<p>You are going to be evaluated on taking the most rigerous curriculum that your school offers and doing well. If your school does not offer AP or IB you are not going to be penalized for it.</p>
<p>Remember the SAT scores are just a range. Being at the top of the range is not going to make you a shoo-in and being at the bottom of the range is not going to keep you out. A student scores are going to be evaluated in context of what is available to them. A 1300 from first generation student living in an impoverished area attending a school where the is a low graduation rate and a average sat of 900 is going to be evaluated differently from someone who is the child of 3 professionals attending a private prep school having every advantage and scoring the same 1300. </p>
<p>Since schools build classes based on their institutional mission, it will most of the time be the subjective things more than your grades and scores that move your application between the admit, deny and waitlist piles. Yes colleges willtake students with stellar grades and GPAs. Yes they are looking for the next rocket scientist, but they are also looking for classics majors, theater people, dancers, writers, musicians, athletes, and a few bwrks who are good people in building their community. Schools that are high on building cohesive collaborative communities are not going to care if you have perfect scores and gpa is you have no people skills and can’t work well with others.</p>
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<p>The application does ask you about your parent’s education and highest degree obtained. </p>
<p>If your father completed an MD it is in your best interest to put it down on the application than having the adcoms dismiss you application for being less than truthful and trying to "game’ the system through misrepresentation. </p>
<p>Remember only a hand full of schools are need blind. The ones that are not will look at your ability to pay and your taxes will state what your parents do for a living. </p>
<p>Adcoms are very knowledgeable about the territories they are in charge of. The know the schools, the neighborhoods, the average SES for that neighborhood, the market value of a home in that neighborhood all which can come from the top half of your application.</p>
<p>Since you could be making reference to me since I was the last posting I shall answer( yes, I read all of the postings on the topic). I apologize if your were offended by my post as it was not my intention to offend you. I usually enjoy reading all of your post and for the most part agree with pretty much everything you write.</p>
<p>I think the important thing that people need to remain cognizant of is that one size definitely does not fit all. what may have worked for your kid or my kid this year may be totally different next year. No one has all of the answers. In the end I don’t think of it as gaming versus being well informed about the process can help people to make good choices and aligning your application to show that you will be a good fit in helping them to build a class instead of shooting buckshot at a bunch of schools because they like the name.</p>
<p>I think that you need to be an expert in college admissions only if you are pushing the envelope. If you want to attend an expensive school on merit aid, attend one of the top ten in selectivity, or want to attend a school at which most applicants have stats above yours, you are pushing the envelope. However, if your goals are well within your means (financial, personal, and statistical), you don’t need to go on a major campaign of studying college admissions. However, people today are putting more effort into SAT preparation, honors courses, cultivating their ECs, and packaging the actual application, so it is putting pressure on everyone to do so.</p>
<p>“Know the way class rank is handled especially if your school doesn’t rank.”
Can you please elaborate? My school does not rank, and I doubt i would be ranked first or second out of 45 kids. But, my GC might say I am the strongest in math and science in my class (which is true), so would that compensate? Is that a worthy distinction?</p>
<p>This current thread entitled “do you have to be an expert on college admissions to be accepted?” has turned into one more thread on how to game the system. BTW, I don’t agree that you only have to be an expert on admissions if you are pushing the envelope. Everyone agrees that being accepted at extremely selective schools is a lottery. The other term often used is that it is a crap shoot.</p>