<p>I had Cs and C pluses consistently in one subject throughout high school (B plus to A range in the others) and mid 6 hundred SATs and still got into several Ivy/Ivy caliber colleges. At that time admissions counselors still read essays.</p>
<p>Consolation-
I also think you got in everywhere…
Results?</p>
<p>Cute thread! I was awful: </p>
<p>SAT V: 740, M 680. No SATII tests.
GPA 3.2, with an F in a senior honors physics. (I was having bad family issues, divorce, alcoholic parent.)
1 AP course (the only one offered by my school)
Rural Georgia high school. I was the top SAT in the school, but was not a state STAR student becuase my GP put me below top 25 percent.
ECs: 4 years Scholars Bowl, captain 2 years, won several titles, Math Team, Debate, Theater, French Club, special summer internship at UGA in Ecology department. National Merit Finalist!</p>
<p>After my fall F in Physics (because I didn’t do a science fair project), my father got angry at me and told me I was a failure and would never get into college – so I didn’t apply to any, even though I was a NMS finalist. I said on my card my first pick was Oberlin, but never filled out the app. Eventually a small LAC came to my school and got me to sign an app so they could offer me a full scholarship, so I went there. I wonder what schools I could have gotten into if I had applied anywhere?</p>
<p>Sounds like you were pretty amazing considering your awful situation. I’m glad the LAC recognized that, and I hope you had a great time there.</p>
<p>Let’s see: female, HS year 1972.
SAT 710 M, 680 V (so around 730, 730 recentered)
subject tests: 790 Math 2, 800 chem, 700 English comp
one AP: Calculus
two courses at nearby college in organic chemistry (where I was the only woman in a class of 60 men): grade: C- first semester, C second semester (and the professor wrote me a glowing recommendation)
HS grades: Cs in French, Bs in English and History, As in Math and Science. GPA was probably around 3, maybe lower.
unranked
all electives were in math (I had 4 semesters in addition to calculus: logic, stats, “business math”, “independent study”)
varsity swim team, chess club, yearbook, photography club (so I could use the darkroom)
applied to Yale (waitlisted) and MIT (admitted). No safety.</p>
<p>White Male, High School class of 1972</p>
<p>Graduated from magnet NYC science high school, about 300 in class of 1000. No AP classes were offered, so none taken. In fact, I only had two electives, taken in my senior year, and they had to be science classes.</p>
<p>SATs, taken once- 650 M, 700 V. Don’t know what they’d be recentered. If it was common to take the Achievement Tests, I took them, but I don’t remember doing so.</p>
<p>ECs likely listed on applications–Student Senate, school newspaper.</p>
<p>ECs likely not listed, because they were “hobbies”, and why would any college be interested in my hobbies?-- Astronomy (made my own telescope from parts ordered from Edmund Scientific catalogue); Politics (campaigned for Norman Mailer and Jimmy Breslin for mayor, Eldredge Cleaver for President); friends and I published an “alternative” school newspaper.</p>
<p>Jobs–lots of jobs. Cashier at A&P. Vendor at Yankee Stadium. Messenger for Wall Street brokerage firm. Clerk at insurance company. Worked at Cocoa Exchange. Installed above ground pools in Brooklyn, Queens and Long Island.</p>
<p>I met my guidance counselor once. He (or she, I can’t remember) looked at my transcript and suggested that I apply to Tufts. So, I applied to Tufts, U. of Rochester, Franklin & Marshall and Clark.</p>
<p>I was rejected by Yale, accepted by Wellesley, Bryn Mawr, and Wheaton.</p>
<p>My “guidance” counselor wanted me to apply to Ripon College as a safety. I discovered that Wheaton accepted every single applicant with my SATs–couldn’t she have looked that up?–so I didn’t even bother with an interview.</p>
<p>I was a notorious underachiever in my school, and my grades in a given course would swing from As to Cs from one quarter to another. Thank doG for standardized tests! :)</p>
<p>I graduated from HS in 1971 from a public high school in an affluent town in NJ. School system thought to be very good. </p>
<p>Grades – All A’s with a sprinkling of A-'s. Probably no B’s, though my memory for specifics is not great on things like this. Class rank: Probably in top 5 out of 400, but I either never knew or don’t remember. </p>
<p>SAT’s: 690V, 760M
Achievements: 800 in Math and I think Chemistry
AP Calculus (5, though colleges would not have seen it); Chemistry maybe (memory is too fuzzy)</p>
<p>ECs:
Varsity Tennis (State championship team but I played doubles, so not good enough to be recruited).
Worked for two summers writing software for the statistics/data analysis group at Bell Labs. (Worked with well-known folks, though I don’t believe I asked them to write recommendations). Wrote some of the original code for what is now Exploratory Data Analysis and wrote some code in a language called b, a precursor to c and c++ on what may have been the original Unix machine.<br>
Attended NSF Summer program at Michigan State on Math and Social Science.
Can’t remember any other meaningful ECs. (NHS not particularly meaningful).</p>
<p>Recommendations: I was shy and I don’t think any of my teachers knew me well. It may be relevant to GC recommendation that I was asked to skip 9th grade a few weeks into high school. [I tried it for two weeks and declined because I had already skipped a grade in elementary school and would have been a) 2 years younger than my classmates; and b) in my sister’s grade.]</p>
<p>In my essay, I told them that I wanted to use mathematics and statistics to study human behavior and in particular political science in areas like legislative behavior.</p>
<p>Applied to Yale, Princeton, Cornell and safeties were Rochester and Michigan. [Didn’t apply to Harvard because I thought it was too urban, but somehow Yale was not. The 17 year old brain may not be strong in clear decision-making faculties].</p>
<p>Wow, Shawbridge: surely you were accepted everywhere?</p>
<p>A few potentially relevant comments. </p>
<p>Like others, no test prep. I don’t think I even reviewed the material given out by The College Board with sample questions. Thought it was like an IQ test. Didn’t take it a second time (who did?). </p>
<p>My school sent a few people to HYP and other Ivies but largely legacies. In fact, I can only remember legacies. No relevant legacies for me.</p>
<p>I am white and Jewish. This may be relevant as I think there was residual anti-Semitism in Ivy admissions at the time (there may still be at Princeton). Incidentally, I was one of 3 Jewish kids in my graduating HS class of 400 as the town real estate agents excluded Jews for many years. The town was old-line WASPs and my parents had originally been steered by agents to the next town and bought their house without an agent. I sensed indirect, institutional anti-Semitism at the HS, but did not experience direct anti-Semitism after grammar school.</p>
<p>Everyone at our high school took the SAT1 twice. Once spring junior year, once fall senior year. A friend of mine (rejected at Yale), got a 750,750 and didn’t want to retake. They told her she had to. She got a 790/710 the second time - so the exact same total. We didn’t study, though there was some vocabulary building as part of English - which I think might have included doing some analogies. I just remembered hating it - and was always “forgetting” to do the vocab. homework.</p>
<p>I hope shawbridge was accepted everywhere. I hope the anti-semitism wasn’t a big factor, if so a waitlist at Yale or Princeton.</p>
<p>bagoshells- you got into Tufts, way less competitive then, judging from classmates of mine who attended a decade later. I would guess acceptances at the others also, but was Clark more competitive earlier? I was reading their website yesterday and it could just be good marketing koolaid but they seemed to be more elite in their past.</p>
<p>mathmom- I think I took the SAT in May of Jr and in the fall of Sr and I took achievements in June of Sr. The reason I remember this and it would be wonderful if the CB could tweak their schedule… don’t read if you don’t want to hear about personal ‘woman problems’ …</p>
<p>I had very heavy periods and strong menstrual cramping that whatever medicine I took, probably aspirin yeah I know not the best, didn’t help often to the point of nausea. The SATs and Achievement tests were one month apart in May/June and guess what I had my period during both and was not in good shape during both. I think I retook the SAT and I think the scores I posted, the ones I remember, were from my second sitting.</p>
<p>I didn’t prep for the SAT either, beyond looking through the materials they sent. I think there was a sample test.</p>
<p>Shawbridge, the town where I grew up in CT was adjacent to Darien, the town of “Gentlemen’s Agreement.” Our town actually had Jewish and black residents, Darien reputedly did not, even then. (Well, Darien supposedly had a few black residents who were “live in” domestic employees.)</p>
<p>At my private high school in New York City (graduated 1972), everybody I knew, including me, took the SAT’s twice, once in the spring of junior year and again in the fall of senior year. But nobody I knew took a prep course, either, even though I’m pretty sure that Kaplan already existed. From our self-important viewpoint, it would have been embarrassing to admit taking a prep course. It had a sort of “remedial” connotation. Maybe I should have taken a course – I remember that my scores were lower the second time, going from a 1480 (probably = something like 1540 now, if you assume 740 verbal translates to somewhere near 800) down to a 1450 (= 1510).</p>
<p>I remember being very aware (as a Jewish kid from Manhattan) that I was at a disadvantage in applying to places like HYP. (I was rejected at H, accepted at Y, waitlisted at P.) But I didn’t think of it as anti-Semitism per se, or as any kind of actual quota like the 10% quota for Jews that existed back when my father began at Yale in 1936. I thought of it more as a geographical disadvantage – that there were so many well-qualified Jewish kids applying to top schools from the New York metro area, that it was a lot harder for them to be admitted to highly selective schools (if I recall correctly, Yale’s acceptance rate that year was about 20-25%) than if they lived somewhere else. And I was pretty sure that if I’d lived in Montana or Wyoming, with the same qualifications, I would have gotten in everywhere. But I don’t see that as so different from the sort of situation that exists today, maybe even more so. And since almost everyone at my school was Jewish, the ones who did get into Harvard or Princeton or Yale were almost all Jewish too.</p>
<p>Does anyone who went to school in New York remember the all-subjects Regents exam? That was still a pretty big deal in my day, because you could get a Regents scholarship, and, if nothing else, it looked good on a college application. Not as much as being a National Merit Finalist (which I was lucky enough to be), but still something. I don’t think it exists anymore, although the subject tests throughout high school (which we didn’t take at my school) still do, I believe.</p>
<p>My father had the second highest score on that all-subjects exam in the entire State of New York his senior year, higher than anyone in New York City. (He lived in Yonkers.) I still have the newspaper clipping he saved. The highest scorer was a girl (of course!) from Buffalo, I think. I once looked her up on the Internet, and was pleased to find out that she had ended up getting a doctorate and becoming a longtime English professor at the University of Oregon.</p>
<p>I never could live up to my father academically!</p>
<p>Waitlisted at Yale. Accepted everyplace else. Went to Princeton. Really enjoyed it. </p>
<p>It turned out that my work at Bell Labs had some direct follow-on effects. One of the mainstays of the statistics department at Bell Labs was also a professor at Princeton. I didn’t know him at the time, but I went at the beginning of my freshman year to the statistics department at Princeton and asked for a job as an RA and they immediately gave me a job writing software and later paid me to do research. It turns out that this professor indirectly and later directly employed me either at Bell Labs or Princeton for 4 years and 6 summers – I just didn’t know it. He became my senior thesis advisor.</p>
<p>The combination of smart kids, great academics, good athletics (I played a sport in college), and a distraction-free environment was terrific for me.</p>
<p>Consolation, one of my girlfriends at Princeton was from New Canaan (one town over from Darien) so I know the Darien style pretty well. Her mother’s side of the family came over on the Mayflower and her father’s side contained multiple generations of Princetonians. They were only comfortable having a conversation with cocktails in hand, which was a new experience for me. My girlfriend was great, but I wasn’t necessarily the most welcome visitor to the family enclave. They now greet me warmly when I see them at reunions. How society has changed!</p>
<p>DonnaL, the whole reason for geographical distribution requirements was to replace the 10% or 15% quota for Jews with less objectionable methods of limiting Jewish enrollment. So the anti-Semitism was institutionalized, just not direct, but was clearly intended to put you at the “disadvantage” you felt. Several posts have mentioned a book called The Chosen by Jerome Karabel. Karabel got access to the archives of HYP’s internal discussions of admissions, and it is clear from the original documents that geographical distribution requirements, interviews to assess the “character” of the applicants, extracurricular activities and particular sports, and recommendations were all instituted to help HYP detect who were Jews so that they could “solve the Jewish ‘problem’” of keeping Jews to the quota level without the embarrassment of having a quota. </p>
<p>I currently perceive no anti-semitism in my life in the US (though the same is not true in Europe and other places to which I travel on a regular basis). But, it was interesting to learn that many of the aspects of current selective schools’ admissions process that I took for granted have their roots in anti-semitism.</p>
<p>Bagoshells: sounds like you and I went to the same high school and had similar grades, except that my class was much earlier. I was accepted at U of Minnesota and U of Utah, waitlisted at Michigan, accepted at Queens College and accepted at the one Ivy that I applied to (where I went, having realized that I had no idea what life would be like in either Minnesota or Utah). Nine or ten of my classmates got into that school with me, but my grades then wouldn’t get me in now, especially considering that back then while I had a couple of ECs, colleges were looking more for the grades than for other aspects such as ECs, essays etc.</p>
<p>And here are my current stats:</p>
<p>SAQ: (strategic age quotient): high
SAT: I forget, but I took 3 Scholastic Achievement tests before they were called SAT IIs
AP classes: none (high school didn’t have them back then)
Class standing: Near top of 2d quarter
Status: member
Hair: battling between turning gray and just plain disappearing
Number of posts: see sidebar</p>
<p>Plagiarized Essay:
I yam what I yam, and that’s all that I yam. </p>
<p>Minority status: ORM (over-represented minority)
Former status: BNTWRK (bright, not-that-well-rounded kid) (good academics, the kind of student colleges used to look for)
Current status: SLBSNSWRP (somewhat less bright, still-not-so-well-rounded parent)
Possible weakness: prone to give opinions about applying for college or becoming a lawyer or engineer
Possible hooks: not many in those (pre-hook) days. I played an instrument in the orchestra, belonged to a couple of clubs, like most everyone</p>
<p>Sometime attitude towards ECs: Quote from the Wisdom of Groucho: I wouldn’t want to belong to any club that would have me</p>
<p>Background: Native-born NYCer living in northern California for many years; conversation sometimes intelligible through my accent</p>
<p>Gosh I can’t even remember by SAT scores or my ACT scores from the mid 70s…how on earth can you remember? I graduated third, GPA probably a 3.8 or 3.9 we had “college prep” track and I clearly remember getting a B in physics and maybe a B in Trig but no APs and a “Great Books” class that 15 of us were asked to take. I really think I had 580/580 or some such thing on my SATs but I do not know why that sticks in my head. Won’t make anyone guess since I didn’t apply to any Ivy schools I think Brown was the only one that I found appealing and my parents were not “into” Brown in the 70s. Was accepted everywhere I applied - a couple CTCL schools, U of M Res College and Middlebury. I had alot of interesting (for that time) ECs that I really was passionate about. Chose K College (for the foreign study/K Plan, the beautiful campus and the tennis). I remember having a horrible time deciding where to apply because there were so many really neat schools and kids from my community went quite far flung for that era - some schools that I remember having a hard time eliminating from the list were Bennington and Oberlin. I remember the parents nixed the Bennington because it was "the most expensive college in the country " at the time and Oberlin lost because I didn’t want to be in “that state”. Silly fun remembering.</p>