ED Chances and Questions

NixonDenier
Fri, 02 Oct 2015 22:26:47 +0000

I’m assuming you’re applying as a science major (engineering, biological sciences, etc.) which means (duh) you need to demonstrate you have the science competency to succeed at Hopkins. For anyone who is reading this and wants to assess themselves, just step back and be as objective as possible. Remember that the committee is made up of people, and people like patterns, stories and want to quickly reduce a candidate down to a few main bullet points. Sure it’s wrong and misleading, but this is how people operate and anyone who is dealing with thousands of applications to go through will eventually have to generalize and make some rational assumptions, etc. Here is how I would approach selecting a candidate. Keep in mind this is how I would go about selecting someone, and while it could be completely wrong, imagine you are someone who only has the application to work with and has to select a limited number of the many applications in front of you:

When I look at your stats I definitely see you’ve challenged yourself and got high marks. I think it is odd though that a student who earned A’s in many of his classes didn’t get 5’s on the AP exams, exams that are highly curved, where, on average, only 60-70% of the material (http://apcentral.collegeboard.com/apc/public/courses/212187.html) you should know needs to be answered correctly on the exam for you to get a 5. Here’s a student who took a class preparing him for an exam, he did well in the class and yet underperformed on the exam. Is he a nervous test taker? Probably not, he earned a 34 on the ACT, a great score, and does well in his classes. I’m left thinking maybe your school isn’t as competitive and that if I’m going to compare your GPA to another school’s GPA your grades are probably inflated in comparison. Look at this guy here, he scored a B- in multiple AP classes but got 5’s on each of those exams. Is he more qualified (based on GPA) since in a standardized test he performed better even though he has a lower GPA?

Breaking character here, you can see what I did there was reductionist and I made some assumptions, but already you can see how someone could reason your high GPA, high rank, etc. is inflated and should be taken with a grain of salt because of your AP scores. If JHU has consistently accepted students from your high school over the years then they are probably familiar with your school and may not need to play these games, but you don’t want to give someone a logical pathway to reach these conclusions. Even without playing these games, the 2 in AP Chem (40-50th percentile, http://www.totalregistration.net/AP-Exam-Registration-Service/2014-AP-Exam-Score-Distributions.php) and the 650 in Bio (50th percentile, http://media.collegeboard.com/digitalServices/pdf/research/SAT-Subject-Tests-Percentile-Ranks-2012.pdf) are most likely red flags that will probably be brought up when the committee is going over your application. How is someone with such high marks, a high ranking, and someone taking college-level biology and math classes not able to score well on standardized exams in bio and chem - topics related to (or fundamental to) a major you are probably pursuing?

By all means disagree with me and consult higher beings than myself, but I think submitting the bio subject test is only hurting you. It reinforces the story I started to tell that the 2 in AP Chem raises. You want high standardized test scores to reinforce your high marks, not to negate them. The ACT score is phenomenal and helps you. A 750 is competitive for math, great. I think a subject test in physics or chem with a 750+ would do wonders for you. The JHU website says you do not need to rush November subject tests for ED (https://apply.jhu.edu/apply/faq/early-decision/), which means you can view the score and decide whether or not to submit it. If you aren’t ready by October then by all means wait until November (just don’t procrastinate unnecessarily). If it doesn’t go well then you studied up and reviewed physics, which you’re most likely going to need in college anyway. The only downside is that preparing for this exam may take time away from your other courses, and senior year first semester GPA is critical for RD admission (and always think big picture, not just ED with Hopkins).

I despise actually “chancing” people and issuing out their fate giving either false hope or false doom. I don’t know the detailed process by which these committees operate. If the process was so easy that I could quickly reach a decision, then why do we have these committees with trained professionals in the first place? Admissions is a complex process and I’m not in the business of hurting people’s feelings either now or later if they get rejected (I’ll leave the mean stuff to the application committee). Furthermore, Hopkins’ admission stats change rather drastically one year to the next, and there’s no way that people from previous years can accurately determine acceptance for an applicant in the next cycle. Who knows how competitive this upcoming applicant pool will be? I do know it will probably be more competitive (given the long-standing pattern), but as for how much more, I don’t know. Given the (meaningless?) move-up in the rankings for Hopkins to the top 10 (USNWR) and the 15% acceptance rate that is advertised (admissions from two cycles ago), Hopkins looks like a great school that is “easier” to get into. I wouldn’t be surprised if there is a huge jump in the number of applications to the school and a significant increase in the competitiveness of the application cycle. All speculation, but that’s my two-cents.

As for anyone reading this, be objective and see what stories you can tell and weaknesses you can find when you just look at your application. Assume this is all the committee knows. I won’t chance you but I will say that I believe the Physics Subject Test (and doing well) would make a big difference in rejecting the assumptions a logical person can make about you as an applicant. I don’t have the time to do this for every person who posts their stats on this forum, but hopefully my approach shows how someone who has limited information can quickly (and possibly falsely) try and compare apples to oranges (GPAs from different schools in this case). Yes, you are more than your GPA and test scores, and yes, this is nowhere near the full extent that committees analyze an applicant, but I’d like to think I’m a logical person, and I reached this conclusion. What’s to stop someone else from doing the same, someone on the admissions committee perhaps?