Eighteen-year-old Anahita Nagpal’s plans to start training this fall to be a doctor are in ruins. She blames a statistical model.
Nagpal, who lives in Göttingen, Germany, had been offered a premed place and scholarship at NYU. Both were withdrawn this week, she says, after she scored more poorly than expected on her International Baccalaureate diploma, a two-year high school program recognized by colleges and taken by more than 170,000 students this year, most in the US.
Teen regrets about grades aren’t unusual, but the way the foundation behind the IB Diploma Programme calculated this year’s grades was. The results, released Monday, were determined by a formula that IB, the foundation behind the program, hastily deployed after canceling its usual springtime exams due to Covid-19. The system used signals including a student’s grades on assignments and grades from past grads at their school to predict what they would have scored had the pandemic not prevented in-person tests.
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