"Admissionspeak" - What do the terms used by Admissions Officers really mean?

Parents Forum
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<p>After sitting through countless admissions presentations, it seems to me that there are many terms used by AOs the purpose of which is to obfuscate not explain.</p>

<p>I thought it might be useful if we sought to define what AOs really mean when they use these terms.</p>

<p>For example, it seems to me that term “holistic” is admissionspeak for “sometimes we let people in whose numbers are way outside the averages for reasons we don’t need to explain to you and that’s why you can’t just look at our numbers and determine whehter you will be admitted.”</p>

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<p>Here’s my smarmy take:
Holistic: Your stats are stellar, but your essays suggest you’re a self-absorbed twit, so we’re rejecting you OR yeah, your grades aren’t that great, but we really need an oboe-playing Latina to make our entering class well-rounded, so you’re in.</p>

<p>Well-rounded: We’re talking about the class, not the individual. You may be a jack of all trades, but if you’re master of none, you don’t have as good a shot as the regional tennis champ who may only have a couple of other ECs; OR half of last year’s entering class was Asian, so to round out this year’s class a little better, you should be black, Latino, white or native American.</p>

<p>Financial aid: Paying for college will hurt, no matter how much we help you. Get over it.</p>

<p>Scores optional: No, you don’t have to tell us you only got a 1750 on the SAT, but you can bet that the student who got a 2200 and tells us about it has a better shot at getting in. It makes our profile look better.</p>

<p>Superscoring: Sure, you can take the SAT five times and only send us the best scores, but we are Harvard and we know everything, including the name of the tutor you paid $125/hr to help you get your math score over 700. Nice job, though.</p>

<p>Optional: Mandatory. Yes, it is. You don’t have to write the essay, fill out the arts supplement or do the athletic supplement, but if you want to distinguish yourself, you’d better do it.</p>

<p>Strongly recommended: Only if you want us to, you know, read your application all the way through.</p>

<p>Interview: A nice chat with a friendly admissions rep or alum about your favorite topic, yourself, OR a hellish grilling by a very green alumni rep who follows the script to the letter.</p>

<p>Unweighted GPA: We take all those extra points right off your AP physics average so we can compare the GPAs of kids from your podunk rural high school to those from the elite charter magnet exam school for highly gifted kids in the next state.</p>

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<p>First, I’m assuming you share an account with your student as sometimes this account is written from a students POV. That gets confusing and one of you might want to get your own account.</p>

<p>I’ll disagree with you on the holistic admissions, however you aren’t the only one that feels this way and I can appreciate your frustration nonetheless.</p>

<p>To me, holistic admissions simply means that every part of the admissions packages is reviewed; transcript (grades, rigor, rank), scores, ECs, LORs, essays, etc. This is as opposed to a more stats based admission that places specific emphasis on your transcript and scores alone. Both of these schools may make exceptions on what they find competitive that year for athletic recruits, legacies, development admits. This is not unique to one or the other. The common data set for each school will give you a rough idea of the emphasis each school places on each component and it becomes easier to see that a school is either stat based or holistic. I remember one school my son applied to three of the eight things they counted as ‘very important’ were things totally out of his control (and institutional goals he did not meet for the school). It was his job to focus on the things he could control and move on.</p>

<p>Again, I really don’t think it’s as much of a mystery as some seem to think, or feel it is a veil of secrecy designed to keep students in the dark so schools can make decisions without answering for it. I do understand others hold another opinion however.</p>

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<p>blueiguana, I think the OP and massmomm pretty much nailed it. All the spinning in the world about how great “holistic” is really just means they can screw your kid out of admissions any way they want to, and you will never even know why. Or admit your kid for completely spurious reasons as far as anyone outside who reviewed the same candidates would be able to tell. The more opaque they make it, the more they can do what they feel like doing on a given day. We spend a TON of time out on CC trying to parse the importance of each piece of the puzzle, but everyone who has spent one or more full admission seasons out here knows it is still a smoke filled backroom horse-trading process (okay, I am sure the ad coms don’t smoke while they do this, but the rest is pretty much what they do). Which is one reason why so many kids feel the need to apply to 10+ colleges. Which add to the instanity in each admissions office, and reduces each kid’s chances of really getting a fair, focused reading of their app (really – a kid can’t get the attention of ad coms when there are 30,000 applications unless they hang from the chandelier with their hair on fire in the admissions office).</p>

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<p>Because Happykid went the CC then transfer route, I only sat through four presentations, two were at in-state publics where transfers from the CCs are admitted directly provided they complete an AA, so those were more along the lines of “Yes, drop your app off today and we’ll take care of it.” One was at a cozy little LAC-like private U in the middle of nowhere that has a good program in her field where we were given the red-carpet treatment by the new head of her potential program, and a formal projection for her probable aid package from the head of transfer financial aid. The last was at a small arts-focused LAC where again we met with the head of her potential program, had a formal tour with a small group, and walked into the admissions chat just in time to hear the admissions officer telling the potential applicants to take as many gen eds as possible at their home-town community colleges so as to save money because that institution has lousy aid - great programs, but no budget for aid beyond the federal money. </p>

<p>No smoke, no mirrors, just straight-up talk. Maybe because these places were pre-screened to be transfer friendly. Or maybe we were just lucky.</p>

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<p>With all due respect, I have spent plenty of time on cc (embarrassingly more then I should), have learned a lot from people willing to share their knowledge and experiences. I have been through this process with one child, and am going through it with another child.</p>

<p>I appreciate, respect, and understand how someone could feel the way the OP does and clearly stated that. Because I don’t share the same view doesn’t mean that I am clueless to the admissions process or haven’t been paying attention during CC 101. It simply means I don’t think holistic admissions is the enemy. People who are educated on the same subject can hold differing opinions.</p>

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<p>I just want to note that I agree that optional=mandatory. I am still trying to get my kids to understand this one.</p>

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<p>Blueiguana, I can assure you that all posts under this name are written by my 49 year old self. My daughter has her own account here, but seldom uses it because she has found other college info sites more helpful and less prone to, ahem, exaggerated angst about real or imaginary stats. (“I got a 770 on my math 2 subject test. I’m applying to MIT. Should I retake it?”)</p>

<p>You’ll note that the top of my post says that what follows is my “smarmy” take. I know it’s hard to catch sarcasm on the web, which is why i pointed it out. I apologize to you and any others who took my post seriously (although there is some truth in it!). If you recall, my daughter is one who is not applying to any true safety schools, so we must have some confidence that the process will work for her and she’ll get into one of her schools.</p>

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<p>Hunt, my daughter finally accepted that optional means mandatory because other adults all mentioned it to her independently. So she’s throwing together the arts supplement this week.</p>

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<p>blueiguana, I am also on my second kid through this process, and have actually been on CC for a few more years than you have… have also been through 40 (yup) campus visits with my kids. Honestly, the OP and massmomm were being a being a little bit facetious when you jumped in with a dig at the OP’s screen name usage (why does that matter at all for this post?) and a somewhat sanctimonius defense of the admissions offices. We all know the formal language the schools use to describe things like holistic admissions, and that language is very much as you described it. But we also all know that it can really be used by the schools as a shield for doing whatever they darned well please in the admissions process. My opinion is that they usually do whatever serves their school the best, usually in some way improving their admissions statistics; that can be scores, yield, GPA, ethnic diversity statistics, gender balance, ability to pay, or whatever else they want to improve. They make “holistic” sound like it is good for the applicant, but in fact that is marketing spin. In fact, it is their excuse for doing what is good for them, and be able to obfuscate just what has driven each individual application decision (obfuscate is the OP’s word, but I completely agree). I bet if you took the common app answers on how they weight factors, created a scoring model of it, and plugged in the applicant pool to that model, you would NOT come up with a class that is close to one they actually admit. The colleges have to say something about how they admit (must fill out the common app form), but nobody checks to see if that is how they really make their decisions.</p>

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<p>“Financial Aid” - We lower the price, and make you believe we are actually giving you something. </p>

<p>“Scholarship” - we lower the price, make you believe we are actually giving you something, and make you believe that you “earned” it.</p>

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<p>“Substance Free dorms”- where we put the kids who have just graduated from rehab so their parents think they will stay clean until Thanksgiving.</p>

<p>“Triple Majoring”- what the kid who loves anthropology does to satisfy Mom who wants him to go to med school and Dad who thinks he should be a CPA. See “why Johnny can’t graduate in four years” for context.</p>

<p>“Why Johnny can’t graduate in four years”- if your kid is going to change departments four or five times, or triple major in things that are completely unrelated, or insist on going abroad junior year even if she or he is majoring in electrical engineering-- Johnny will not graduate in four years. If Johnny refuses to get out of bed before noon and won’t take classes that meet on Thursday afternoons or Fridays, Johnny won’t graduate in four years regardless of his major.</p>

<p>“Greek life”- we are too cheap to build safe and adequate housing for all our students, so we allow kids to live in big dumpy old houses close to campus which are owned by an outside organization which doesn’t give a %^* about the fire codes, serving alcohol to minors on the premises, etc. Oh yeah- the members run a coat drive for the homeless every year in exchange for us not calling in the local cops every time they have a rowdy party.</p>

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<p>Tufts finally got rid of their optional essays, because no matter how many times they said they were optional, students were convinced they were mandatory. My son considered Tufts enough of a reach he did write an optional essay, but that was also because he’d been dying to write it as soon as he saw the topic (What if the British hadn’t lost at Lexington?) He wrote the essay as a series of newspaper headlines, excerpts from documents, letters and diaries. He loved doing it. I’m really sorry they got rid of the option, because it did give my kid a chance to shine that really isn’t provided for with more typical essays.</p>

<p>In any event, I don’t think we are in 1984 land here. I think for the most part admissions officers mean what they say.</p>

<p>Holistics just means you are more than your numbers. Different schools care about different things in the soft parts of the application. </p>

<p>Some schools look for well-rounded students, others more for a well-rounded class (which needs some well-rounded types in it too.)</p>

<p>GPA’s get looked at in different ways by different schools, but most of the schools my kids applied to looked at them in the context of the school and looked to see how challenging your curriculum was as well as the grades you received in the courses.</p>

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<p>“Diversity” means diversity in the photos in the brochure.</p>

<p>“Work hard, play hard” means drink hard.</p>

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<p>Massmomm - You and I crossed posts. I’m a slow typer. Believe it or not I actually think about what I say, recheck, correct spelling if I can (I’m horrible and it’s a frustration that takes time). So the top comment regarding sharing an account was to the OP, not you. After I read your post I was actually getting ready to edit mine to thank you for the laugh. I did catch your sarcasm, thought many of them were funny, and got derailed defending my original post.</p>

<p>intparent - I try to respond to people in a respectful manner. If you didn’t take either of my posts that way then I’m sorry. I offered another opinion while respecting the OPs and others viewpoints. My intent is always to either learn, share an opinion, or offer information I’ve learned. In the cafe sometimes to offer support. If I missed the mark in your opinion then I’m sorry. I am not quite sure why you feel pointing out your longer time here on cc is necessary. It is not as if I am a new member and don’t know forum etiquette.</p>

<p>To the OP, I apologize that my participation in your thread has derailed your conversation in any way.</p>

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<p>YES, optional= mandatory! I wish I had thought of that one!</p>

<p>How about “recalculated GPA” = drop the BS, we’re not gonna count the A in culinary when you’re competing against a kid who took Dual Enrollment Multivariable Calculus as a HS freshman.</p>

<p>“Need blind” - we see all the flack Wesleyan is catching, see definition of “holistic,” above.</p>

<p>“Word Limit” - this one is tricky because it can have 2 opposite meanings, either (a) if you exceed this number of words our supplement will cut off your essay so we don’t even see your attempt to explain why your pet cockroach collection is not so disturbing that not only are we rejecting you from our school but we’re calling all of our AO friends at other schools to make sure they don’t let you in, or (b) stick to this number of words only if you don’t want to fully develop your essay and are nice enough to save us the time of reading through your entire application.</p>

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<p>Hey, don’t pick on those cockroaches. :slight_smile: My D2’s entomology collection is actually a pretty good essay topic for her! Hopefully it will not disturb the ad coms too much…</p>

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<p>“We encourage everyone to apply” - we would love to cash your application fee check even if you are unlikely to make it through our initial screening filter</p>

<p>“Waitlist” - we don’t want you to feel too bad about being rejected, so we will give you a second chance but only if you are willing to jump through an arduous new set of arbitrary obstacles in search of a moving (and possibly non-existent) target.</p>

<p>“Undergraduate research opportunities” - we want all our students to feel academic, so even our basketweaving majors can count baskets with their professors and write a report on it for credit.</p>

<p>“Average standardized test scores” - we don’t report these anymore since it is too easy for applicants to compare. Instead we report our middle 50% so that we can be even more opaque in our decisions (see “holistic” in previous postings).</p>

<p>“Every application will be thoroughly reviewed” - it might be reviewed by a paid reader and/or a software filter but it will be reviewed somehow. It might not be fair but we have 20,000 applications to get through in three months. (see “We encourage everyone to apply” above)</p>

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<p>Optional=Mandatory even in the business world, so good thing to get kids to understand!</p>

<p>Recalculate the GPA=we’re going to look at the letter grades unweighted and only in core classes. </p>

<p>Holistic=“we hope you are more than grades and test scores”</p>

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<p>Love this thread!</p>

<p>Freshman dorms= Your student shouldn’t expect to sleep due to extreme partying, soccer in the hallways,etc.</p>

<p>Substance Free Dorms= All smoking and drinking is done in the dorm rooms instead of the lounge. Bottles are discretely hidden in dressers and not displayed on the window sills.</p>