I know the title of this article might be a bit too much for some of you. However, I’ve had some interesting conversations lately, and it’s got me thinking about our admissions system. I keep wondering what it is that our admissions department is looking for when it goes over all of the applications it receives. I know they must make notes, rank people, etc. I’m just curious about whether or not this is the right thing to do.

Last week, I learned a lot about Gustavus that I had never known before, in the span of about five minutes. The main revelation was this: Gustavus Admissions ranks all Gustavus applicants when they apply. It’s not a very strange idea, but it’s one that I hadn’t thought of before. According to my sources, applicants are ranked by grades, of which the highest grade is “W.”

Why “W”? Well, once again according to shadowy sources, I was told it stood for “winner.” I was also told about two other grades, although for all I know there may be more. The other grades were “AA,” which apparently seeks to show how awesome someone is through alliteration, and the other was “A,” which at this point seems to be the “C” of Gustavus’ admission ranking system.

The idea behind these grades worries me a bit. First off, I would hope that any institution of higher learning would have the good sense to understand that calling someone a “winner” is just about the most annoyingly smarmy and cliché way of referring to a person. When I see someone who I don’t like, or someone doing something I think is stupid, I sarcastically refer to that person as a “winner.” For those uninitiated in sarcasm, this usage of the word “winner” is closer to “idiot.” “Winner” is not the sort of word you ought to use to describe your top candidates for any reason: it’s bad for both parties involved.

Also, the assumptions that are lined up behind this sort of terminology are a bit too much for me to swallow. Let us assume that Gustavus, like any other college, is looking for the “best” students possible. Specifically, for people with a 4.0 GPA, a 36 on the ACT or a solid 1600 (now 2400) on the SAT, lots of extracurricular activities (say eight or nine for good measure) and a personality that can best be described as “go get ’em.” Some of you may cry foul at this point, saying things like “they don’t require those tests anymore!” Well, I’m aware of that, but I’m still pretty darn sure they’d like to see those scores and that they’d like them to be high.

With all of that assumed, at what point can we ever call someone who is so absorbed in the things they have been told to do by our society—or their parents—a “winner”? I don’t mean to offend those of you who were that “winner,” but I think it’s important to note that if you were one of those kids, I’m not sure you actually had a childhood, let alone a high school experience that was characterized by anything other than stress in the pursuit of a made-up ideal.

According to our own admissions webpage, as of 2007, our first-year class size was 675 students, 34 percent of whom were in the top 10 percent of their graduating class. That same first-year group had an average high school GPA of 3.67. The middle 50 percent of those incoming first-years had ACT scores in the range of 23-28 or SAT scores in the range of 1135-1345. I’m guessing that the “winners” that year were well above those averages.

Is this really the way we think of our students? By test scores? I worry that this sort of emphasis on past achievement has narrowed our field of prospective students too much. Individuals who pursue life in a less regimented way are, in this system, considered to be at best “A” material here at Gustavus. And while we may use a nice letter for these individuals, it is apparent that these individuals are not “winners.”

The standards by which it appears we judge people are ones I consider to be relatively worthless in such a pursuit. As a college, we want people to have been involved in extra-curricular activities during high school. However, what if a student, for a variety of reasons (not the least of which might be economic), was unable to be involved in a bunch of superfluous activities during high school? Are people with other commitments not “winners”? This same idea can be applied to GPAs and test scores. Is someone not a “winner” if they don’t have the time to study for a standardized test? How many AP classes does it take to be a “winner”?

We have decided to value the strangest things in our prospective students. Many of the people with multiple AP classes under their belts when they come to Gustavus were likely told to take those AP classes by their parents. I would guess that many of the Gusties who did volunteer work in high school did it so that they could put it on their college applications. I’m not saying that this is the case for all people—certainly there are legitimate “winners” out there. In terms of selecting individuals however, there was a point, shortly after these criteria were made obvious to college applicants, that these criteria ceased to be worth anything. These criteria no longer exist for any purpose other than giving people a standard to conform to—a rigid and narrow guide to being what I can only call a “winner.”