<p>I have been trying lately to return the thread to something like the original topic. How does a student, unspecified, write an essay for an unknown audience? People take things such different ways.</p>
<p>What was disconcerting to my CS kid was that it was actually easier to get into the school with the lower acceptance rate, and the less good fit. At the time MIT was accepting 25% of the kids it deferred to the regular round and Harvard was accepting about 10%. (Mom wasnât surprised by the results BTW.) </p>
<p>And while I think most of us parents who have spent too much time on CC get that most applicants are reasonably qualified and therefore their acceptance rates should be the same as the schoolâs overall rate, I can tell you from looking at our schoolâs Naviance that if you are a kid who is constantly at the top of the cloud of kids from your school applying to a place, itâs not unnatural (even if itâs wrong) to assume that your chances ought to be better than the other kids from your school. I think itâs pretty easy for a kid to overestimate their chances, though less easy the more info gets out there. I wish GCâs did a better job explaining to the top kids in their schools what the odds really are</p>
<p>What people assume is that admissions is a function of academic ability (including writing ability), drive, athletic ability, and leadership ability plus VIP status for legacy/politicianâs children/development admits, geographic and racial affirmative action, and choice of major, when in fact they forget about the other factors. </p>
<p>How does a student write an essay for an unknown audience? Pretty much the same way anyone does anything that will be subject to an unknown personâs approval. I mean, how does a lawyer make a closing argument without knowing the complete histories, biases, and inclinations of everyone on the jury? How does a chef prepare a meal if he isnât sure whether or not his definition of âmoderately spicyâ lines up with the customerâs definition of âmoderately spicyâ? How do I manage to send out articles to journals when Iâm not sure which member of their editorial board will be reading it, or whether or not some more experienced scholar sent out an article to them on a similar topic yesterday?</p>
<p>In each of these cases, you do some combination of the following:
- Produce something that you yourself are pleased with, based on your own standards of taste and quality.
- Consider who, IN GENERAL your audience is most likely to be, and have that audience in mind. So, for a college essay, youâre writing for a group of reasonably intelligent and educated non-specialists. That means donât assume that your reader shares your jargon, whether that vocabulary comes from mathematics or music or the West Egg Civics Association.
- Consider what the assignment is actually calling for. For the defense attorney, the goal is to get an acquittal, so you want to be persuasive rather than nuanced. If youâre a college applicant, you want to demonstrate something positive about yourself in an effective way. Thatâs a broad task, and thereâs a lot of ways of fulfilling it. One way of NOT fulfilling it is to write a super generic essay that practically anyone similarly situated could have written; another is to write something that says more about subject X than it does about you - you arenât supposed to be educating the adcoms here.
- If possible, allow other people to preview your work before you submit it for final approval.</p>
<p>Obviously thereâs no accounting for tastes, but in broad strokes, I think one can make reasonable, educated assessments of the effectiveness of an essay. And unlike the other examples I began with, the essay is not an all or nothing proposition. Schools donât take the top 1500 SAT scorers, and they donât take the students who wrote their 1500 favorite essays either; both are part of a more nuanced picture. Having an OK but not award-winning essay isnât usually the death knell for an applicant. </p>
<p>Well, people with critical thinking skills recognize that those things donât even factor in at the same level for every candidate. Itâs not as though being captain of the debate tea is uniformly worth X points for every debate team captain. It might tip one debate captain over, and not tip another at all. It depends on the whole trajectory of their story. </p>
<p>" I can tell you from looking at our schoolâs Naviance that if you are a kid who is constantly at the top of the cloud of kids from your school applying to a place, itâs not unnatural (even if itâs wrong) to assume that your chances ought to be better than the other kids from your school. I think itâs pretty easy for a kid to overestimate their chances, though less easy the more info gets out there. I wish GCâs did a better job explaining to the top kids in their schools what the odds really are."</p>
<p>Ha! Maybe this is a âproblemâ in super affluent school districts where there are always a cohort of kids applying to top schools such that one might have enough Naviance sample to draw conclusions. Itâs not a problem in less affluent school districts where there arenât enough Naviance sample to draw conclusions â so you have no choice but to revert to âwell, the overall admit rate for this school is 10%, and I appear in the reasonable ballpark, so my chance is 10% too.â </p>
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<p>Let me clarify this statement. People assume that if there is a large gap in academic ability between themself and someone else at their school and the other person gets in while they do not, then the other person must be better than them in one of those factors above.</p>
<p>Know whatâs unnatural about assuming your Big Dawg status in your hs makes you special to some distant college? Itâs narrow. Incomplete. Shortsighted. In-the-box thinking. All things that those single digit schools would like to avoid. I thnk many kids spend more time on choosing a car model theyâd like or getting to now the ins and out of some video game, than they do on what college and why. </p>
<p>âPeople assume that if there is a large gap in academic ability between themself and someone else at their school and the other person gets in while they do not, then the other person must be better than them in one of those factors above.â</p>
<p>Maybe people who are smart enough to go to a top school should stop thinking that it was a âcontestâ between them and Janie in first period Calculus, and understand that it isnât a comparison of them to Janie per se, but an effort to build a campus and in that regard, they, Janie and 29,998 other applicants were evaluated on that criteria. Not that it was a 1:1 battle between them and Janie. </p>
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<p>I used the example of the same high school so you could throw out much of the confounding factors about the different opportunities available from different high schools, not to make any statement about what âBig Dawgâ status should mean.</p>
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<p>Weâre both talking about how they build the campus, not any contest between so-and-so and Janie. Calling it a contest is mere semantics. Youâd expect them to be evaluated on oneâs demonstrated qualities. Hey, itâs not a contest, but in building a campus a college needs a tuba player, they may need Janie for that despite the fact that Eunice was great at math team, but my point was that people would expect them not to choose Janie for her tuba playing if Eunice was just as good at that plus better in other desired traits. And that is the constraint which 99% of people assume holds going into college admissions. </p>
<p>That may be quaint thinking to you, but itâs certainly more surprising then people telling others that:
- college like to have most of their majors represented and admit accordingly
- colleges donât rank candidates strictly by their stats.
- there are more people than beds
âall of which are pretty obvious to anyone born in their country but which seem to find their way into most of these threads.</p>
<p>I am intrigued by what Inst Res is looking at, and what Academic Assessment is looking at. What kinds of qualities does Inst Res track? How do they look for evidence of those qualities in the applications? How do they know who fits and who doesnât?</p>
<p>Most of the top schools have graduation rates that hover around 98%. I would guess that it is completely impossible to predict which students will not make it to graduation. Is that true?</p>
<p>When I remarked about people being able to assess the âfitâ of about 100 students, tops, I was responding to a specific post by Hunt (number identified earlier), who said that people at the universities collected a lot of data and observations on âfit.â My estimate that one could analyze the âfitâ of a limited number of students was made in that context, with a 4-year time frame (or 2 years for Deep Springs). Clearly, there are some superficial elements of fitâability to graduate, GPAâthat can be data-analyzed for a large number of students. But when people say âitâs all about fit,â I think they mean something more than that, donât they?</p>
<p>Perhaps the âeliteâ schools do employ people to make observations about personal âfitâ and report back to admissions. That sounds a little creepy to me, but maybe it does happen. I doubt that each of the observers actually knows more than 100 students well enough (in any given cohort) to assess their true âfitsâ to the institution.</p>
<p>Obviously, I know many more than 100 students to some extent or another. I probably know on the order of 10,000 students, all toldâalthough thatâs a long time frame.</p>
<p>With regard to the number of posts on this thread, I think it is accurate to say that I am substantially outnumbered here. There are a few people who have supported my opinions, and I really appreciate that. I think that when you are looking at the balance on the thread, you need to consider not just the numbers of posts by individual posters, but the numbers of posts on different âsidesâ of the issues. There are some hot-button topics to which I will always respond.</p>
<p>Almost none of my posts on this thread have anything to do with people on the autism spectrum. And actually, they have extremely little to do with MIT (on this thread). </p>
<p>Incidentally, apprenticeprofâs #1403 is exactly the type of advice that I have been asking about. I think it should be quite useful to applicants who are aiming high, without a lot of guidance available for reach-school applications.</p>
<p>In Huntâs post #1375, he alleged that there were a lot of data and observations related to âfit.â I am not asking for the scoring system, I am just asking how the people at the institutions know about âfit,â beyond fairly superficial measures, such as graduation rates, GPA, maybe loan defaults?</p>
<p>My university tracks âretentionâ (= returning for sophomore year) and graduation rates, vs. a number of statistical variables, such as high-school GPA (and which high school), ACT/SAT scores, university GPA in the first year . . . </p>
<p>I would be appalled if we included observations by the Resident Assistants or other dorm staff in the analysis. I am essentially 100% certain that we donât. I am also sure that we donât ask professors whether the students seem happy or whether they âfit.â At this point, we do not track the studentsâ college-level ECâs and I would have qualms about it if we started to do that. I donât know how you would assess âfitâ without some of the sorts of input mentioned in this paragraph.</p>
<p>What we find in the data analysis that we do: there is a cut-off point in ACT/SAT score, below which the retention and graduation rates fall off monotonically as the score decreases. Some of the students with ACT/SAT scores below cut-off will make it, and we take a chance on a number of themâI am all for that.</p>
<p>Above the cut-off point, retention and graduation no longer show any significant variation with ACT/SAT scores. There are other factors that make the difference. My guess is that most of them are economic, though we do not have hard data on that, to the best of my knowledgeâI donât think we survey students who did not return after freshman or sophomore year.</p>
<p>Although I really liked apprenticeprofâs #1403, I did want to comment about one additional difference between a lawyerâs argument to a jury and an application essay (aside from the obvious). The lawyer has a peremptory challenges to use during the voir dire, based on seeing the potential jury members and questioning them. The peremptory challenges are limited in number, but they are used with no reason given. Challenges for cause are also possible (if, for example, the defendant is named Bob, and some jurorâs irrational dislike of people named Bob is detected, I suspect that a removal of the juror for cause would be granted).</p>
<p>It will probably surprise no one that I, my mother, and one of my close faculty friends have all been subject to peremptory challenges, when we have been called for jury duty. (My spouse, however, often winds up as jury foreman.) </p>
<p>I think we need to clarify here what we all mean when we say that colleges are analyzing applicants based on âfit.â</p>
<p>QM, the way you seem to be interpreting it is that above and beyond any other qualitative assessment of merit, colleges additionally consider whether or not a student will âfit inâ with their culture, so that an applicant they might otherwise accept will be dinged for amorphous reasons of perceived personality mismatch. That strikes me, however, as a misinterpretation of what colleges are actually doing. Except to the extent that they may be playing games for yield protection reasons, I honestly donât think colleges give a hoot whether or not their school is the best possible match for that student. You may recall that some years ago, the president of Princeton said she wanted more âgreen-haired people.â She didnât say that because Princeton was the obvious choice for an artsy countercultural type, she said it because far from making a paternalistic determination that green-haired applicants wouldnât actually feel at home at Princeton, the adcoms WANTED some students who would break their usual mold.</p>
<p>Collegealum, I agree with many of your points. Not only on this thread.</p>
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<p>Too commonplaceâŠespecially if said applicant comes from the SE. </p>
<p>The applicant can try to revive some T Rexes, but even that might be too pedestrian for schools like JHU, Cornell, Caltech, MIT, etc. HoweverâŠif they end up reviving one T Rex with a really dopey voice and an obsession with torturing people with his children TV show songs, THAT will be a great hook.*</p>
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<li>Mainly so the adcoms, trustees, university Profs/admins/prez, and community could get said applicant to get this particular T Rex to cease his singing⊠:D</li>
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<p>Good thing the essays donât require the applicant to demonstrate a sense of humor. Some would be up the creek without a paddle.</p>
<p>QM, you make all this seem mighty complicated. In reviews, they do look for certain qualities that suggest the kid can tackle hurdles and knows how to seek help. </p>
<p>Why not get in touch with your Uâs IR and other groups that fulfill these needs- then you can see firsthand. </p>
<p>Fit isnât about the glass slipper. Each college has a self image. It isnât, for heavenâs sake, about analyzing. Iâm not even going to try to explain what makes one kid seem, say, Bama, and another seem Reed. </p>
<p>So much micro inspection.</p>
<p>Hunt, in #1375, claimed that the institutions collect data and observations connected with âfit.â I asked him what he meant by âfit,â and he has probably been too busy with other things to answer yet. I am still curious about that, and curious about how the âdata and observationsâ are collected.</p>
<p>If one is only talking about probability of graduation and GPA, in terms of âfit,â I donât see a need for a holistic assessment to get those right.</p>
<p>From #1417, I take it that âfitâ at Alabama is different from âfitâ at Reedâthat seems very reasonable, even without an explanation.</p>
<p>The reviews that you mention in #1417, lookingforward: Are these reviews of the applications, or reviews of the use of university resources after admission? Or correlations between elements of the applications and later use of university resources, if admitted?</p>
<p>I am reasonably sure (95%) that my university does none of that type of study.</p>
<p>lookingforward, I donât know whether you remember a New Yorker cartoon that showed a sign at the entrance to a town, saying</p>
<p>Population: 25, 372
Altitude: 2,106
Total: 27,478</p>
<p>(The numbers are made up, but the pattern is right.) One of my colleagues posted the cartoon, with a hand-written comment that it was the work of our Institutional Research group. Actually, they seem to have stopped some of the more ridiculous totaling that used to be employed. </p>
<p>Their efforts are really focused on analysis of grant-funding $ and tuition revenues. Then they are probably looking at the legislatorsâ voting patterns (for âhunchesâ about state allocations); and connected with that, they are looking at retention and graduation ratesâand employment after graduation, to the extent that information is available. We do get some analyses of student ratings of courses and grades awarded by our department. Since the student ratings are anonymous, we cannot establish any 1-1 correlations between applications and that element of student satisfaction. I think we check how satisfied students are with the housing and meal options, and some other facilities and student servicesâbut again on an anonymous basis, for the students. </p>