Admissions Officers Research Articles

5 questions with Iowa's Shuchita Poddar

In our recurring “5 questions with” series, we profile a communications professional through a brief Q&A. This month, we introduce you to Shuchita Poddar, communications coordinator for the office of admissions at University of Iowa.

5 questions with Iowa's Shuchita Poddar

In our recurring “5 questions with” series, we profile a communications professional through a brief Q&A. This month, we introduce you to Shuchita Poddar, communications coordinator for the office of admissions at University of Iowa.

A Rule-Based System for Admission Recommendations in Nigerian Tertiary Institutions

This research presents a rule-based system to provide admission recommendations in Nigerian tertiary institutions. Unlike many existing studies that employ machine learning classifiers, this research aims to develop a transparent and deterministic system using predefined rules. The rule-based system recommends suitable courses based on candidates’ O’level results, Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) scores, computed post-UTME scores, and specific eligibility criteria. By focusing on a rule-based approach, the system mitigates the limitations and potential misclassifications associated with machine learning, thereby enhancing the efficiency and accuracy of the admissions process. The methodology follows predefined guidelines to ensure a transparent and understandable admissions procedure. This approach avoids the complexities and uncertainties of predictive models, providing an accurate and reliable method for course recommendations. The rule-based recommendation system ultimately aims to support educational institutions and admission offices in making informed decisions regarding candidate qualifications, eligibility, and course recommendations.

Suchita Poddar on social media analytics

In our recurring “5 questions with” series, the Recruiting and Retaining Adult Learners marketing column profiles a communications professional through a brief Q&A. This month, we introduce you to Suchita Poddar, communications coordinator for the office of admissions at University of Iowa.

An Analysis Study on the appropriateness of evaluation criteria of the University Admission Officer System by using Topic Modeling to the Student's School Cumulative Record: Focusing on the Computer Engineering Applicants

An Analysis Study on the appropriateness of evaluation criteria of the University Admission Officer System by using Topic Modeling to the Student's School Cumulative Record: Focusing on the Computer Engineering Applicants

Q&A: 5 questions with Shuchita Poddar

In our recurring “5 questions with” series, the Recruiting and Retaining Adult Learners marketing column, profiles a communications professional through a brief Q&A. This month, we introduce you to Suchita Poddar, communications coordinator for the office of admissions at University of Iowa.

The role of letters of recommendation in perpetuating or challenging the social stratification of American secondary schools: a quantitative analysis of admission officer assessments in highly selective college admission

Admission to highly selective institutions offers a pathway to upward social mobility, particularly for low-resource students. However, entrenched wealth disparities in the United States present serious challenges for admission officers at highly selective institutions. Utilizing individualized holistic review (IHR), including letters of recommendation (LOR), and contextual consideration, highly selective institutions aim to account for wealth inequities. This quantitative analysis, conducted at a highly selective research university, examined 95,326 applicants across 4 years to explore if admission officers’ internal assessments of LORs relate to contextual independent variables beyond students’ control. Statistical methods, including ANOVA, Two-Way ANOVA, Chi-Square, multiple linear regression, and logistic regression, were employed, controlling for standard measures of academic readiness. Findings revealed higher LOR assessments for students facing greater contextual challenge levels, underscoring the ability of the admission process to identify high achieving students from high challenge contexts. Paradoxically, elevated LOR ratings were also observed for students from private and smaller schools, indicating a nuanced interplay of factors in the admission process. Importantly, LOR assessments significantly correlated with admission outcomes, emphasizing the pivotal role of LORs in highly selective college admissions. This study reveals the nuanced role of LORs in admissions, exposing their potential to tackle inequities. It calls for improved IHR training and heightened consideration of contextual variables, offering a crucial contribution to advancing equity in highly selective institutions, fostering more informed admission practices.

Multilingualism and mismatching: Spanish language usage in college admissions essays

In US K-12 education, the Spanish language is subject to practices and policies that limit its expression, especially among racialized Latinx students. However, higher education claims to view Spanish as a positive form of diversity. We therefore examine college admissions essays to analyze how students strategically deploy Spanish in light of these contradictions. We use two years of undergraduate application essays (n = 276,768) and metadata submitted to the University of California by every self-identified Latinx applicant and a racially representative random sample of non-Latinx applicants. To identify Spanish language usage in the text, we develop a computational mixed methods approach by combining machine translation and human reading. Spanish was used by 33% of Latinx and 15% of non-Latinx students with stylistic variation by class and ethnicity. We also find that lower income Mexican and Central American applicants were the most likely to use substantive forms of Spanish in their admissions essays as well as provide translations into English. We posit that this self-translation is an example of students identifying cultural mismatch between themselves and university admissions offices. This linguistic strategy, which we call strategic Spanish, sheds light on how language, culture, and ethnicity intersect in high-stakes evaluation and also helps surface the potential for machine translation as a method for social scientific inquiry.

Designing diagnostic tools for the organization of differentiated professional orientation of high school students in pedagogical fields

Importance. Professional orientation in pedagogical fields is an effective means for the education system development. The diagnosis is an essential planning and organization component of targeted professional orientation for high school pupils. The issue of conscious selection of a teaching career is linked to the axiological aspect of the orientation for adolescents and young people, as well as to the implementation of the individualization and differentiation principles in education. A comprehensive set of diagnostic tools for targeted career guidance for high school students under modern conditions, considering the pedagogical field and its axiological significance, has not yet been defined. There is a growing need for educational initiatives and scientific support for the development of methods range for targeted career guidance, including diagnostics, to encourage students to pursue careers in the field of education. The aim of the research is to provide a theoretical basis and present the results of developing diagnostic tools for organizing differentiated professional orientation for high school students pursuing pedagogical studies. Based on systematic, predictive, individualized, and value-based approaches to professional guidance, these diagnostic tools could be useful for selecting students for teaching positions, implementing a system of personalized career counseling in a contemporary educational setting, and for admission officers involved in planning and executing career guidance programs in the field of teacher training.Research Methods. Analysis of scientific literature and the current state of affairs in the vocational guidance and career counseling field, as well as a review of existing tools and parameters for this purpose. The research follows a logical path that begins with the career guidance organization for schoolchildren and progresses to the diagnostic instruments development (such as sample interview questions) for use in differentiated career counseling for those interested in teachingrelated fields.Results and Discussion. The “professional orientation” concept is considered both in Russia and abroad, and the specific implementation examples of career guidance activities in education are presented. An important area of professional orientation is value orientation towards pedagogical specialties. Career guidance diagnostics includes an analysis of values, value attitude to the profession, interests, abilities, and orientation of students necessary to predict the development of personality qualities in the chosen field of training in pedagogical specialties, and the organization of differentiated career guidance. In the research course, the author’s diagnostic tools are developed – the diagnostic matrix “Career guidance interview for a future teacher”.Conclusion. The problem of differentiated professional orientation towards pedagogical specialties among adolescents and young people is urgent and requires special attention from the state, society and the educational system. The professional orientation of high school students to pedagogical specialties includes the diagnosis of values, value attitude to the chosen profession, individual interests and abilities, improves educational results and helps to see the prospects and opportunities of everyone in the future professional field – the field of education. In addition, it reduces the risk for a person to choose an unsuitable profession and helps to successfully integrate into the professional teaching community in the future.

Could this year's problems impact next year?

Just when college officials thought the news about FAFSA couldn’t get any worse, a speaker at this year's American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers hinted that the Education Department's problems may continue into next year.

A Study on the Blockchain Acceptance Intention for Improving the Reliability of Student Submission Data and Efficiency of Administrative Processing, such as the College Entrance Screening Department

In this study, we explored the acceptance factors of Blockchain technology, a fourth industrial innovation technology, for efficient management of basic admission data such as school records that require transparency, security, efficiency, and reliability. Factors for accepting Blockchain technology were derived through in-depth interviews with university admissions officers, and a Delphi survey and stratification analysis (AHP) were conducted on a total of 42 people, including admissions officers, university professors, high school seniors' homeroom teachers, and admissions academy counseling experts. carried out. The in-depth interview consisted of an open-ended survey on four aspects, including behavioral affordance, constraints, effectiveness, and efficiency, based on Donald A. Norman, International Standards (ISO), and Nielsen's theory, and closed-ended questions from 42 admissions-related experts. The importance and priority of the factors derived through this study were analyzed. As a result, the importance of the top factors was in the following order: efficiency (0.414), effectiveness (0.309), behavioral affordance (0.154), and constraints (0.123). The sub-factors are: efficiency is 'reduction of admission management burden'(0.235), effectiveness is 'ensuring fairness in admissions'(0.284), behavioral affordance is 'unfairness of entrance exam results'(0.324), and constraint is 'ambiguity and distrust of the admission system'(0.314) showed the highest importance, respectively. The research results showed that the efficient aspect of “how much the burden of admission management is reduced” should be considered as the most important factor in accepting Blockchain technology into the university admissions system.

다중비교 인과포레스트를 활용한 대학입학전형에 따른 대학생활 성과 분석

Over the years, university admission types have primarily been the subject of social discussions on the
 dimension of fairness. However, considering the original purpose of university admissions system, it is also
 crucial to evaluate how well each type performs in selecting students who can successfully navigate academic
 life at each university. Accordingly, this study aimed to analyze the university life outcomes (sense of
 belonging, adaptability, intention to reselect the university, intention to reselect the major, GPA) according
 to different university admissions types: the admission officer(AO) system, high school grade-focused(HSG)
 selection system, and College Scholastic Ability Test-focused(CSAT) selection system, using the data from the
 Korea Education Longitudinal Study(KELS) 2013 collected in ’20~’21(N=2,011). Assuming the effects may
 vary according to the baseline characteristics, the study employs the Conditional Average Treatment Effects
 (CATE) perspective through the Multi-arm Causal Forest technique(Athey, Tibshirani, & Wager, 2019). The
 main findings are summarized as follows: First, on average, students admitted through AO system exhibit
 superior outcomes across all considered aspects of college life, with a notable emphasis on higher intentions
 to reselect both the university and major. Second, it appears that parental income and education, high
 school academic achievement levels and their university-level average were significant conditioning variables
 predicting heterogeneous treatment effects on college life outcomes. Last, the effect heterogeneity of CSAT
 system, depending on the values of major conditioning variables, was more prominent compared to that of
 AO system. Based on these findings, suggestions for interpreting the research results and directions for
 future studies were provided.

고교학점제를 고려한 학생부종합전형 평가 루브릭 개발 및 내용타당도 검증

The purpose of this study is to develop an evaluation rubric of admission officer system considering
 the high school credit system. Interviews with stakeholders, including high school teachers, admission
 officers, and evaluation experts, were conducted to derive evaluative elements that accurately reflect the
 High School Credit System and students' educational experiences. The outcome is a rubric with four
 dimensions: Career Exploration, Exploratory activity and level, Basic learning ability, and Sense of
 Paricipation and responsibility, each evaluated across three levels and within a nine-point scale. These
 dimensions are designed to assess various aspects such as students' career exploration, in-class inquiry
 activities, academic achievements, and individual talents, as evidenced in their school records. Then,
 this study verified the content validity of the evaluation rubric with content experts, aiming to present
 a more reliable evaluation tool. This rubric is anticipated to significantly enhance the objectivity and
 validity in the University Admission Officer System, while also serving as a guiding framework for
 students, teachers, and parents to understand and improve educational outcomes.

Balancing Access and Success: Admissions Officers’ Sensemaking of Test-Optional Policies at Less-Selective Public Institutions

ABSTRACT The COVID-19 pandemic pushed many institutions and higher education systems to adopt test-optional policies due to challenges accessing testing sites, expanding test-optional policies outside the traditional sphere of private liberal arts and highly selective institutions into public institutions that span from less to highly selective. As public system staff evaluate maintaining test-optional policies in the future, they must balance the needs of students, institutions, and the system. This multiple case study explores participants’ sensemaking, drawing upon interviews with admissions personnel at two public, less-selective institutions in the same state under a system-wide test-optional policy. Our findings suggest that participants’ sensemaking of the test-optional policy interacted with organizational factors to create nuanced views about maintaining the policy long term. Policymakers should account for the varied test-optional experiences at different institutions when deciding how to proceed with their test-optional policies.

The Use of TOEFL iBT® in Admissions Decisions: Stakeholder Perceptions of Policies and Practices

AbstractThis paper reports partial results from a larger study of how three different groups of stakeholders—university admissions officers, faculty in graduate programs involved in admissions decisions, and Intensive English Program (IEP) faculty—interpret and use TOEFL iBT® scores in making admissions decisions or preparing students to meet minimum test score requirements. Our overall goal was to gain a better understanding of the perceived role of English language proficiency in admissions decisions and the internal and external factors that inform decisions about acceptable ways to demonstrate proficiency and minimal standards. To that end, we designed surveys for each stakeholder group that contained questions for all groups and questions specific to each group. This report focuses on the questions that were common to all three groups across two areas: (1) understandings of and participation in institutional policy making around English language proficiency tests and (2) knowledge of and attitudes toward the TOEFL iBT test itself. Our results suggested that, as predicted, university admissions staff were the most aware of and involved in policy making but frequently consulted with ESL experts such as IEP faculty when setting policies. This stakeholder group was also the most knowledgeable about the TOEFL iBT test. Faculty in graduate programs varied in their understanding of and involvement in policy making and reported the least familiarity with the test. However, they reported that more information about many aspects of the test would help them make better admissions decisions. The results of the study add to the growing literature on language assessment literacy among various stakeholder groups, especially in terms of identifying aspects of assessment literacy that are important to different groups of stakeholders.

성취평가제 확대 적용에 따른 대입전형 평가의 방향

Objectives The purpose of this study is to explore the problems of the standard-based assessment, which is ex-panded in the high school credit system and the 2022 revised curriculum, and the direction of desirable college admission operation.
 Methods To this end, a survey was conducted on high school teachers and university admissions officers, and the questionnaire was composed of a background variable and a total of 14 questions in 4 areas and was prepared on a 5-point Likert scale. For the collected data, descriptive statistics, t-test, cross-analysis, and one-way var-iance analysis were conducted. In-depth interviews with experts (two high school teachers and admissions offi-cers each) were conducted to secure the validity and reliability of the survey results.
 Results First, the expansion of the standard-based assessment will reduce the student sub-curricular screening and expand the comprehensive student sub-curricular screening. Second, when the standard-based assess-ment is expanded, the boundary between the student sub-curricular screening and the student sub-curricular screening is blurred, and it is necessary to introduce qualitative evaluation in the student sub-curricular screening. Third, admissions officers were more negatively aware of the operation of subject selection and grade inflation according to student wishes than teachers, and teachers preferred to introduce or strengthen interview evaluation and admissions officers preferred to introduce or strengthen the minimum academic standards for the CSAT as a way to compensate for the difficulty of discrimination in student sub-curricular evaluation.
 Conclusions When applying the standard-based assessment requires additional factors, specific methods, spe-cific methods should be applied depending on the characteristics of the universities of universities should be ap-plied according to the characteristics of universities. In order to Evaluation of Desirable University Admissions high school life records, and universities need to strengthen the competitiveness of the evaluation of the evaluation.

대학입시 공정성에 대한 미디어 담론 분석: 학생부종합전형을 중심으로

The purpose of this study was to reveal the discourses of fairness germane to the college admission systems. To do so, the study paid close attention to the comprehensive student record screening (the so-called Hakjong in Korean), a revised version of the college admissions officer system in South Korea. To analyze the varigated public opinion son fairness entwined deeply in the college admission systems, I conducted a critical discours eanalysis (CDA) of newspaper articles published in South Korea. In so doing, I illustrated three interrelated discourses: (a) the evaluations of students’ potentials, (b) the competitions for various qualifications (i.e., spec, a widely used term in South Korea) to get admissions from the highly selective colleges, and (c) the Hakjong (the comprehensive student record screening) versus the CSAT (the College Scholastic Ability Test). Furthermore, the order of discourses of fairness overarching these interrelated discourses is intimately attached to powerful ideologies (e.g., neoliberalism and meritocracy) in, but not limited to, Korean society/societies. Based upon CDA, this study articulates a crucial point: the order of discourses of fairness germane to the college admission systems serves crucial roles to (re)shape unequal relations of power that perpetuate social inequality in South Korea. This work, by doing so, offers insights to address various critical issues related to the fields of education as well as the college admission systems in South Korea.

NEW STUDENT REGISTRATION INFORMATION SYSTEM AT THE WAISUMAR STATE ELEMENTARY SCHOOL MODEL SCHOOL

Registration carried out by the system automatically provides announcements of registration results carried out online. Prospective new students can find out announcements easily using the internet. The implementation of online admissions for new students is considered to have its own advantages and benefits. Apart from being more efficient, online acceptance of new students is more transparent and open. This includes facilitating monitoring both by students or parents and the community as well as by departments and related parties. The method used in this research is a data collection technique where there are observations, interviews and literature studies. This new student admissions information system was built using the PHP programming language and utilizes the MySQL database as the database server. It is hoped that this research can help prospective new students and new student admissions officers in the process of registering new students at the Waisumar State Elementary School.

Association Between a Medical School Applicant's Community College Attendance and the Likelihood of Application Acceptance: An Investigation of Select Medical School Characteristics.

One-third of medical school applicants attend a community college (CC), and they represent a diverse group of applicants. However, they have a lower likelihood of being accepted to medical school. Using application-level data, this study examines how an applicant's CC attendance impacts the likelihood of application acceptance and how 3 medical school characteristics moderate this association. Data examined were from 2,179,483 applications submitted to at least one of 146 U.S. Liaison Committee on Medical Education-accredited medical schools by 124,862 applicants between 2018 and 2020. The outcome was application acceptance. The main measures were applicants' CC attendance (no, lower [> 0%-19% of college course hours], or higher [≥ 20%]) and 3 medical school characteristics: geographic region, private versus public control, and admissions policy regarding CC coursework. Multilevel logistic regression models estimated the association between CC attendance and the likelihood of application acceptance and how this association was moderated by school characteristics. Among applicants, 23.8% (29,704/124,862) had lower CC attendance and 10.3% (12,819/124,862) had higher CC attendance. Regression results showed that, relative to no CC attendance, applications with lower (adjusted odds ratio [AOR] = .96; 95% confidence internal [CI], .94-.97) and higher (AOR = .78; 95% CI, .76-.81) CC attendance had significantly decreased odds of acceptance when the 3 school characteristics were included. Each of the 3 medical school characteristics significantly moderated the association between an applicant's CC attendance and the likelihood of application acceptance. The negative association between CC attendance and medical school application acceptance varies by medical school characteristics. Professional development for admissions officers focused on understanding the CC pathway and potential biases related to CC attendance would likely be beneficial in terms of trying to attract and select a diverse cohort of medical students in a holistic and equitable manner.

Using artificial intelligence to assess personal qualities in college admissions.

Personal qualities like prosocial purpose and leadership predict important life outcomes, including college success. Unfortunately, the holistic assessment of personal qualities in college admissions is opaque and resource intensive. Can artificial intelligence (AI) advance the goals of holistic admissions? While cost-effective, AI has been criticized as a "black box" that may inadvertently penalize already disadvantaged subgroups when used in high-stakes settings. Here, we consider an AI approach to assessing personal qualities that aims to overcome these limitations. Research assistants and admissions officers first identified the presence/absence of seven personal qualities in n = 3131 applicant essays describing extracurricular and work experiences. Next, we fine-tuned pretrained language models with these ratings, which successfully reproduced human codes across demographic subgroups. Last, in a national sample (N = 309,594), computer-generated scores collectively demonstrated incremental validity for predicting 6-year college graduation. We discuss challenges and opportunities of AI for assessing personal qualities.