Yale students have posted with some granularity as to what their actual admissions folder looks like. On the first page along with demographics is SAT and GPA. Most relevant to this conversation, not just GPA but GPA in comparison with the highest GPA from that school that year. What more direct expression that relative excellence in academics is “a thing” at Yale than that? Yale could have compared the GPA with the school’s 75%, the school’s median, the school’s average. No, they compare with the highest. Now others have to devalue this fact by saying “well being valedictorian doesn’t guarantee Yale admission”. I can’t see how that’s the same thing, but it sure seems that Yale will notice if you are the top academic student in your school by GPA.
Of course AO’s talk about generalized academic excellence and their individual and institutional role in reading essays and letters and their freedom to select whomever and whatever qualities they value. It is part of the same diversity lingo my friend got from the MIT admissions director. Look at the 25% math SAT at MIT among admitted students and the acceleration most students have in STEM and we can conclude MIT does not value relative math excellence with “over 70% of applicants being perfectly admissible”? Maybe we should look at (anecdote aside) who actually gets in. The reasons for emphasizing this viewpoint serve institutional and diversity goals, but as has been discussed recently on CC on multiple forums, such statements have to be considered in that light.
What you see right on the first page of Yale’s own process is that Yale takes note of relative excellence in academics. Even if the high school itself doesn’t rank, Yale notices relative academic performance.
And isn’t that what most high school students see played out year after year in real life? It’s not the top 5% students who are accepted. It’s the valedictorian or someone in the “top 2 or 3” at least for unhooked students from large public high schools in suburban USA.
Even seen through the lens of preservation of prestige which is another institutional goal of many colleges, they want to be seen as taking only the “best”. To be clear, no one is saying relative academic excellence is the ONLY thing or always the DETERMINATIVE thing. Despite specific facts both at Harvard and Yale, however, there are those who don’t want it to be anything or in some lights a bad thing.
Take, for example the issue of self-studied AP classes. Most schools have very regimented and bureaucratic processes in regard to acceleration to prevent the school from being embroiled with acceleration that doesn’t work out. Self study of AP chemistry for example with a 4 or 5 on the AP however would allow an interested student to take more advanced DE courses which on this very thread an application reader noted that their highly selective college does in fact value significantly. How do we expect students to get to those higher level classes if we snip their self-study ambitions in the bud and instead send them to museums, the coffee shop or out on a carefree stroll? That’s actually the carrot. The stick is “AO’s will think you are a drone”.