That is the sort of proprietary detail of admissions policies that they tend not to share, and I am not aware of any evidence which would prove or disprove that non-formulaic colleges may sometimes use internal tracking data.
So just speculating, but if they were going to do this, they could do it as part of a multi-factor model. In fact we already know they sometimes subscribe to the College Board Landscape service, which has a lot of information about high schools:
If you were doing internal tracking and incorporated it into such a model, conceptually what you are doing is not just using the internal tracking data for that one high school, but also internal tracking data for all other high schools, particularly those most similar to that one high school. And you could fold that into an even bigger model where it would also be de facto looking at tracking data for similar sorts of individual applicants from similar sorts of high schools, and so on.
Makes sense, I can see that happening. However, that would also seem to involve assumptions that are really a stretch, not to mention that no amount of slicing and dicing GPA data can turn it into a standardized metric. Yet another effect of the enrollment management consulting industry’s effect on the process and bowing to almighty “data,” though perhaps if that is getting colleges results that please them, then whatever.
Last I heard, Harvard-Westlake was the only school that provided data for hooked vs unhooked. Maybe others do too and it’s just not widely discussed. At our school, this data is kept from families.
I think it happens a lot where there is no correlation between test scores and grades. High test scores plus average grades equals smart but lazy in the eyes of an admissions officer. They would rather see the opposite.
Schools absolutely track admissions from various high schools and how they perform in college. I have had numerous UGA admissions officers tell me this. Georgia Tech even publishes this information on their website. For in-state schools, you can look it up by school and see number applied, number accepted, test scores, grades and first year GPA. You can also look up by state and find this information.
At D22’s school, the data is not published, and families were never told about specific kids. However, I remember the college office talking about hooked vs. unhooked candidates in their initial presentation to parents. Not exact statistics, but they discussed the issue of hooks more conversationally. For example, they made comments such as… in the last five years, we’ve had a large number of admits to [insert rejective university here]. That is great news, but it is also important to take the scattergrams with a grain of salt since the majority of those students are children of alums and university employees. Or typically, [insert X college here] has liked our student athletes. Or lately, many students, both hooked and unhooked are being admitted to Y, Z, and other similar schools.
I can’t remember if D24’s school did something similar in their conversations with families, but I think they did mention that some colleges seemed to really like applicants from her school.
It seems rather likely that large state universities track academic performance in college relative to admission credentials, including HS GPA and which HS, because they have large enough sample sizes. Such information has other uses even if it is not used for admission purposes (e.g. predicting how many sections of remedial English and math courses will be needed for the incoming frosh class).
But publicly displaying such data by HS could ignite a political firestorm that the universities may not want to deal with.
Absolutely, but those aren’t the kids I’m referring to. I referring to a very specific subset of kids from a very priveledged background. While having to work or take care of a family member is a reality for a small percentage of the kids in our district, those kids don’t tend to fall into the kids I described in one of my previous posts. Kids that work or take care of a family member often talk about that in a meaningful way on their application.
I have a different viewpoint. Some of my most interesting classmates had almost nothing in the way of ECs. But they were privately doing some deep thinking. Kind of like the duck who to the casual viewer seems to be floating along, but under the surface it’s a different story.
Some of these people ended up very successful (one has an Oscar, one is a VP at a FAANG) while others have had just average success. But all remain very interesting people.
My view, at the risk of sounding mean, is that anybody can join volleyball.
I suspect people are thinking of automaton-like kids who aren’t deep thinkers. I also suspect deep-thinking, interesting people have little trouble with college admissions as they can write about deep, interesting things, and are also the type of kid most schools are looking for.
“Discrepant” students whose HS GPA and SAT score show one much higher or lower than expected in relation to the other was a subject of some College Board research. One thing found was that discrepant students with higher SAT score were more likely to be from traditionally advantaged groups (high SES, high parent education, male, White), while those with higher HS GPA were more likely to be from traditionally disadvantaged groups (low SES, low parent education, female, minorities).
Discrepant students with high test scores may also be common among 2E students, but not sure that anything in the CB data would be able to pick that up, or how significant that subgroup may be in the sample. (Of course, 2E students among lower SES groups may not even be identified as such and receive less support than those in higher SES groups too.)
Interesting conclusions of both those articles (I just skimmed but think I got this right) re: SAT being a better predictor of first year college GPA than high school GPA. Both those studies are fairly dated though, and it would be interesting to see more recent work on it, especially with so many colleges being test optional now.
My take on this is that the data is too limited to draw much conclusion/speculation.
My first impression is that the first one is T20 and second one is T50, if we assume T20 has less accepted students. But if we look at the the median SAT of accepted students, second school would be higher, suggesting second could be T20.
Either way, the applicant pool is too small, and the median SAT of accepted students is around 1100 and 1300, which would be below 25 percentile for most T20 or T50 schools.
Our school uses SCOIR, and the applicant pool in 5 years usually will be over 100.
I kind of feel the meanness from this. Unless you truly know the Val does not have any EC. Even if that is true, it is hard to be the only reason for the 16 rejections. Some kids with outstanding ECs and high Stats receive blank rejections too in a bad day.
Yup same. I wonder if we were in the same presentation
In fact we as families/students can’t directly access Naviance/SCOIR type data at all. The school doesn’t let us. They will show you a few schools you may discuss during a 1-1 meeting with your college counselor, but that’s it.
Nominally it’s so that families don’t obsess and fixate on it, and also for the exact reasons we’re discussing: the data really aren’t all that useful without knowing the hook status of applicants.
The good news is that with hundreds and hundreds of colleges in the US, we are not running out of college anytime soon.
The high stats kid without a lot of outside interests is going to land. Maybe not at Princeton, but someplace terrific with engaged faculty and plenty of academic and social and artistic challenges.
The lower stats kid with tons of outside interests is also going to land. And again- not Princeton, but someplace fantastic.
So many kids post on CC about their INCREDIBLE EC’s which are going to make up for their spotty transcript-- and then the reverse, the kids with the incredible transcript who are incredulous that Harvard didn’t see them as a fit.
Seems like many, many high school kids overemphasize ECs (vs academics) in how they think about college admissions, not realizing that normal, garden-variety ones they already do are totally fine for most colleges. I don’t know if this is a cultural myth or inadvertent advice by high school counselors. The emphasis just seems way off.
I think it may be that they hear these descriptions of ECs-- because it’s the kind of thing everyone talks about – without hearing “excellent grades and scores are table stakes”.
It doesn’t help that many parents are coming from a time when a top GPA and excellent SAT score was, in fact, outstanding enough that with that alone and perhaps an EC or sport, the odds of admission to a very selective school weren’t bad at all. It’s all a decoupage of scraps of info, not pulled together into something coherent and accurate.
