A Moral Dilemma: Rice and Geographical Selection

FallenAngel9
Thu, 22 Mar 2012 22:22:03 +0000

Too late for that, and yeah Student B will be at a slight disadvantage based on stats, however, his/her essays, recommendations, and personal story may more than make up for that. At this level, you can’t predict what the admissions office wants in an applicant, because most people who apply are qualified to attend and would do well in the environment; beyond that the only criteria are whether the admissions office thinks those students would add something to Rice’s community and would be able to take advantage of the resources and opportunities Rice provides. Thus, having a statistically “better” application doesn’t mean much, and for all we know, Student B might have been accepted and Student A might not have gotten in at all. It’s a crapshoot, really. One year they want a baseball player, the next year a mathlete.

A real-life instance: I was ranked 6/425 in my high school upon college application season. The valedictorian and salutatorian both applied to Rice, and although their test scores were slightly lower than mine, their GPAs and extracurriculars were a lot stronger in the typical sense of those aspects (granted, I had a 4.0 UW and all, so I’m just speaking relatively). The valedictorian got rejected and the salutatorian got waitlisted, while I got in. On the other side of the spectrum, a guy a few ranks below me, who is an absolute genius with equivalent GPA/test scores/etc, also got waitlisted. So you can never really guess what admissions will do based on your app alone, honestly.

Moral of the story: Student B may or may not be at a disadvantage, and withdrawing your app–even if it wasn’t too late–would not necessarily help. Don’t worry about it, what happens happens.