Senior Year Through a Laptop: Admissions and the 2020 Classroom

The students who graduated from Dana Hills High School in 2021 spent the end of their junior year and much of their senior year learning through a screen. The class of 2020 lost its spring. The Paper, the school's student newspaper, covered both: the ordinary stress of college applications before March 2020, and the stranger version that followed. Six of those stories, reread in 2026 for this archive, make a useful map for anyone who has to explain an unusual year to an admissions office.

They are worth reading in order, because the order is the point. The first three were written by students who assumed the usual rules would hold. The last three were written once they did not.

Before: the usual pressure

In February 2020, weeks before campuses closed, College Applications Taking Senior Year tallied what seniors were carrying. The writer reckons that even the simplest application many Dana students filed, the Cal State one with no essay section, takes hours, and that an application with essays and an achievements section can eat a full day. Add standardized tests, the FAFSA and scholarship forms, all on top of classes, jobs and sports. The conclusion is surprisingly calm. The process is a strain, the writer says, but it teaches time management, and free help exists on campus.

That same month, College Fair Educates reported on an out-of-state college fair in the school's Porthole Theater. A representative from the University of Tennessee told students that rising numbers of California graduates were competing for seats at California schools, and she walked them through a three-tier list of reach, target and likely schools, built around each student's GPA and test scores. Colleges from more than 15 states set up booths, from Hawaii Pacific University to Syracuse.

And in ACT Retake Unfair, a staff writer objected to a newly announced ACT plan that would let students retake single sections. The case was that section retakes would push scores up, make the test less useful to colleges and favor students who could pay for repeated sittings. Agree or not, the piece shows how closely students watched the scoring rules of one exam.

Of the three, the college fair story has aged best. The advice in it, build a list with reach, target and likely schools, compare each school’s admissions profile to your own record, and do not rule out a campus because of sticker price before checking aid, is still what counselors give. The writer also notes that turnout was small. That detail is easy to skip, but it hints at how few students were using this kind of in-person help just weeks before everything moved online.

During: the switch

Then the classroom moved. The Trials and Tribulations of Online School (September 2020) lays out what changed in Capistrano Unified. Google Classroom and School Loop gave way to Canvas, Apex lessons were added, and families picked between a hybrid plan and a fully online program. The writer lists the obvious problems, cameras switched off after roll, distractions at home, but also credits the district for lending laptops and Wi-Fi routers to families who needed them.

By December the effects were reaching report cards. Student Trends During Online & Hybrid School quotes a Dana Hills academic advisor who had seen more D's and F's on the six- and twelve-week progress reports. The story names the worry that came with it: that a falling GPA would cost students their college choices or scholarships, and that the stress would drag grades lower still.

The same week, Should finals be worth as much of our grade this semester? answered no, for two reasons. Students may not have learned as thoroughly as finals demand, the writer argued, and online testing made academic honesty impossible to police evenly, which left the students who followed the rules at a disadvantage.

The camera rules, the progress reports and the finals debate were each written up as a separate school issue. Read in sequence they describe a single shift: a school year that stopped measuring what it used to measure. That is the context an applicant from those years needs to give, and it is the context these stories document from the inside.

What an admissions reader sees

Lay those stories side by side and a timeline appears: a normal fall 2019, a disrupted spring 2020, then a first online semester that, by one advisor's account, brought more low marks than usual. For the class of 2021 the timing was especially awkward. The spring of junior year, normally the last full term an admissions reader sees before early deadlines, was the one that broke. Many seniors in that class, and some in the classes after, carried some version of that pattern into their applications.

The useful response is neither to hide it nor to dwell on it. A guide on how to explain a dip in grades in a personal statement makes the case for owning the change in a few sentences, giving context rather than excuses, showing what changed afterward and keeping the whole explanation short. The advisor's report in The Paper is exactly the kind of context such a note can lean on without sounding defensive: the advisor described a semester that was hard for a majority of students.

Testing shifted too. The ACT complaint from February 2020 assumed scores would stay central. Within months many colleges had gone test-optional for pandemic-era applicants, which shifted more of the weight onto grades in context and on writing. For students aiming at selective schools, the short-answer questions began to matter more. Stanford's supplemental essays, for example, are short pieces that leave no room for filler. The best answers are specific in the same way the strongest stories in The Paper were specific.

The writing underneath

What stands out on a reread is how much of the students' own experience made it onto the page. The camera debate, the Canvas rollout, the quiet fear about grades: these are the kind of concrete details that make a personal statement specific. A student who wrote for a school paper in 2020 was practicing the hardest part of a personal statement, which is choosing one concrete scene and saying what it meant.

The ACT piece offers a different lesson. It argues against a policy before anyone knew how it would play out, and it builds its case on consequences: higher scores, lower value, higher cost. Predictions like that are risky in an opinion piece and useful in an application essay, where the reader wants to see how you reason about a change, not whether you guessed right.

The finals piece is a good small example. It does not say online school was hard in general. It names two specific problems and argues from them. An application essay about a pandemic year works the same way. One real detail, such as a progress report, a borrowed router or a class taken with the camera off, carries more weight than a paragraph about resilience.

Most applicants do not have an editor. For those who want one reader who will push a draft without taking it over, personal statement help built around one-on-one sessions does the job a student editor did at The Paper: ask what you meant, mark the vague sentence and hand the draft back to its writer.

The paper's coverage of those years is spread across the News and Opinion sections. The 2020/21 school year in the archive collects everything published in the year classes were online or hybrid.