Just a thought balloon here.
There's a lot of discussion on CC and elsewhere about the relative merits and weighting of different criteria for highly selective colleges.
If the primary goal of admissions for highly selective universities is to distinguish and admit the most academically qualified (with some nudges towards other factors, such as institutional and social issues), then I suggest that the signal clarity of many traditional measures of academic merit among applying high schoolers has weakened.
This makes the job of the admissions officer more difficult.
It also likely makes at least SOME academic and other analysis of past historical cohorts less valid for the modern era. (i.e. how well GPA, test scores, and the like predict success in college and beyond).
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Here are, roughly, the major factors largely within a student's control that affect highly selective admissions:
GPA and course rigor
SAT/ACT test scores
Extracurriculars
(Perhaps essays, interviews and the like, though I'm a little more skeptical of their weight than many).
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GPA
When grades first started being assigned to students in primary and secondary school (probably centuries ago), I assume that they were primarily to provide both feedback and rewards (or penalties) to students. Secondary goals may have been to satisfy the educators themselves (they likely got satisfaction from rewarding the bright stars) and maybe as a marker to the outside world of the stronger and weaker students (i.e. what's your GPA). But I suspect that this latter goal was pretty low on the list.
Even into the mid to late 20th century, the primary mark of a successful high school career was not one's GPA, but rather, the high school diploma itself. Getting a diploma was an accomplishment. If you had many Cs and a few Ds along the way, well, so be it.
But as a HS diploma has become more of a baseline, and a greater and greater portion of the population attends college, those Cs and Ds got added significance, keeping Johnny out of Harvard and maybe even out of State U.
So, with pressure from students and parents, there has been a shift in the purpose of grades, as markers for college admission. This has led to grade inflation, grade compression (i.e. the 70th percentile of the class only a few tenths of GPA away from the 90th or 95th), and difficulty in cross comparisons (as some schools succumb to grade inflation on a large scale and others put up rear guard fights).
The alternative measure to GPA is class rank, but of course we know that many schools don't disclose this now and make it harder for colleges to get a fine measurement of where a student really stands.
Weighted grades help some in assessing curriculum rigor, but they also add murk and confusion.
And when a college wants to measure a kid who clearly succeeded (in grades, rank, or whatever) at an inferior high school, versus a kid who was ranked somewhere high (exact position murky) at a competitive school, how does the college adjust things properly?
Yes, the above is not new - it's been going on for decades, but I suspect it has gotten noticeably worse in the last decade or two.
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Test scores
(I'll try to keep this shorter)
I don't know exactly how much test prep helps, but it does seem to help SOME.
Add in the SAT recentering truncated the top end of the range for that test in the mid 90s.
Add in the much wider draw for admissions at top universities (i.e. they get more applicants, including international ones)
Now you've got many kids applying with 1600 SATs, and 36 ACTs. And we all know a 36 ACT isn't really that different from a 35, which isn't that different from a 34. Yes, a 36 ACT kid is likely to do much better at Harvard than a 26 ACT kid, but in the numbers game, Harvard is really weighing the 35s against the 34s and the 33s (with other factors besides test scores weighing in of course.
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Extracurriculars
Even when I was in HS in the 1980s, extracurriculars were not entirely pure. You didn't join necessarily Key Club because of whatever it does (what exactly does it do?), but rather because it's a line item on a potential future college application.
But I suspect that the overall competitiveness of highly selective admissions (single digit admission rates across the top schools), and the ease of information sharing (via the internet, including of course, CC), has increased the degree to which extracurriculars are sculpted (by the parents if not the kids, at least for those aspiring to the highest levels).
Does that kid have a passion for the homeless and underprivileged, or did someone nudge them that way to increase the chances of a Harvard sticker on the back of the minivan's window, a few years hence?
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Anyways, it's a long post already, but in brief:
Increased focus on college (versus simple HS completion) +
Increased focus on highly selectives (soaring applications) +
Increased information (via the internet)
= More 'gaming the system' (often in subtle ways, and not always by the student(s))
which in turn
= Many of the old signals probably are less clear than they once were
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