<p>I also want to comment on the post saying that the SAT scores are not so highly considered. I don’t believe that for a minute. Looking at many, many schools’ Naviance points, it’s pretty danged clear that if you don’t make the mark test score and classrank/grades wise, it’s not going to happen without some heavy duty hook. It becomes even more apparent when one does look at some more detailed records on who gets into top schools. I had the privilege of getting to see a number of them. Though I cannot out and out say, the schools have a cut for those stats, the evidence sure as heck shows that. Short of being in a special pool, not a one, not a single point got in without them. The very admissions criteria work on academic indices involving 5 SAT tests, and class rank/grades for many of those schools. Not to say there isn’t a fluke somewhere, but I sure as heck didn’t see a single one, and I examined over 20,000 data points. </p>
<p>So a kid with a 2100 3part SAT, 3500 5 part, without something special ain’t gonna get into Harvard, no way , no how even as val, IMO. The chances are infinitismal. Not once did I see this without some other flag put in there. Sure, if that 's what a kid wants do do, give it a try, go on ahead. But it’s even more than just a lottery ticket, it’s a lottery ticket with a huge, huge odds. The 2400, 4000 SAT kid who is first in his class is still not a sure shot without a hook, but maybe, maybe, he’ll make the pick. He’ll at least be in the running. </p>
<p>Though outdated in many ways, Michele Hernandez’s book “A is for Admissions” is still a good read that explains well how it works at the Ivies and other selective schools.</p>
<p>Cobrat, a lot of good in that post, but I have to re-read it, Yes, many top performers seem to sleepwalk (my word for it) through their apps. On CC, many kids who think they have discovered some “angle” are, in fact way, way off.</p>
<p>Your app is really all you have that can represent you to the adult strangers who represent that college and review you. There is such a world of difference between a Davidson and a Bowdoin (and then UCh) and what they NEED to keep being what they are. </p>
<p>Btw, any of our experiences when we were in hs, just throw them out the window. They no longer apply to the central issue here. Admissions has even changed since I joined CC. </p>
<p>ps. So look at Brown’s admissions detail, the number of vals and top stats kids who don’t get in. NOT just how your own stats measure against a matriculated class- but, this insight into the hard fact that it takes more than a CC version of perfect or match. </p>
<p>So much of what we need to say here is tough to bear. So much of what parents and kids think makes a kid stand out is really being done by so many others in the country. </p>
<p>@collegealum:
“Sorry, I know its a favorite activity to blame the essays when someone doesn’t get in. I didn’t mean that they were something wrong with the essays or that they were inauthentic, only that my suspicion is that ones with a certain tone may not resonate with the admissions committee. I made this mistake myself; in fact, in retrospect someone should have told me that I needed to pick another topic. One of my essays, even though it was probably one of the best I had ever written, probably had a poorly-chosen topic in retrospect. And neither the GC nor the high school teacher that read it mentioned that.”</p>
<p>It is a favorite activity because it is true. At the lottery schools, essays (and LORs) will make or break the application. Tens of thousands of applicants will have 3.9+ Uwtd GPA and 2300+ SAT. Since adcoms read tens of thousands of essays, the essay will have to be different from most common topics, a fast read, and entertaining at some level (not funny or shocking, just hold a reader’s interest) in a creative non-fiction narrative style. </p>
<p>@chris46, it sounds like your D was doing great work and feels passionate about educating others on the negatives of sexual assault. As a reader of essays (meaning I do read application essays), I would think “Most women think that sexual assault is bad, so how does this differentiate D from the other tens of thousands of women applicants” so then your D’s angle will have to fall under “I am an activist” or “I work in ways to get rules (legislation) changed” and the rest of her ECs should slant that way and support it. It’s all about the entire application arc.</p>
<p>“In a question that proved to be very transparent later on she was asked by the admissions counselor – do you think you will apply E.D. I or II?
I guess In retrospect, that should have been the harbinger of things to come.”
I do agree that this appears to be a leading question or a major hint.</p>
<p>sorry, but if I were to sum this up it would be “Parent’s cautionary tale: I don’t understand probability”, It has nothing to do with anything your daughter did or didn’t do, in the end, I’d guess those schools rejected more people with your daughter’s stats than they accepted. There was a high probability she wasn’t going to get into any of these schools, if you had your daughter calculate the actual probability, both of your expectations would have been set properly.</p>
<p>This thread has been fascinating to read. It’s a little mind-boggling to think that anyone paying even a little attention to the college application game doesn’t realize how unpredictable getting an acceptance is at most of the schools in question here. But I think I can guess why not everyone gets it-like the OP and a few others. It’s the “meritocracy” thing, which the speaker I linked to way upthread pointed out. </p>
<p>Coincidentally, my 9th grade D got a very major honor this past week-one of only 16 in her entire school district, and one that for which she had some fierce competition, and from older students. Added to other honors and awards she already has stacking up make her sound very impressive. But she shrugged it off, saying that she isn’t doing anything so amazing that plenty of others she knows couldn’t also be doing. “I’m not that special,” she just told me this morning. She GETS IT. And I suspect that if she is turned down by any reach schools a few years from now, she’ll understand exactly why instead of thinking that her “meritocracy” was cheated or something. </p>
It’s possible to have matches and even near safeties with low overall acceptances rates. The important part isn’t the overall acceptance rate. It’s how likely the applying student is to be accepted or rejected. As I mentioned in my earlier post, some highly selective colleges place a lot of emphasis on non-stat criteria. In some cases these non-stat criteria are more important than stats. This can make it difficult to estimate chance of admission, particularly if you focus on stats and largely ignore how the other non-stat criteria compares to the general applicant pool. However, there are also low admit rate colleges on the other end, for which one can a more accurate prediction of chance of admission by only looking at stats.</p>
<p>For example, USC had a 17.8% acceptance rate this year. It received more applications than Stanford, Harvard, Cornell, or any highly selective private college I am aware of. Does this mean it’s a reach for everyone? USC’s CDS lists GPA and test scores as the most important admissions criteria and does not mark any non-stat criteria as “important.” Fitting with this, scattergrams show a mass of acceptances in the upper-right hand high GPA/SAT corner, with the vast majority being accepted and only a few rare rejections. Using the Parchment criteria I listed in my earlier post, applicants with a 3.9+ GPA and 5+ APs had a 80-97% acceptance rate for all SAT scores with a statistically significant sample size (if I remove the AP criteria, then acceptance rate drops tremendously at lower scores). Applicants with 3.9+ GPA while taking 5+ APs and near perfect SAT had a 97% acceptance rate. If the college says non-stat criteria are not “important”, scattergrams show the vast majority are accepted with your stats, and Parchment shows a 97% acceptance rate for applicants with your stats, I certainly wouldn’t call it a reach. I’d call it a near safety, even though the overall acceptance rate is only 17.8%.</p>
<p>Yeah, but not everyone who complains about the lack of meritocracy is naive to the strength of the applicant pool. Let’s be real: Davidson is not filled with a race of supermen/women. </p>
<p>And there are things which would distinguish you even in the applicant pool at Harvard such that you might wonder what went wrong, even though I recognize at the top schools there are a lot of subjective factors which may influence the decision.</p>
<p>Yoho, I’d add that the essay has to be relevant to a college app review. What happened in 4th grade may not inform. The simple facts of what happened or was done may not reflect the personal attributes, growth or potential. Readers don’t like to have to put 2 and 2 together for an applicant. </p>
<p>This isn’t rocket science, but folks have to remember it’s not a usual high school writing assignment or for a teacher who knows you. </p>
<p>Plus, just how important “show, not tell” really is. For a highly competitive college, it’s indeed a skill to be able to have the arc come through without a hammer. And, it has to match what shows in the rest of the app. No good playing the activist card if the ECs are all more reactive.</p>
<p>I agree 100% with YoHoYoHo’s comments here. I am not an adcom but I do work in marketing. Differentiation is key in everything that is not a commodity. In a way, the OP is correct that just by the very features of her life experience his daughter has little way to stand out (in other words, she is undifferentiated from tens of thousands of other aspiring kids).</p>
<p>When my son was applying to colleges I told him not to worry about what his Common App essay said or to tell a “big” story, but rather to just say something that would give a window into how he thought about things. He wrote about a week spent digging post holes on his grandfather’s ranch. That’s it. It was simple and humble and, in my opinion, very good (a lot of adcoms told him so too). Meanwhile his Ivy-obsessed best friend penned a grandiose essay that grossly exaggerated one aspect of his life experience and compared it to the struggles of a controversial literary figure. The idea itself was questionable, and then it was group-edited by both parents, a trusted aunt, and a family friend who is a novelist. In the end it was a mess. After he got rejected at all his Ivies and other elite schools, he asked me to look at his new pack of essays for his more reasonable choices. One of his minor essays was about his fantasy football league, and it was fantastic. It was HIM–his voice, his sense of humor, his enthusiasm. It’s too bad he hadn’t submitted that one in the first place.</p>
<p>As a reader, I’m happier if someone uses a hammer.<br>
It’s better than what most kids do : “These are all the great things I did…GPA, SATs, APs, ECs, and essay about a great thing that I did. Now YOU, reader, pick out all of the relevant pieces from all this great data. Now YOU, reader, figure out who I am based on this. And based on all this data, I swear that I am a better admit than the other tens of thousands of kids with my exact same data…(presuming 1 per high school), the 36K++ other vals, the 36K++ other newspaper editors,” </p>
<p>Basically, an app should be able to sum up a kid with a tag line (with maybe 2 threads of ECs) and I want it blatantly obvious with a hammer. Believe it or not, Sally305’s kid may have been referred to as the “holes” kid by the committee.</p>
<p>@chris46, what was the website that your D made?</p>
<p>As a reader, oops, I am not into all hammer and no perspective. (Too much “tell” and not enough “show.”) Unfortunately, though, I agree with the rest. The new CA prompts are a mess, so many taking them literally.</p>
<p>"When my son was applying to colleges I told him not to worry about what his Common App essay said or to tell a “big” story, but rather to just say something that would give a window into how he thought about things. He wrote about a week spent digging post holes on his grandfather’s ranch. That’s it. It was simple and humble and, in my opinion, very good (a lot of adcoms told him so too). "</p>
<p>You would think that this would be common sense - that the essays are what bring you to life in front of an adcom that gets bored senseless trying to distinguish between the student council president with a 3.9 GPA and the newspaper editor with the 3.85 GPA. The most important thing to do is to tell a story about yourself. Make yourself stand out. Not in the stupid “I juggle on a unicycle while playing the accordion” that so many people on CC think it’s about - quirky for the sake of quirky - but making yourself stand out. You can stand out and be quiet at the same time.</p>
<p>But the essay is the most subjective part of the application. If the numbers are matches but the first reader doesn’t get the essay (for whatever reason–maybe they just read an essay about digging post holes on grandpa’s ranch :)), the application may not go any further.</p>
<p>Edited to say that I really don’t like that laughing smileyface! Can’t we pick???</p>
<p>Maybe we should call it, “making yourself recognizable as an individual.” So they can see what you bring. Not just pure “standing out,” via the unicycle. As I keep saying, they DO need people who get what that college is about and fit it. Not a bunch of outliers. Sally clearly gets it.</p>
<p>Fwiw, digging potholes would be interesting. As long as the main focus stays on the kid and not grandpa.</p>
<p>“But the essay is the most subjective part of the application. If the numbers are matches but the first reader doesn’t get the essay (for whatever reason–maybe they just read an essay about digging post holes on grandpa’s ranch :)), the application may not go any further.”</p>
<p>Yes. So? That’s how life works. That’s how interviewing for jobs goes - the anecdote that may resonate with this one person who interviews you, doesn’t resonate at all with another person who interviews you. Duh, it’s subjective. If it weren’t subjective, they’d just rack-and-stack by SAT’s, and everyone would then whine that SAT’s aren’t the be-all-end-all.</p>
<p>Look, in another thread, there is a discussion about Duke, in which their adcom says something like the following:
About half of our applicants come from schools that don’t rank, the other half do. If we eliminated all the non-ranked kids and just focused on the ranked kids – and we decided ONLY to take valedictorians - we’d still have twice as many kids as we have beds for. </p>
<p>But, cue the inevitable “my kid deserved to get in.” No. No one’s kid “deserves” a spot anywhere - as in, it’s a horrible miscarriage of justice if they don’t get in.</p>
<p>And, cue the inevitable stupidity of “but the Ivies!” by the provincial and parochial people who aren’t bright enough to understand that there are many great places and the Ivies aren’t the 8 best, but just 8 of. </p>
<p>But the essay is the most subjective part of the application. If the numbers are matches but the first reader doesn’t get the essay (for whatever reason–maybe they just read an essay about digging post holes on grandpa’s ranch :)), the application may not go any further."</p>
<p>"That’s how interviewing for jobs goes - the anecdote that may resonate with this one person who interviews you, doesn’t resonate at all with another person who interviews you. "</p>
<p>Yep, that’s the lottery part of it. Your essay must resonate with the reader (and there are many different readers in different moods) which is the luck of the lottery. But if you write an essay that is similar and undifferentiated from what tens of thousands of others write, then your application will also not go further. </p>
<p>@ lookingforward, I agree with your “show, not tell.”</p>
<p>"But the essay is the most subjective part of the application. "</p>
<p>Most private US colleges have decided that they want some sort of holistic application process. If they and the public wanted it to be a purely objective application process, we would just have some college entrance exam and admit solely on those scores alone like other countries do.</p>
<p>The thing about the postholes essay was that it had NOTHING to do with my son’s primary interests at the time–music, political activism, running, art. It wasn’t about one of the interesting places he had visited over the years. It wasn’t pretentious. He used no big words. It simply spoke to his perseverance doing unpleasant work in an unpleasant place (rural central Florida in the middle of the summer). For all we know the adcoms found it refreshing to not read about yet another middle- or upper-middle-class kid’s predictable experiences as a camp counselor or on a ecotourism trip or working in a lab. I guess we will never know.</p>
<p>My daughter will be going through this next year and I fully expect her to want to write about dance, which is her main activity. Unless it’s a specific essay for a dance program, though, I will counsel her to discuss something else.</p>
<p>Pizzagirl is right. It is so much easier to understand all this (for me, anyway) when I relate it to my experiences interviewing for (and interviewing people for) jobs.</p>