<p>But the point is that Chicago DOES! Behnke’s explanation for the dip in yield makes precisely that argument: Chicago lost out because the pool of applicants that yielded cross-admits was unusually strong, and 64% of these unusually strong cross-admits went somewhere else. Behnke is not making an argument that Chicago does not provide enough financial aid to attract more students, or that, conversely, HYP have better financial packages. Translated, his argument is: Chicago does better with weaker students. I, for one, would not like to make it as I happen to like Chicago.</p>
<p>m.s. who knows? It was interesting to me though how easy it is for me to slash a good essay down to size and how hard for the original writer. My dh’s Phd. advisor used to do the same thing to his scientific papers. </p>
<p>I’d like to point out that you can’t reuse your common app essay(s) for the Chicago essay using the write your own prompt now, because you have to submit the Common App essays* in addition* to the Chicago supplement.</p>
<p>I think all parts of the application process can be gamed to some extent. I don’t think that the nature of the Chicago prompts makes them significantly harder to game than the Common App prompts.</p>
<p>calmom, I agree with marite. Chicago accepts a lot more risky, imperfect students than Harvard or Yale, because it accepts a lot more students than Harvard or Yale, period, and from a pool that contains many, but far less than all, of the strongest applicants in the H-Y pools. I have never seen any indication that Chicago shies away from admitting students it likes because they seem likely to be admitted to Harvard or Yale (or any school like that). In fact, I DO think Chicago courts HYPS applicants, because (a) a lot of terrific ones still won’t be admitted to those schools for no particularly good reason (see newmassdad’s recent thread for a sensational example), and (b) you can’t step up your game if you are not playing against the strongest competition.</p>
<p>At the same time, I am really impressed by Chicago’s ability to find diamonds in the rough. For evidence, all you have to do is look at some of the regular CC posters who are current Chicago students. Over the years, several of them have disclosed their imperfect high school grades, or test scores that, yes, probably would get them cut from the HYPS pool without much further attention. But, wow!, they are thoughtful, smart, fair-minded, deliberate, generous, and wonderfully expressive. I’d put them up against anyone. Whatever Chicago does to decide “That kid’s a keeper despite those B-'s or that 620” – it works for me!</p>
<p>Sure there is. Quantitatively, they say so in the CDS. Qualitatively, the address by the dean to the incoming students – in which he says (I’m paraphrasing) “we don’t ask you about large mustard jars for nothing” – suggests that they weigh it quite heavily.</p>
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<p>No, xiggi. You do this a lot. You set up a straw man.
“Chicago puts a very heavy weight on the application essays” does not mean the same thing as “Therefore, all other universities just count the number of words to see if you can follow directions, and if you did, then that’s fine.” </p>
<p>I don’t know if you’re aware, but you do this a LOT. You take statements that are solely about X and infer that the speaker / writer is also saying something about Y that is not-X.</p>
<p>So, the Chicago essay prompts are simultaneously:
Too quirky, turning off otherwise-qualified students who might have enjoyed Chicago immensely and added to the campus; AND …
So incredibly easy to answer by any adult with a pen, so therefore MORE prone to cheating than the “tell me about an experience that changed you” essay?</p>
<p>Do you just randomly make up attacks as you go? This is quite an odd juxtaposition. I’m a grown woman, reasonably smart, and I gotta tell you, I could not answer the mustard jar or h’lade or what-about-Wednesday prompts to save my life. But I could much more easily help my kid come up with experiences that changed him or books he likes to read or whatever, if I were so inclined.</p>
<p>You’re really dancing around accusing the parents of Chicago kids on here of defending these prompts so “spiritedly” because they (the parents) cheated and wrote them. Is that really what you want to say?</p>
<p>Sorry, I don’t know how to quote in the grey box, but from xiggi’s post:</p>
<p>"Weren’t the essays submitted to Chicago supposed to be smarter, more intellectual, more … more everything for that matter! "</p>
<p>No, they were supposed to be more “the applicant’s view…of whatever.” For crying out loud my D was admitted with a topic of her choice essay about writing a research paper. Reflective and cute, yes, intellectual, not really. As for the weight given the essays, I haven’t seen Nondorf address this specifically, but Ted O’Neill often spoke about the importance of the essays in Chicago’s admissions decisions. I’m biased, clearly. My kids have loved it there, and thrived. Chicago is a great school…wonderful for some, not the right fit for others. Just like most other schools in its category. What I fail to understand, like others who have posted here, is why the discussion of anything Chicago inflames such passions, even from those who have had no direct contact with the school, or its application process. Remember, in the days before the Common App Chicago’s neighbor up the lake had some pretty interesting essay prompts as well. I know kids who refused to apply there as well because of the essays. No one suggests that NU makes claim to being an exclusive, intellectual bastion of academia, thereby drawing the slings and arrows of frustrated applicants and their parents. Why? I have no idea. Schools that are marketed to and appreciated by a certain subset of applicants exist across the board. Why the special treatment for Chicago? 49 pages later, I have no idea.</p>
<p>Let it just be said, however, that when Hugo Sonnenschein was still at Princeton, he sent HIS daughter to Northwestern, not U of C! (She was in my program at NU, and doesn’t suffer from any deficit in the intellectual realm.)</p>
<p>As a result of this discussion about Chicago, I’m becoming sorry that I didn’t go there even though it seems to require far more academic work than I’d have preferred. :)</p>
<p>Me too…and I went to the neighbor up the lake! It wasn’t even on my radar screen when I applied. Chicago was, for me, that scary place on the south side that we went to run track.</p>
<p>edit: weird, I posted this after NSM, otherwise it doesn’t make sense!</p>
<p>Northstarmom, I came to the same conclusion after reading the U of Chicago boards vs the Harvard ones here on CC. The students who post seem very, very different, even if in reality they are only slightly different.</p>
<p>That may be true, as to more important. However, both Harvard and Princeton list the following as all equally Very Important:</p>
<p>Rigor of secondary school curriculum
class rank
academic gpa
test scores application essay
recommendations
talent/ability
character/personal qualities </p>
<p>Yale puts extracurriculars in the Very Important category; Princeton puts e.c.'s in the Important category. Otherwise, these 2 U’s are the same: application essay is in Column One.</p>
<p>And I will state agreement with xiggi’s similar knowledge of the habits of Yale’s & Princeton’s (and some other Ivies’) practice of writing comments by hand directly on the admission letters, regarding the content of those essays.</p>
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<p>So do the Ivies. They just don’t necessarily use the essay responses to determine the full range, or the most important indicator, of critical thinking skills.</p>
<p>And I have an inner quirkiness that if indulged, could lead me down the path of cat-lady pretty quickly, LOL (and I don’t even like cats!) – so for me, prompts like that would have been a signal, “Uh-oh, don’t apply here – save yourself, find someplace more mainstream!”</p>
<p>ONCE MORE – saying that Chicago does X is not the same as saying therefore the Ivies don’t do X. Please don’t set up straw men! No one has said that the Ivies don’t look critically at essays.</p>
<p>I strongly disagree with this, as a lifelong educator and specifically working often with high school essays. You can’t unring the bill or reverse experience. What I’ve seen is that it is actually more difficult to fake an adolescent personal essay than an intellectual one, but both are difficult, in my experience, because even for ‘impersonal’ expository writing, one’s ‘global’ experience is unconsciously an influence on perspective and even choice of words. There are approximately 3 (in my recollection) students on CC over the last 5 years that initially I did a double-take on whether they were students or parents; that’s how mature their ideas & expression was. But they are highly unusual. (One was at H, one at P, and I think the third was at MIT.)</p>
<p>Say, this horse doesn’t seem to be moving anymore. Can we stop beating it?</p>
<p>(I mean the one about whether Chicago and the Ivies are admitting fundamentally different types of applicants due to the nature of their essays. Some of these other horses still seem to be twitching a bit.)</p>
<p>EDIT: Oh, snap. I believe I’ve just invited some ■■■■■ to say, “Oh, I see. Just because you’re done talking about this subject means that everyone else has to be done discussing it, too. I guess you own this board, and everyone else has to do your bidding. I’ll conclude with a snarky quotation that subtly demonstrates my intellectual superiority.” Let’s see if I’m right…</p>
<p>Have you been following the discussion? Or do you just randomly keep coming on and saying the same thing? There is no point in even making an issue out of prompts (for 49 pages) if there is not something that supposedly sets the Chicago prompts apart from those of other U’s – both in intent and in result. That is the entire framework for this discussion. You may think that a comparison is not being made, but both implicit and explicit comparisons are being made, and have been made, so please stop with the ‘straw man’ comments. This discussion is very much about comparisons, differences, equivalencies, etc., and whether those differences are real or assumed.</p>
<p>Most recently, look at the post on page 48 that is quoted in post 732. (Only one of many examples.)</p>
<p>That’s rich, coming from someone who misinterprets most points and conclusions (as shown in your post 725 and many others) and possesses a keen penchant for circular logic and taking quotes out of their original context. </p>
<p>For starters, your misrepresented the argument; “Chicago puts a very heavy weight on the application essays” was NOT the statement in discussion! It was, “The REALITY is that Chicago weights essays more significantly in its application process than many other schools.” </p>
<p>If someone advances that Chicago places MORE importance on the essays than other schools, then you have to look at other schools. And in this case, there is ZERO evidence that the schools I listed place LESS importance on the essays. Again, can someone really argue that the adcoms at Stanford are less interested than Chicago’s in the quality and depth of the essays they receive? For Chicago to do something MORE, another school has to do it LESS.</p>
<p>Glad you agree with me. I should say, though, that NMD’s D was never a “diamond in the rough.” She was a diamond, the real deal. Hence her dismay that some of her peers were admitted at schools that rejected her.
My argument, like that of Bill Fitzsimmons, has always been that there are far more qualified applicants than can be admitted at HYPS, and that the overflow has benefitted schools that traditionally (and for whatever reason) have been considered less desirable.
So it is dismaying to me that a Chicago dean is suggesting that Chicago benefits from a weaker applicant pool, since none of the schools against which it measures itself has significantly enlarged its student body.
I’m happy to agree that Chicago is willing to take more risks and that HYPS may play it more safe. How those two approaches play out eventually in the construction of distinct student bodies is an interesting question.</p>
<p>marite, just to make things clear, I was not suggesting that newmassdad’s daughter was any kind of diamond in the rough. I thought I was discussing two different categories of Chicago admitted students: (1) People who were great HYPS candidates, some of whom would not be accepted for no particularly good reason. That is certainly the category I imagined newmassdaughter to be in. (2) People with some flaw in their records that would effectively exclude them from the pool of serious HYPS candidates, but whom on closer examination are dynamite students – the “diamonds in the rough”. </p>
<p>Chicago has some of both. Everyone has some of the first group – they aren’t exactly hard to identify – but what impresses me is the quality of students I encounter who clearly come from the second group.</p>