Season 1: Episode 6 Transcript
Decoding Transcripts and School Profiles
Lee Coffin:
Dateline, a campus near you. Read all about it: press releases, articles, blogs, news feeds, rankings, books, tweets, posts, podcasts. The head spins and swims in admissions updates, news, spin lists, commentary, gossip, so much buzz, too much info, so many opinions. I'm here to help. When the beat is loud, I'll turn down the volume. I'm Lee Coffin, Dartmouth's dean of admissions. Welcome to The Admissions Beat the pod for news, conversation, and advice on all things college admissions. Hello, everyone.
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Welcome back to the Admissions Beat. This week, I'm taking a slightly different path towards my storytelling and I'm recreating a panel discussion I had a couple of weeks ago at the National College Board Colloquium. I'm bringing back three of the panelists from that topic of decoding transcripts and school profiles. We are going to not reenact the panel, but we're going to bring the band back together and have a conversation about transcripts and profiles and changes afoot on both fronts. But before we do that, let's get to the newsroom with Charlotte Albright. Hi, Charlotte. Nice to see you.
Charlotte Albright:
Nice to see you, too.
Lee Coffin:
Let's go. What's on the Admissions Beat for this week?
Charlotte Albright:
Lee, you speak about forming a community and shaping a community. I know one of the ways that you and many other deans do that is to make sure that international students are part of that community. We live in a global society, but there are some conflicting media reports about that. So The Chronicle [of Higher Education] recently reported that the number of international students at American colleges declined precipitously during the COVID-19 pandemic, not surprisingly, with new enrollments tumbling 46% in the fall of 2020. These are 2020 numbers. Forbes Magazine, this past June, talked in a much more bullish way, really, and said deans of admission are expecting more international students this year and they were seeing enrollments as up as of June, or at least applications as up. So what are you seeing?
Lee Coffin:
Forbes is channeling what I'm seeing. So I think the danger in all of the admissions stories that are written that use 2020 data has to have a huge, bright neon asterisk appended to it, because that was a pandemic admission cycle. The pandemic was especially wicked in the international part of my applicant pool where COVID did not hit every country equally and some were crippled by it and so you saw declines in applications as a result of that. We saw declines in enrollment because of that. We had significant numbers of our international acceptances either declined because they couldn't leave their country or they postponed for the same reason, either because of COVID or because of visa issues and the embassies were closed. So there was a really complicated moment for international applicants in their enrollments during the 2020 admission cycle.
A year later, so the classes enrolled in September, the pendulum swung all the way to the other side on many campuses. Dartmouth saw a 48% increase in international applications last year. As the pandemic moved a bit towards a resolution, as the political climate changed, as we were able to extend visas to foreign citizens again, that pool bounced back. So the class that just enrolled this fall has a record enrollment of foreign citizens in it. So it's contradictory to "the sky fell." The sky didn't fall, it sagged, because we were in a pandemic and that disrupted the flow of students around the world for reasons that I think make a lot of sense. But to say that we are in the dark age of globalism in college admissions in the U.S. would be grossly overstated. International students are applying. They're being admitted and they're enrolling and in a lot of places, getting scholarships too. So if you're listening to this from outside the U.S., don't worry about this.
Charlotte Albright:
Let me pivot now to a story I saw in The Washington Post in late October, and it touches on a topic you are about to raise with your panelists. It has to do with transcripts. As you know, somewhere around 2017, a group of people came together and formed something called the Mastery Transcript Consortium. It was led by a guy named Scott Looney, I think, who was the head of the Hawken School, but it had a lot-
Lee Coffin:
I know him.
Charlotte Albright:
You do?
Lee Coffin:
I do…
Charlotte Albright:
Of course you do. So like a lot of people in the independent school world, he was noticing that assessment in high schools, both private and public, had been changing a lot. So it's not always numbers. It's not always letters, now it's portfolios and so forth and he was noticing that transcripts aren't changing with those assessment changes. So he wants to reform what a transcript looks like and what it says. So The Washington Post was saying, "He's getting some traction. 275 private high schools and 125 public schools are part of this consortium." So I'm wondering what you're seeing. Are transcripts looking any different to you at your end of the pipeline?
Lee Coffin:
No. There's a group of schools that are adopting what's known as the mastery transcript, which for listeners is a more qualitative narrative-based type of assessment. So instead of having a letter grade or a number, you have a narrative that gives feedback on a student's performance. What I always say to schools when they ask this question is, "You have total license to teach what you teach, evaluate as you evaluate, create a transcript that reflects the pedagogy of your faculty. It is not my responsibility or my right as an admissions officer, as a dean, to tell you how to do that. What I do need you to do is explain it to us so that when we're meeting this transcript, which might be more narrative than numerical or more narrative than A, B, C, D, or whatever grading scale might have been previously used, we have to read it and understand preparation."
We have to read it quickly in a competitive admission construct where the volume is creating the need to move swiftly. So one of the challenges of the mastery transcript is it's not easily digested, and so I think on the school side, one of the conundrums is, "Here's the way we've documented a student's performance. How does that transcript get assessed by the colleges to which that student applied?" But that's a great question, and when we come back, our panel will pick up Mastery Transcript as part of this week's round table about transcripts and profiles. See you in a minute.
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Welcome back to Admissions Beat round table. This week, I'm joined by a fun cohort of colleagues who (all of us) were on a panel at a College Board Conference in October. We had such a lively exchange around the idea of decoding a transcript and a school profile that I thought let's bring the band together again with my friend, Darryl Tiggle, the director of college counseling at Baltimore Friends School. He was the mad genius who put that together and led the conversation. So Darryl, why is this a topic?
Darryl Tiggle:
Well, in terms of the work that we do, and I'm going to be narrowing my focus as a college counselor at a Quaker school with no APs, no ranking, no waiting of our GPA, it's really important that we be able to give the world that's looking at our students an understanding of the context of our school. So what I often say about the school profile in so much as the transcript is a profile of the student, the school profile is a transcript of the school. It talks about our academic program, our mission, our curriculum. So it helps us communicate with the external community in a way that we might not be able to do with everyone. So it's just our lead sheet to let people know what our school does and what our students are studying and pursuing.
Lee Coffin:
So we're joined by Calvin Wise, who is the director of recruitment at Johns Hopkins University. Hi, Calvin.
Calvin Wise:
Hey, how are you? Good to be here.
Lee Coffin:
I'm good. Nice to see you again. Candice Mackey is college counselor at Los Angeles Center for Enriched Studies in LA. Hi, Candice. Nice to see you again.
Candice Mackey:
Hi, Lee. Hi, everyone. Really good to see you all again as well.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah. Darryl, is there controversy around this topic? When you first imagined it, so let's have a conversation about this. Why? Why are people talking about school profiles right now?
Darryl Tiggle:
One of the things that may have brought on the focus on the profile and my college colleagues and Candice, correct me if I'm wrong, insomuch as people were wondering, "What are colleges going to dig into? What are they going to bite into to evaluate students in the absence of testing?"
Lee Coffin:
Oh, I see. Yeah.
Darryl Tiggle:
All right, so things like rigor of curriculum, grade distributions, things like that, we imagined as college counselors, those might be things that college admissions folks are going to look more closely at in the absence of testing. So we were particularly happy at Friends School that we've always had a really robust and comprehensive profile to communicate to really everyone, colleges, even potential families that might be looking at our school, what our school is about in terms of its mission and its academic piece. But in terms of how it's going to be used, we wanted to make sure that in admissions, when our applications arrived without testing, that the schools had a really good way to contextualize our students.
Lee Coffin:
Candice, you're at a larger public high school in LA, with a bigger caseload than Darryl.
Candice Mackey:
Yes.
Lee Coffin:
How does the profile help you do what he just said?
Candice Mackey:
Yes. The school profile is incredibly important for our school, for our community. I think really being able to convey a lot of information that that colleges may not otherwise have or be aware of as it pertains to our campus, our student demographics. What our students have experienced, I would say during the pandemic, but even prior to the pandemic, as our students, at least this particular class, class of 2022, they were part of the Los Angeles teacher strike that occurred. That happened during the second semester of their freshman year, so this class has been impacted by a lot of different factors.
So this is information that it's critical to be added to the school profile. In addition, to looking at other things within our community and looking at other measurements as admissions reps are evaluating our students and really just having an understanding of LACES. Yes, we are an urban school. We are a Title I School, public high school and we serve several students who come from at least 40 different zip codes across Los Angeles County. So our school profile, as I mentioned before, it's just a really important piece that we always strive to update and make sure that we're really communicating lots of details that, otherwise, may not really be recognizable if you just look on our website.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah, or if you just look at the transcript. Calvin, as you're starting to read applications, how does the profile factor into this work?
Calvin Wise:
Yeah. I want to preface this by saying Lee and I, we represent schools that are selective, that also practice a holistic admissions review. Not all schools are looking at applications in this way, but those who are selective are usually practicing holistic review, and so we are digging into the application deeper than the numbers. You hear the word kind context being thrown around a lot as it relates to holistic review, because we are trying to understand the context of where students are coming from. I think one of the most common misconceptions that I see or hear in working with students and families and some counselors is that particularly at schools that are selective, we're not solely reviewing a student's application with the aim of rewarding their past success.
We're really trying to figure out their future potential and predict their future potential on our campus. It's easy to look at a transcript and say in a very black and white, "Was this student successful or not?" But I think that we are taking a little bit more of a nuanced look and trying to figure out and predict the students per potential. The profile itself gives us a sense of how that student has navigated the opportunities available to them, and can help us glean how that student may take advantage of the opportunities available to us. So there's definitely a lot of layers, and as we're thinking about a student's academic character, their story, how they've navigated their educational environment, and the profile really serves as the base for us to start understanding that.
Even at a place like Hopkins, we have a regional model where we have staff members who are the experts for their region, their job is to be knowledgeable about the students that are coming from their region. We still see new schools, we may have new staff members, and so we have to continually educate ourselves around what is offered. we've seen this from the pandemic things have differed as schools have had to shift and so even relearning re-teaching ourselves. So that profile is crucial in understanding that school context to get a better sense of how the student is doing.
Lee Coffin:
I agree. I think it's one of those hidden pieces that is so central to the way you read a file. Even a school that you might know really well, I still read the profile every time I start at the school group each year. I just say, "What's new?" Like to Candice's point, "Oh, there was a teacher strike. Oh, there was a wildfire," if you're reading California. What kind of disruption might have altered someone's journey from ninth grade to 12th grade? How do we need to know that, so when we see Ps appearing all of a sudden on the transcript, we have some way of contextualizing that. So Darryl, you work at a school. It's a small school. Your caseload's smaller. How does your transcript attach to your profile?
Darryl Tiggle:
Well, I'll get that, but I also wanted to carry on something that Candice said about updating things that are going on in our school. So one of the things that happened at our school recently, as we had the arrival of a master teacher, science teacher, who had taught an AP curriculum prior to coming to Friends School. Friends School students who were taking advanced bio for the last several years were used to getting As and very few As are being granted in that advanced bio, so that is something that we're highlighting in our profile. So that they see when a transcript of a student who looks like a pretty straight-A student pops a B, or just there's something average in their transcript, our profile actually highlights that. We produce our own profile so we can really keep up-to-date things in our profile that mirror our transcript.
So I often say that I'm a college admissions guy disguised as a college counselor. So a lot of the things that I put in my profile is to, not advantage our students in an unfair way, but to really help communicate to the colleges what our students are doing. So our profile also gives a great distribution of how the students have fared in their junior year courses to get an understanding of how they're performing. Then, we do a couple different things in terms of highlighting the curriculum where we're a pretty flat curriculum. We do have some advanced courses, but our curriculum is always highlighted in the profile in the way that a reader can transfer back and forth from the transcript to the profile very easily and ascertain how rigorous that course might be, what kind of progression that student has taken in a discipline.
Lee Coffin:
Well, you say you're an admissions officer hiding in a college counselor's body, but you were an admission officer. I'm thinking that maybe that informs your sense of the profile as something valuable.
Darryl Tiggle:
Very much so. I know it helps admissions counselors read applications. I know that clarity and context helps them put the applicant and the applicant school in a framework that they can understand if it's just one child applying from that school, or if it's 20 students applying from the same school, the transcript and profile will help give them some insight that will inform their decision making.
Lee Coffin:
What about demographics? How does that factor into a profile, and why is that important? Candice mentioned students at LACES come from 40 different zip codes, which is remarkably heterogeneous for a public school to have that kind of pull, but why would you tell us that?
Candice Mackey:
Well, I feel incredibly grateful to work at such a diverse school and diverse community and so I think it's so important that for all of us to be aware of the different communities that we serve and whatever that may be. For LACES, there's a lot of diversity within ethnicity, within socioeconomic status. We also provide on our school profile, how many students participate in our school busing program. So this is helpful for admissions to understand that LACES is not a school that's like a residential school or a neighborhood school.
So we do have some students who are attending the school and they live local in the area, and it may only take them 10 minutes to get to school. But we also have students who are traveling and they're spending anywhere from an hour to an hour-and-a-half in the morning with their commute, or perhaps even going home. So this is important for everyone, for all of us to be aware of, as you're really thinking about each individual student where they're coming from. When we're talking about looking at evaluating students holistically, holistic means identities, or that involves identities and communities in addition to academics and transcripts.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah. I love that point. I wrote down a minute ago, Calvin said, "It's deeper than the numbers," and that's what you just put an exclamation point on that Candice where I think people outside of school or college roles get caught on the numbers. The numbers seem to mean something and they do, but context also means something, and the number without the context doesn't work, I think. Calvin, can you give an example? We're reading files again, so we're often and running towards the class of '26. Can you think of an example or two of where you were recently reading a file where the profile helped illuminate the context of the student?
Calvin Wise:
Yeah. I think Candice gave a great one. When we talk about our process in the role of admissions officers, we like to say that our staff are researchers and that our process is evidence-based, so they're pulling together pieces in the application, finding different aspects of evidence that build a broader picture as to who the student is. A good example, when students have long commutes to and from home, you may come across a student and students, their extracurricular involvement may be light, and it could be because of a variety of different reasons, but one of which could be because they are up at 5:00 in the morning. They're getting ready to go to school, and they have a long commute to get home and they can't stay late for school-based activities.
So I think the commute, where students are coming from is a big one. I think course offerings, as we understand how students took advantage of opportunities available to them, understanding what those opportunities are across higher-level courses is one that we talk a lot about. That's something that may change from year to year as you have teachers coming in and out. So that's why, as you mentioned, Lee, it's important to look at, and even for schools that you're familiar with each year to better understand that. I think the other one that's a little bit more nuanced is we're institutions that are global.
If you think about students across the country, I was just reading an application from a student where only 20% of students in the graduating class went to a four-year school. This student attended a school in Wyoming, the kid's from Wyoming. So not only are only 20% of students going to college, this kid is now thinking about going to Hopkins in Baltimore. So when you think about the environment, it doesn't take much imagination to understand in the environment that student's coming from and how probably the student's going against the grain in regards to the college culture or the opportunities after high school. So I think that provides some additional context in color for the application as well.
Lee Coffin:
I'm really glad you used that for your college example, because it's one of those data points on a profile that is so critically important that most people don't even think about it. But as the admissions officer, really it is a signal about what's the college-going culture in this school, in this community and the families in that community and that 20% to a four-year college on top of leaving a rural Wyoming environment, going to Baltimore? You're right. You get a sense of, "Okay, this kid's courageous." He or she is leaving a community where that's not the norm. I was reading one recently and it, the student was from rural Oregon, another rural one, where it was 40 miles south of Portland, Oregon, in an agricultural region of the state.
The profile talked about that, that said, "We are an agrarian economy. Most people are farmers, or work in the lumber industry and very few of our students leave this region." To your point, here was a student saying, "I see a future that is different than this one," and then the rest of the application, she wrote her essay about inseminating pigs on her farm. You put the essay in the context of place and say, "Okay, there's a pig farmer applying and she wants to be a vet," and you start to see the way that puzzle adds up. Darryl's laughing as I say that. You have any pig farmers at Friends.
Darryl Tiggle:
No, I love the story. But the other thing I realize as a participant in this conversation is I've just discovered a huge blind spot in our own profile at Friends School, as I was listening to Candice describe the context of the students. We talked about the context of the school that's described in the transcript, but the context of the student body is super important. My profile does not have comprehensive context on my student body. As I was looking, we've got 40% students of color. I don't say that in my profile, we've got 30% of our students on financial aid who are at private schools, so I guess that's a blind spot that I was blind to. So I'm so happy that that was revealed in this conversation. I'm revising my profile conversation. Thank you.
Lee Coffin:
So we've already served a purpose, like we've helped Darryl.
Darryl Tiggle:
Thank you.
Lee Coffin:
But it's because you're in a Quaker school and like Candice, you're probably pulling people from a broader geographical area than people might presume.
Darryl Tiggle:
It's the narrative of Baltimore on its, for many different reasons, a private school city, for secondary school and there's several of them and they all have their own identity and they're pretty distinct identities. So it's something that I do need to, I'm learning and growing in this because Baltimore is a different place in many ways. The profile is super important to understand about the dozen or so secondary schools that many people send their children to.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah. Another little nugget that I've started digging out of the profile is the percentage of students on free and reduced-price lunch. That's particularly important in urban schools or rural schools where the socioeconomic situation is important to know. On our reader form, we type that in now, when we pull it off a transcript to know, what's that situation in the local school? Candice, do you talk about that on your profile?
Candice Mackey:
Oh yes, absolutely. That is definitely one of the identity, demographic community markers that I am highlighting or just mentioning. So our profile, it covers our students who are eligible for free or reduced lunch, that percentage. As I mentioned before, we do cover the amount of students who are bused in and then, of course, the breakdown of our ethnicities. One thing that we mentioned, and this may not be so much of a big deal, but I really try to be mindful of representing the different ethnicities that we do serve. So one thing that I added this year to our profile was the category for students identifying as biracial or mixed. That is something that has actually increased in terms of capturing that data each year. You want to update your profile every year and you really want to look at it in every which way. So that's one area of our demographics that I have made an update to.
Lee Coffin:
Well, it gets to Darryl's point that the profile tells the story of the school and the community it serves. If you're Calvin or Lee reading a file, it helps us meet the person where they are. What other information goes on these profiles? So to someone who's never seen one, and this might seem mysterious, is it a reason to be suspicious, or is this document a straight-up representation of place and curriculum?
Darryl Tiggle:
}I think it's straight up. I'm going to just march down mine and give you each heading, and then I had another thing I drew from the last conversation we were having. So ours gives the just name, address, location, website, what have you, then we talk about our school's mission, the curriculum graduation requirements. We do a grade distribution chart for the class, which, full disclosure, since we're not a ranking school and when I worked at admissions, it just drove me crazy, trying to get right. I wanted to make sure that schools had some way to ascertain where our students fell.
We give a mean, a high, a low GPA. We give some national merit information, and then we commit at least a couple of pages to diagrams of the curriculum just so that people understand that it's not going to say IB, it's not going to say AP, but please know that it is a rich and rigorous curriculum, and that's something that we really lean into. Then again, I'm sorry, there's a GPA distribution early on and then a junior year class distribution. Then, we talk about special programs, a little bit about standardized testing, and then we give our college list. So that's the …
Lee Coffin:
That's a lot of data.
Darryl Tiggle:
It's a lot of data. It's a lot of data. But one of the things that we had talked about earlier in terms of one of the purposes of the profile, an equity tool, because Candice and I are at two different places where I get to sit at with college counselors, four or five a day. I'm only counseling 40 students, so I've got a little bit more time on my hands. She's juggling way more students, so she may not have as much face time with college people. The profile enables her to talk to many, many, many different people, and when it's as comprehensive as hers, in terms of providing equity insight, the college admissions folks can really get a clear picture of, "These are the children who are coming to coming from this school, and these are the lives they're living," and that's super important. So it's, again, I've got a whole bunch of work to do now, because that is so important. But that's a long answer to what's on our program.
Lee Coffin:
No, it's an important answer, because I think every school maps it out differently with words and numbers and graphs and charts and lists and there's no perfect answer to that. I can't say, "This is the best one,' but there are some that aren't very good. Like Calvin, when do you come upon a file and say, "Oh, this profile isn't helpful?"
Calvin Wise:
It's when a lot of the information is missing, particularly around the academic context, what's offered, the curriculum. Limitations, some schools limit students from taking certain classes, depending on if you're in a special program, maybe depending on what you took in the ninth grade. So I think that as we're having this conversation, what's top of mind for me is we're in the reading process. So I'm thinking about the things that are necessary for me to understand from a reading lens. But I think, and again, another misconception about our process, is that we enroll through our recruitment process, right? It starts early, early on, and we do this in our office. I think it's wise for and admissions officers that have their regional officers look at profiles when they're thinking about the recruitment process before they interact with the schools, to understand the communities and maybe prioritize some information.
If this is a school that has a high percentage of students who are on free and reduced lunch, maybe you bring a financial aid brochure. Maybe you make sure you're highlighting some of your financial aid policies. If the school has a special program, that's a global studies something or other, right? That might be helpful for you to know so that you can be prepared to talk about that. So as much as we talk about profiles being helpful in the selection process, and that's where my head is now, when I think about helpful the profiles it's definitely about the curriculum and the academic offerings and the students that are there. I think there are definitely some other pieces that I know we use in our office to get a better understanding about the community itself so that we are ready to engage with the school at that point in time.
Lee Coffin:
If the profile's a little underdeveloped, where do you find the information otherwise?
Calvin Wise:
Yeah. So in our process, we require either the common app or coalition application and there is a secondary school report. So a counselor will fill out some information that provides some basic demographics info. Then, there may be some other pieces. Teachers, we require two teacher letters of recommendation and a counselor letter of recommendation. So oftentimes, counselors or teachers will bring up some stuff. Sometimes students bring up things about their school in the application and additional information. So again, it's a lot of things that may pop up. We're, as researchers, trying to find that, but it really helps us out if it's all consolidated on the front end in the school profile.
Lee Coffin:
I love how you refer to admissions officers as researchers, because it really is the task at hand when you're reading that. You're a recruiter during one part-year, and you're a party planner in some other parts of the year. But when you're reading a file, you're sifting through the story someone put together and the researcher says, "Oh, look, it's the guy who gave everybody Cs this year saying she's the best student in the class," and that's context.
Darryl Tiggle:
Calvin, I'm sending you a couple of those scholars and [crosstalk 00:33:45]
Calvin Wise:
So I'll circle back to that conversation later.
Lee Coffin:
The Washington Post had the story recently about the Mastery Transcripts and what's that? What's this new twist on a high school transcript and the idea that they're moving away from maybe letters and numbers and more towards a more qualitative assessment? Do you have any thoughts on that as either people read about it in The Post or a school might say, "Hey, we're shifting away from what would be a more A, B, C, 100 down transcript to something that tells a story quite literally?
Darryl Tiggle:
Yeah, well our school and it's really been more of the academic dean, the principal, the faculty have explored it and toyed with it. I think they are somewhat compelled by it. I don't know that teachers love it. As a college counselor, it was a little hard for me to get my just, I like the data. We're a 0 to 100 point GPA school, but it's something as a Quaker school, as we talk about narrative and evolving our practices. I'm not very well-versed in it though, however.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah.
Darryl Tiggle:
Yeah.
Lee Coffin:
I haven't seen very many. Calvin, how have you encountered many as a reader?
Calvin Wise:
Not yet, not Mastery. We've seen other transcripts that have the same aim. I think it's important to acknowledge in thinking about how we work with young people, moving away from this achievement by a number or a grade. We talk a lot about on the college side, Lee, about love of learning and intellectual curiosity and academic character and that's what we ultimately are looking for.
Darryl Tiggle:
So one of the things I'm curious about from my college colleagues is I've got a few questions about different ways of doing things and wanted to get your feelings on them, narrative or GPA, Lee?
Lee Coffin:
GPA.
Darryl Tiggle:
All right. Calvin?
Calvin Wise:
Let's say GPA.
Darryl Tiggle:
All right.
Calvin Wise:
Narrative comes in the teacher rec, so I have narrative in other parts of the file. Did I just blow your mind, Darryl?
Darryl Tiggle:
No, I'm with you. We're on the same page. One of the categories is weighted GPA versus unweighted GPA. For the audience who may be listening, weighted GPA means that they give a little bit more credit for a course that's accelerated or honors or more rigorous; wherein an unweighted GPA curriculum, say for instance, it's a 0 to 100, you can max out at 100. Where in a weighted grade point system, it might be a 4.0 unweighted system where with weighting, a student can grow to a 5.0. Did that make sense?
Lee Coffin:
Yeah. So the A in an honors class could count for five points and then, a college prep course might count for four.
Darryl Tiggle:
Yes.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah.
Darryl Tiggle:
But at Friends School of Baltimore, we do it the good old-fashioned, 100% way.
Lee Coffin:
These are the little details that people get distracted by.
Darryl Tiggle:
You're right. You're right.
Lee Coffin:
[crosstalk 00:37:02] transcript and they forget when I read the transcript, I'm looking for trends. I look to see, "This is mostly A student, but I see some B+s is popping up." I always look to see, is that B+ in the same subject every year and a lot times it is. It's like this language student is getting a B+ in math every year and so I write, "A student with a B+ in math," or it's a math science kid who is getting A+s in those STEM-oriented courses and you say, "Okay, your aptitude is really flying there and it's syncs up with your testing." So with all that on the transcript, that's where the transcript and the profile sync up so you can see what are the patterns in the school?
What is the level of rigor available that the student may or may not take? I read one this morning where the school profile said, "We allow students to take two AP courses a year. We teach 20 AP courses, but you can only take two a year." So I was like, "Okay, this person had four, and that was the max for junior-senior year, so it was four out of four," as opposed to a more sloppy wave reading. It would've been four out of 20, but that was not possible in that high school and that's where the profile helped me understand that. This has been fun. Thank you all for spending some time talking with me about decoding transcripts and profiles and Darryl, as always, for making it fun, but maybe we'll have you come back,
Darryl Tiggle:
Please do.
Lee Coffin:
Okay. Thank you, Calvin, Candice, and Darryl, it's always fun to see you.
Calvin Wise:
Yeah.
Darryl Tiggle:
Likewise.
Calvin Wise:
Pleasure.
Lee Coffin:
Okay.
Calvin Wise:
We had a good time.
Candice Mackey:
Thank you, Lee. Thank you, everyone.
Lee Coffin:
So this week, we will skip Inbox. Remember, if you have questions, send them to admissionsbeat@dartmouth.edu. For now, this is Lee Coffin from Dartmouth College. See you next week.