VOR. Suppose the matrix was derived and it looked like this:
4.0:
2400 = 15%
2350 = 10%
2300 = 5%
2250 = 3%
3.9:
2400 = 12%
2350 = 11%
2300 = 4%
2250 = 2%
(not filling out any more, just hypothetical - and I wish I could tab)
How would you react? Note that the 4.0/2350 pool has a lower acceptance rate (10%) than the 3.9/2350 pool (11%).
What would be your reaction? This would be proof of … what, exactly?
Pizzagirl Do you know why colleges accept more students than it has room for in its freshman class? I think if you understand that then you will have your answer.
I think it is true that a lot of high-stats kids get mixed messages. A kid with top scores and top grades in a particular high school may be one of the best students ever seen in that school. People–including guidance counselors and teachers–may be telling him, “You’ll get in anywhere! Why don’t you go to Harvard?” But a little research should reveal that this isn’t necessarily so. There are thousands of high schools, each with a best student.
But again, who, exactly, is this transparency supposed to help? Who needs to know that their real chance of getting into Harvard isn’t 5%, but more like 2%?
Hunt The students and their parents. That’s who. These holistic schools have the data, why are they so against providing the data? There shouldn’t be any reason not to provide it with the caveats that they already have under the information that they already provide.
Why does Stanford separate all of their data by GPA and individual SAT scores when it could compile the information via a matrix? I could understand if the costs are astronomical but there is little to no cost for these holistic institutions to provide it.
voiceofreason, I think what several of us are trying to tell you is that the data you seek would be misleading, because it would be so incomplete. If holistic review is real–and I believe that it is–releasing data on only part of it creates a false impression of what’s important. Just as an example, what if getting a national Gold Key from the Scholastic awards is a clear ticket to admission to Harvard, as long as your stats are within a reasonable range? If that’s true, data on whether that kid got 2400 or 2250 is pretty much irrelevant. On the other hand, what if having no significant ECs is the kiss of death, even if you have really high stats?
Of course, recommendations may say as much about the recommender as the student. Perhaps this is an inherent admissions advantage that students from elite private or public schools have, since the teachers and counselors are more likely to be experienced with writing recommendations.
Hunt I agree that the GPA/SAT matrix would be incomplete because other factors are applied in holistic admission which are not quite as quantifiable, but it would be better than data of GPA alone or SAT alone that holistic colleges currently provide. Wouldn’t it?
If you are against better information being provided to students and their families then you are in the lookingforward group that believes that too much information is harmful while less information is enlightening. I can’t believe that you take the lookingforward point of view. Do you take that point of view?
In 2011 when Princeton first published numbers based on GPA and SAT score, it said 19.2% for 2300-2400 which seems to dropped 5 points since then.
I am afraid that you might have missed the finer points of LF’s position.
Regarding transparency and additional releases of data, I am also afraid that you are missing what some of us are saying. One can be very much in favor of more data, and still realize how futile the efforts would be when considering the responses of the targeted audience. Except for a few, the people looking at the numbers and narrative would simply continue to misunderstand, ignore, or misrepresent it by focusing on the most trivial date.
Fwiw, it is surprising that you harpoon Stanford for releasing the numbers quoted in this thread and claiming they are still way too short from meeting the standard for … I suppose … integrity. Obviously, astute or agenda-less observers might point out that Stanford goes a bit further than most schools in disclosing the bands and ranges of admissions. Coupled with the CDS, the statements by Dean Shaw at the SS meetings, and the interviews, I DO think that the applicants COULD find sufficient information to decide to … apply!
The biggest issue here is that applicants are NOT that interested in the granularity you believe is so important. Spend a few years around here, and you will notice that many students believe that surpassing the average percentiles is sufficient to play! What would a school such as Stanford or Harvard have to do to show that at best the chances are in single digits for the overwhelming majority of students? And on the other hand, should the school refrain from “recruiting” in areas they feel need additional resources and focus?
In the end, while more data might satisfy an extremely finite number of observers, if the targeted audience is the millions of potential applicants, the data that exists appears to be sufficient as it is mostly … ignored. In addition, it remains that the finite numbers of observers who would be sufficiently interested or able to dissect the data might never agree on what the data actually means. Believe it or not, there is really not that much of an interest and especially not from the academic research realm to dissect the numbers much further. And this is NOT due to a desire to protect some secret sauce from prying eyes.
On a last note, I believe that you do understand this but prefer to reject what people have been repeating here ad nauseam for the sake or arguing. On the other hand, I might have to applaud your restraint in making the issues debated here as an Asian discrimination issue. Thus far, that is!
I don’t necessarily agree with reply 225. Rather, teachers at privates may have more time (or choose to make more time) to write good recs. Nevertheless, even a teacher at a private may have some legitimate reasons to recommend a student for particular traits but cannot recommend that student to the same level as another student. There’s nothing unethical about that., nor does it indicate “inexperience.” Further, the teacher would cancel his/her own credibility by speaking equally highly of every student. It’s not bad to say that the student is hard-working and methodical. For some schools & majors (Accounting, for example) that might be seen as an advantage. In fact, I have had one or two students apply to a theoretical program at an “Elite” in addition to an accounting program/major at a different school.
VOR, the bottom line is that you want a formula, but the Elites are the last colleges (overall) that determine admissions by formula. What you seek is inherently contradictory.
post 228. It is interesting how many people start threads saying I got into “name your school” with 3.5 and 1800 and don’t believe what someone at CC tells you about your chances just about every application season.
epiphany As I stated before, I would like holistic schools to provide a general matrix so people can get a better picture of their admission chances. If there is a formula, great, publish it, if not, then this additional information will be helpful so you won’t have parents posting threads like the following:
These parents actually state the following:
“My husband and I would like him to look at schools like Harvard, Yale, Brown, Columbia, but he says he thinks he’d get a perfectly good education at any of his schools, and he would only be going for the “name” at these other schools, and I think he has a point.
On the other hand, the “name” can open a lot of doors, and I THINK HE HAS A DECENT SHOT, though he’s not a slam dunk at any of them.”
How can a 5% admit rate result in these parents thinking their son has a “Decent Shot”? If they saw the matrix they might think differently.
xiggi Applicants all want to know their chances at getting into the schools that they apply. The more precise the estimates, the better. You know this having given advice about the SAT. Why do you think kids care how they score on the SAT/ACT? Because it is a factor in most colleges admission decision. Why do they ask you how to do better on these tests? Because they want to do better on them to improve their chances of getting accepted to the schools they apply.
To segue off of 228, the students who are most interested in applying to the supposedly least transparent and most elite schools are often the very students who ignore or deny the statistical data that IS available from that school (CDS, Admitted Student Profile, etc.). Thus, “more” transparency would not necessarily either discourage applications nor dispel so-called “confusion” or mystery about a denial. I have all kinds of students whose stats are subpar for Elites but who have several Ivies on their lists. They’ll have somewhere in the 2000’s on the SAT, a 3.8 or even 3.7 UW, have one or two “C’s” on their transcripts, and mediocre e.c.'s which they magnify as being far more significant than they would be to any elite school.
A year ago one of my students, unhooked, with 600’s on each SAT section, and a 3.4 gpa (with a C in an AP course; yeah, that’s helpful) applied, would you believe ,to YALE. I was told by the family that “it’s been a dream since childhood that he go to Yale.” In point of fact, I think that was an internalized dream based off of the PARENTS’ highly unrealistic and arbitrary “dream.” Such irrationality will continue to override supposedly more forthcoming data. It’s called denial, combined with a highly superstitious and fallacious understanding about the admissions process in the United State of America.
That is an extremely poor analogy and one that is glaringly irrelevant. The SAT is a test that is incredibly clear in its scoring and process, including the scoring of a formulaic essay. Obviously, students want to know their results. Just as they want to know the results of the homework, tests, and exams. Inasmuch as some kids do ask “What are my chances to get to 2300 in three weeks from 1950” there are no parallels to evaluating the odds of getting an admission at a school that admits 1 out each 20 applicants.
Again, the biggest issue it is a fool’s errand to believe that one can “refine” his odds from 6% to 4% by analyzing the data, and especially not the one that you might want to see. The application system you seem determined to question and challenge is not one based on earning a total of X points on a well-hidden scale. Inasmuch as the school might develop a system based on scoring academics or even ECs and character, it remains the domain of looking at an entire file in the context of the entire applicants’ pool and the context of THAT class institutional demands.
What else can we say?
epiphany The GPA/SAT matrix might have brought the people you talk about to reality. Looking at a matrix on Yale’s website would make a difference to these people. If they saw that only 1 in 400 get into Yale with 1900 SAT and 3.4, the writing is on the wall, but without this information if they believe that Yale as a holistic school might give greater weight to their son’s life long dream to go to Yale and whatever other aspects such as EC LOR etc of his application that he believes is superior to all other applicants then their perception of reality might change causing them to apply to Yale.
xiggi Why does a kid ask you “What are my chances to get to 2300 in three weeks from 1950”? Because the student believes a higher score will result in greater chance of getting admitted to their colleges. Why is giving the people a more accurate information so displeasing to you? It costs these holistic schools nothing (other than potentially lower number of applications) to publish this data but would be of great importance to many would be applicants and their parents.
In your words “What else can we say?”
More data is not the same thing as better data.
I am reminded here of the biblical story of the rich man who, after his death, asked that a poor man be sent to warn his brothers to mend their ways so they could avoid the punishment he was undergoing. Abraham tells him (as I recall), “If they won’t listen to the Law and the Prophets, they won’t listen to a man returning from the dead either.”
I guess what I’m saying is that I’m not convinced that these people whose behavior would be changed by a more detailed stats matrix actually exist.
One hour of online research should be enough to give any sensible person a pretty good grasp of the situation. Teenagers spend more time than that researching video games.
Hunt If you don’t know if the additional information would change behavior then why not just have these holistic schools provide the info since they have the data and it costs them nothing to provide the information on their websites.
If it changes nothing then it changes nothing, but if the information is used and it changes the behavior of students then you will know you were clearly wrong and the data would have served its purpose.
“epiphany The GPA/SAT matrix might have brought the people you talk about to reality.” No. I’m telling you it didn’t and doesn’t. There is abundant published data on which any capable student can construct his own matrix (if he’s that brilliant), and discover the highly transparent information already out there that either separately or together, a 3.4 and an 1800+ SAT does not put you in admissibility territory for YALE. The fact is that they don’t want to hear it. The fact is that when you show them charts and Naviance scattergrams and anything derivable from mathematical info, they DON’T WANT TO READ THEM. You can look them straight in the eye and tell them, “You have NO CHANCE for Yale,” yet they will apply anyway, “just in case.”
I’m concerned that your focus on this is coming very close to an obsession, by the way.
One thing that has become very clear to me over the last 10 years including most of the years that I have been in business doing this, there exists a binary or “bipolar” fiction regarding U.S. college admissions, especially by those most resistant to the reality of it. “Either” US admissions must be “strictly” mathematical in nature, OR all bets are off: It is categorically an irrational and random process which precisely imitates a financial lottery, in which you literally “buy tickets.” That is, if one can’t literally compute and reduce the process, it is “therefore” completely irrational, is not even in the broadest sense predictable in terms of general possibilities which would help one create a list likely to result in a few acceptances at minimum.
If you are a 3.4 and an 1800, are unhooked, unpublished, and unremarkable, you don’t have merely a tiny chance of getting into Yale. You have, definitively and predictably, ZERO chance of getting into Yale in the foreseeable future. Because, guaranteed, with virtually 100% probability, your competition has already beat you cold.
Intentionally or perhaps unintentionally, you’ve hit the nail on the head here. The system is rigged and holistic admissions is the guise under which they rig the system - much like the economic system in this country. They let a few “others” in just to say “hey look they made it” but that’s it. The rest buy lottery tickets.