, achieved that distinction yet. These seniors still have a full term of high school ahead of them. Again, there was no qualification for these imprecise statistics.

The press release to which the piece refers is here.

Throughout the piece, the author bends over backwards to avoid placing even an ounce of blame on the admissions office for these lies. One wonders why. He ends up blaming Dartmouth’s lies on “the hypercompetitive environment that plagues all of the Ivy League admissions offices.” That strikes me as ridiculous. It’s like blaming “stressful community pressures” for a few students’ theft of final exams—a farcical excuse Hanover witnessed recently in a scandal involving a heist at Hanover High.

Revelations like this make me wonder whether I should exempt the public affairs people from the conclusion of my deanery post, below. One wonders how they look themselves in the mirror, intentionally spreading lies for a living.