As I sift through College Confidential looking at students who want to be “chanced” by their peers about their likelihood to be accepted to a certain college I notice that many of them put only two numbers: GPA and ACT.  Do those two numbers define a student’s high school career in the eyes of a college admissions officer, and more importantly, should they?

Grade Point Average (GPA) is a measure of a student’s academic achievement throughout their coursework. The problems with GPA are that it does not account for the difficulty of the classes and different schools have different standards when it comes to what qualifies as an “A”.

Because of the inconsistency of a GPA colleges also require students to take a standardized test such as the ACT or SAT. The ACT and SAT allow colleges to compare students using one number that they know is based off of a standardized scoring system.

Unfortunately for many high school students, these two numbers do define their high school career in the eyes of a college admissions officer. The exceptions are stellar athletes or students of a minority, such as Hispanics or Native Americans.

Students that are being recruited for their athletic ability will be accepted regardless of their scores. And minority students will be held to much lower standards in terms of their scores, because colleges need to fill quotas of accepting a certain percentage of minorities, and generally the applicant pool for minorities is not as strong simply because there are fewer applicants.

Applying to colleges has become very easy through the Common Application, meaning many schools receive obscene amounts of applications and do not have time to read through each application thoroughly. University of Missouri received over 20,000 applications last year and they do not have time to read that many essays and résumés, so they have a policy in place, if you get a 24 or above on the ACT you are automatically accepted. So for some schools your scores are literally the only thing that defines your high school career.

The bottom line is GPA and ACT scores are the main criteria for college admissions for a majority of high school students. The real question is, should this be the case?

There most definitely are attributes of an applicant that are not represented by those two numbers such as leadership ability, work ethic, and amiability. All of these characteristics are vital to being successful in college and in a career, but it is difficult to portray that you have a these characteristics except for recommendation letters, which admissions officers know are almost always sugar-coated, and perhaps showing that you are the leader of school clubs. It is important to show that you are involved in extracurricular activities such as sports, music, and community service. But unfortunately for college admissions officers it is difficult to distinguish which student has the best leadership skills, work ethic, and is amiable simply based on a list of extracurriculars they are involved in.

Until there is a way for student to truly demonstrate that they possess other valuable characteristics outside of knowledge, test scores will and should be the main criteria for college admissions.