How The Coronavirus Has Upended College Admissions
As stressful as it always is for students applying to college, this year it's all that — and then some — for the admissions officials trying to decide whether to admit them. Because of the pandemic, many students will be applying without standardized test scores and several other metrics admissions officers at selective schools have long relied on, leaving colleges scrambling to figure out what else they might consider instead.
"So many things that were sacred in the college admissions process may not be sacred anymore," said Angel Pérez, CEO of the National Association for College Admissions Counseling, and former head of admissions at Trinity College in Connecticut. "Colleges and universities are reinventing a process that hasn't changed in over 50 years in the span of a couple of months [...] and they don't have another choice."
Indeed, students' applications may be missing not only SAT and ACT scores, but also a semester or two of grades, since schools switched to pass/fail grading when they went online, or closed altogether. Schools will also have to make do without a semester's worth or more of extracurricular activities — sports, band, theater, volunteering and anything else that would help distinguish applicants from one another.
The near-panic is reverberating on campuses around the nation, where deans are used
