"MOOCs may soon become a prominent factor in admissions decisions at selective colleges..."

"... a way for students who may not do well on traditional measures like the SAT to prove they can hack it."

That’s the argument by officials at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which on Wednesday announced a plan to create what it calls an "inverted admissions" process, starting with a pilot project within a master’s program in supply-chain management.

... Students who come to the program after first taking the MOOCs will then essentially place out of the first half of the coursework, so they can finish the degree in a semester rather than an academic year. That effectively makes the master’s program half the usual price.

ADDED: With so much hanging on success in the MOOCs, how will MIT deal with cheating? Here's an article from last month in the MIT News: "Study identifies new cheating method in MOOCs/Research from MIT and Harvard shows how to exploit and protect MOOC certification":

In this [new] method of cheating, a user creates multiple accounts, one of which is the primary account that will ultimately earn a certificate. The other accounts are used to find or “harvest” the correct answers to assessment questions for the master account.