If you student is at a hard grading high school they are greatly disadvantaged at the test-optional and test-blind schools. Although OOS for your school, those students need to apply to schools that require standardized tests, where they can shine. Of course, it’s often too late by the time families discover this.
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I get that but the question is why did they get shut out. High achieving Kids with perfect gpas, 15 APs with 5 scores and amazing activities shut out of the UCs. The locale profile referenced above seems to be the only explanation…
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This is not expected of students who attend HSs that don’t offer APs…I have never heard an AO say that. I can’t speak for all institutions but the one I read applications for does not expect this at all…again, context.
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More likely, they applied only to a few more selective UCs, perhaps to more selective majors as well.
But they cannot be completely shut out just yet, since not all UCs have delivered decisions (and any ELC referral has not yet occurred either). Could be that you are just getting inaccurate hearsay.
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No, no, no. The private schools not offering AP classes do that because they believe their classes are better, and more rigorous than APs.
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So which colleges are using Landscape?
My sons attend a very small, no-frills rural private high school in New England–def not one of the “desired” states we hear about. Zero APs! They did not try to take any APs online because they were busy enough. Honestly, I didn’t even know about that until senior year, too late. Not sure we would have done it even if we did know. And when I say small, think less than 80 kids total in the entire high school. (Yes my boys refused to apply to even 1 small LAC as a result and I have heard many, many complaints over the past 4 years about the “dating pool”). Nobody has ever heard of this high school, but the academics are strong and so far over 1/2 of the class has been accepted at colleges with a less than 20% acceptance rate and 40% with less than 10%. Test-optional too for a few. So that’s perhaps at least a little bit of evidence that the selective schools seem to look at what a high school actually offers? But I’m no expert. This is my first go-round with it all. I need a vat of Advil and a padded room. 
Our D26 goes to a huge rural public school (she refused to attend a tiny school) and is thriving, so we’ll see what happens there.
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Not offering AP courses seems to occur for different types of reasons at different schools:
- Believing that their own courses for advanced students are better than AP courses. (They need to have colleges believe that as well.)
- Offering some other kind of advanced courses and curricula (e.g. IB, or dual enrollment at a local college).
- Being under-resourced and not having enough advanced students to offer AP or any advanced level courses.
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I’m not an admissions officer, but I observed admissions decisions being made this cycle at an elite liberal arts college.
I can say that Landscape was front and center in these deliberations. Committee members also remarked that its use has become much more widespread and central at elite institutions that want diversity, now understood as socioeconomic diversity.
So an applicant from a severely impoverished and under-resourced area would certainly be identified, from the first pass onward, by the Landscape data, and their application would get special consideration because of that.
Why students from the districts in your area haven’t reaped any advantage, I can’t say. But the summary sheet of every student’s application I saw displayed the Landscape data prominently, in bar graphs and numbers.
One thing that came up more than once was test scores, relative to the 50th and 75th percentiles of scores at the applicant’s high school. As in: “Whoa, this student’s 1410 nearly 400 points above the school average—very impressive…”
Even though 1410 was on the (very) low end of reported scores of applicants accepted by this college.
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We look forward to your book, and signed copies for all CC’ers! 
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Hee hee. I’m far more ignorant of the admissions process than most of the posters here! I wouldn’t be able to teach you all anything.
And edit: I should also say I didn’t see a vast number of admissions decisions being made, just a few, to get a taste of it.
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I don’t know about that, and sounds like a good experience observing admissions!
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Do you have insight into whether the large research universities are using Landscape?
Not sure, but I think someone did mention (e.g.) Ivys using it a lot now.
And I should also say that, from the very limited number of application reviews I saw, nothing suggested that applicants from affluent areas were getting short shrift, like “eew, a rich person, where’s the trash can?” Rich and middle-class kids seemed to do just fine.
It was more a way of giving low-income students a somewhat better chance.
But I suppose some would say that giving special attention to applicants with high Landscape numbers means that fewer non-socioeconomically challenged applicants will get in.
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Since college admissions at a specific college that fills its class is a zero-sum game, any better chance for a portion of applicants necessarily means a worse chance for at least some of the other applicants. Hence, it is obvious why some of the upper-middle-class parents here become more anxious at any additional admission consideration for applicants from limited-opportunity situations.
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Sure, but we’ve all had time to get used to that idea, through the affirmative action era, the on-going legacy and recruited athlete era, the South Dakotan oboe-player era.
And the first-gen/working-class/low-income era has been around for a while too.
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Not expected for sure, but folks are not expected to be accepted. Do the unexpected…
I’m not an AO or counselor, but I strongly believe those not making the first cut go beyond not being “competitive” but who they are overall (knowing that a majority of applicants have to be cut).
Looking at the transcript first offers a numerical baseline (I acknowledge it’s not an equal start! We all could write a post just on that comment.) and then the essays and LOCs may answer some questions a reader has (e.g. why a B- amongst As, why one poor semester, what were they doing in addition to school, etc.) in addition to crafting a picture of the student and how they may enhance the admitted class.
At this time the reader may also decide that although the grades are stellar, holistically, the student’s “profile” is blank; They don’t have a clear idea of who the student is and can be moved to the decline pile.
Folks in Silicon Valley take the AP course outside school so they are better prepared when they take it for real. Then, they take more advanced courses at community college to go beyond what the school offers… This is par for the course out here.
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Question about Landscape use, for those who might know:
Do test optional colleges get and use Landscape data, even if they aren’t getting (or aren’t using) a student’s test scores?
Do colleges get and use Landscape data, if a student only submitted ACT?