ANU vice chancellor Brian Schmidt wants the admissions process to reshape the geographical and socioeconomic mix of his university’s students. His battle is only half-won.
sent out a video Tweet that, by his standards, got a pretty big reaction. More than 22,500 people viewed his 54-second piece to camera.
“Your ATAR might feel like the be-all and end-all, but I promise you it’s not. It’s who you are as a person, your kindness and your curiosity – that’s what’s going to keep you on the right path.” “I want people to think about not just ATAR; I want them to think about what they want to do, where they want to live,” he tells“It is a measure, but it’s not the only measure. ... If I could have 99.90 ATARs as my entire population? Nope, I really don’t want that.”The basic principles of his strategy are pretty clear: you can’t expect a student from Onslow in Western Australia, say, to uproot to Canberra if they’ve barely been given a month to do so. That’s one reason for the early offers.
But these are easy to game: elite schools simply drill the kids on how to succeed at interviews and what to put in their statements.And the problem with interviews and qualitative evaluation, as Schmidt says, is that “as soon as humans are in there, then implicit bias comes in”. He also says the early-offer students are on average getting better grades at ANU, everything else being equal, than those admitted in the usual way, after the ATARs are released.The system has shifted ANU’s undergraduate intake from being overwhelmingly skewed towards Canberra eight years ago to one where about 70 per cent of admissions are no longer from the nation’s capital.
The real task in this area, he says, is to up the number of scholarships and bursaries, and the availability of cheap student accommodation, which will also help with the geographic spread.
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