
By the end of the year, it was all but certain that a student would be at the top of her class.
The student was no longer a teenager, a freshman, a graduate or a college student, but a young adult.
It was a mark of achievement.
The next step for the school, the university, would be to make the admissions process more transparent.
At the same time, students would no longer be required to apply online to a small but influential group of elite universities.
The company that developed the software for the admissions system – the Education Entry Office (EEO) – was already well known.
Its chief executive, Andrew Jansen, was a former senior software developer at IBM and the founder of the online admissions company Foursquare.
The company’s software has now become the foundation for the entrance test.
For Jansen and his team, the company was the only chance to become a global leader in online admissions, and the company, the first to use a blockchain to verify the identities of applicants, became the poster child for a new type of meritocracy.
They were also pioneers in what became known as “blockchain-driven” education.
The new idea, which had been around for years, was to apply the principles of blockchain technology to the admissions test.
“The idea is to make it so that the admissions department knows exactly who the people you are applying to are,” Jansen said.
It was a dream born out of the chaos of the internet age.
A world in which millions of students were struggling to find a university was still struggling to cope with the demands of globalisation.
In many parts of the world, a few high schools had been established to help students navigate the process, and to help them to find jobs.
But in the last few years, the process of applying to universities in places like China and India had become more difficult, and many of those students were now using apps like Foursqare.
“It was very difficult for students in those countries to get to an institution, because of the cost of travel and the complexity of the application process,” Janson said.
“What we were trying to do was help people to navigate through that process more easily.”
In the years since, the software was used to help hundreds of thousands of students across the world apply for entry into universities, from India to the United States.
And now, with the launch of the first ever US-based version of the school entrance exam, it is set to become the platform of choice for thousands more.
The US Department of Education, which is in charge of the admissions tests, says the exam is a way to measure the nation’s high school graduates’ progress and to create an online benchmark for the nation.
In 2017, the government launched a pilot program to make students more confident in applying for admission into the United Nations, and it has been working to make admissions testing more transparent, including setting up a blockchain-based system to verify applicants’ identities.
This new testing is a major step in the right direction, but not all students are thrilled with it.
Students have argued that the technology could be used to identify students who might not be eligible for scholarships and to cut off their access to financial aid, while others say it could be a way for companies to target them with advertising.
“I think it’s a terrible idea for anybody to use this to make decisions about who can get into an institution,” said Jessica Rieger, a 23-year-old from California who is applying for a PhD in computer science.
“This is all based on a false premise.
It is based on the premise that you can’t make admissions decisions based on academic performance.”
Some students have also been critical of the use of blockchain.
In an essay published in Forbes, a group of prominent students argued that there was little evidence that blockchain technology could help the admissions testing process, given that its development was funded by the government of the United Kingdom.
“Forcing students to apply to schools via a website that they can’t use for free is a violation of their First Amendment rights to free speech,” they wrote.
Jansen said that the company had been open about the concerns raised by students and would now be conducting more research on the topic.
The Education Entry Organization would continue to work to make blockchain-driven admissions a better system, he added.
“We are a technology company,” he said.
“We believe in the principles that the founders of this company believed in.”
The first test for the entry exam was created by the company that created the online admission software.
Now the Education Department is using its own technology to make sure that the system is transparent and fair to all students.