Have you ever felt that you didn’t have an opportunity to showcase your strengths on an application? Or that your acceptance to a program hinged on a single score or number? In 2015, the head of the Hawken School developed the Mastery Transcript Consortium (MTC) to build a student-centric, consistent, evidence-based, and flexible transcript that encouraged dialogue among students, educators and colleges to gain a deeper understanding of each individual student.
MTC, now in its fifth year, has over 170 colleges and universities that accept the Mastery Transcript and over 400 member schools, including All Saints’ Episcopal School. We have been engaged with MTC since 2017 as a member school and hosted the 2019 MTC Winter Conference on our campus. That same year, we developed the All Saints’ Mastery Transcript credit areas that include the following broad categories: Communicator, Engaged Citizen and Servant Leader, Innovative Thinker, Peer Collaborator, Reflective Student and Researcher.
Each category is divided into Foundational and Advanced Credits. Foundational credits are more easily mastered in high school, whereas Advanced credits are started in high school but most likely will need additional work to master. The philosophy of MTC goes hand-in-hand with our mission of promoting each student’s individual genius within and is aligned with our Portrait of a Saint in fostering students who are guided by integrity, faithful community members, creative problem solvers, empathetic global citizens, valuable collaborators, committed to personal growth and effective communicators. In 2020, we began the Beta stage of the MTC process where students have been building a Beta version of their own MTC transcript to give us feedback on our All Saints’ Mastery Transcript credit areas.
After a series of meetings and workshops with a group of students since last year, we have three students who have completed the Mastery Transcript Consortium Beta Stage process: Edo Knitel '23, Grace Lamis '23, and Thomas Wright '23. Within the portal, they have picked their credit areas, provided evidence, and all of their courses have been entered into the portal. All Saints' will move from the Beta stage to the Pilot stage.
The relevancy of reimagining the college admissions process and what a transcript can look like is even more apparent in light of the student experiences during the last two years. The new transcript encourages the notion of interdisciplinary learning and the application of knowledge to real world situations. It also captures each student’s creativity, persistence and passions, coupled with their work outside of school. It’s time to give a face and personality to each student’s application and a greater understanding of what they can bring beyond a single number.