Out from the Crowd

A new way for Pomfret students to differentiate themselves in college admissions.

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Last year, Director of Studies Doug MacLeod gathered a group of veteran teachers to participate in an experiment. On one side of the room, he taped five college transcripts. On the other side, he listed the names of five high-achieving Pomfret seniors. Then he asked the group to match the transcripts with their owners. 

“They couldn’t do it,” he says. “The classes were the same. The grades were the same. It was impossible to tell them apart.”

Pomfret is not alone. Over the past two decades, the number of applications submitted to colleges has increased by more than 150 percent. Last year, more than 60 percent of the grades reported to colleges were As. Increasingly, college admission officers are having a hard time telling one top-tier candidate from the next. 

To help give our students the edge, Pomfret recently partnered with the Mastery Transcript Consortium (MTC) — a national nonprofit specializing in the measurement of student growth and achievement — to adopt something called an MTC Learning Record, an official supplement to the traditional college transcript.

In his recent State of the School address, Head of School Tim Richards described it this way: “For the first time, we are giving students a way to truly differentiate themselves in the college admissions process.”

Starting next year, every student will have the option to begin building a learning record. Students who opt-in will begin to earn “competencies” — think of them as credits — organized around Pomfret’s Portrait of the Graduate. As part of the shift, students will be asked to upload “evidence” of their learning, including tangible work samples.

“It is important to emphasize that the MTC Learning Record does not replace a traditional high school transcript,” says Dean of Enrollment Management Susan Mantilla-Goin. “It’s just one more resource that college admissions officers can use to gauge student achievement.” 

Like a college essay or teacher recommendation, the MTC Learning Record will give application readers a clearer, more holistic snapshot of a student’s unique strengths, interests, passions, skills, and capabilities. But unlike a college essay or teacher recommendation, the learning record will be a cumulative self-assessment curated by the student, drawing on the totality of their Pomfret Experience, over three or four years.

“So much of the learning that happens at Pomfret takes place outside of the classroom,” says Director of the Grauer Institute Gwyneth Connell, who is spearheading the MTC Learning Record effort.

Though learning records are new to Pomfret, they are not new to higher education. Applicants with learning records, or something similar, have been accepted at hundreds of prestigious colleges and universities, including Harvard, Caltech, Carnegie Mellon, Georgetown, Cornell, Mount Holyoke, and The University of Chicago, to name just a few. 

“It’s just one more way we are helping our students stand out from the crowd,” Connell says.