What does France do if there are too many kids with the same GPA and BAC score? That is the situation in the US. I
The type of holistic admission is only practiced in US and some Canadian provinces, I believe. Making the tests harder is what other countries do.
Some schools over-admit qualified students and then weed out, which would strike many in the US as “unfair,” but at least when I was there a few years back, was seen by the French as fair, in that it gave more students a chance after the fact. I knew someone in a program that had a hard cap of 200 graduates but many more than that had been admitted into the program.
Does France have an overabundance of excellent schools, as does the US? My thought is that it is less necessary hear to admit strictly by rank since there are so many excellent schools that top students can attend. Also, do schools in France have different characters? Do kids there worry about “fit” in the same way?
There are of course elite schools in France but also excellent regional universities all about the same level as the others, and most kids I knew just went to the nearest one. Most European universities are VERY different from those in the US - very little campus life or university personality, no athletic or Greek scene or anything like it, just buildings and classes and degrees. So “fit” is not as big a concern as in the US.
They’re not necessarily saying that the kids have no personality, they’re saying that the personality doesn’t come through in the applications.
I’ve been reading a lot of advice columns about writing the essay, and I’ve been watching a lot of college acceptance reaction videos. One video in particular was a young Asian man opening his Ivy Day decisions. He was rejected and waitlisted everywhere until he opened his Yale portal, where he was admitted. He was ecstatic. He said, before he opened the decision, that he was expecting a no because he wrote the supplements on the last day of December and he hadn’t showed them to his parents so he was sure they weren’t any good.
Anecdote is not data, I know. But the essay advice columns that make the most sense to me state that you should show your essay to as few people as possible, and that you should only make minimal spelling/grammar changes in response to feedback. I’m wondering if it’s possible that Asian kids are more likely to overwork their essays due to anxiety, and in doing so they defeat the purpose of conveying their own unique voice.