How common are unstated admission requirements?
Replies #6 through #9 of this thread discuss a situation where Georgia Tech’s web site does not indicate that calculus in high school is a requirement or recommendation for admission, but where an admissions officer there told a student that her application would not be looked at without calculus in high school:
http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/discussion/comment/21103726/#Comment_21103726
If this is common, then it could be part of what is driving the “freak out” about college admission credentials (trying to take every advanced and AP course possible, freaking out about getting one B grade, etc.) by students and tiger parents, since they do not really trust that the stated requirements and recommendations are the true ones.
Unstated admission requirements are probably more common around highly selective schools/ ivies. I understand the freakout but when it comes to highly selective/ivies,and even selective schools, where so many people are applying they have make a judgement call on who they want and why. However if your school doesn’t offer calculus they can’t hold that against you either.
However, I would expect a public school to be more transparent with this type of thing, such as stating something like (for this example) “if calculus is available to you in high school, it is highly recommended that you take it.”
This is unfortunately the reality of college admissions. Especially since colleges aren’t required to tell you why exactly you were rejected, it allows them to form these unstated rules. I’m not saying I agree with this policy (in fact I agree with you in how this shouldn’t be a thing) however there is nothing you can do to change the admissions process, and it’s one of those things you just have to accept.
The other thing to be careful of is the ‘an admissions person told me/told somebody that…’ anecdote. Both accuracy and context are critical here.
So, in the example cited above, IF the AO actually said ‘we will not even look at your application without calculus’, was it specific to that person (so it could have been ‘we know the school you go to, and the high achievers typically have Calc’)?
I think it unlikely in the extreme that an AO actually said flat out ‘we do not bother looking at any application that doesn’t have Calc in it’- unless they said it at a school like TJ*, where most 10th graders are already in Calc, and it was in the context of that school, GT is specific on the website that they consider the context of what is available to the student, and calculus is not always available.
The ‘freak out’ is more likely related to ambitious students recognizing that there ares simply too many applicants for each place, and having relatively few ways to try and stand out. So, the colleges make it clear that they like community involvement and hey, presto! everybody has 50 → 100 → 200! community service hours. The colleges want to see rigor? ok, I’ll show you rigor by taking every AP my school offers. You want leadership? I’ll invent a club if I have to. You want to ‘know’ me? right, so, I’ll bare my soul to you in my essay. And as each thing goes from a distinguishing factor to a standard offering, students keep looking for ways to say ‘I am the 17 year old you are looking for’. Every now and then a school languidly lifts a hand and says ‘but we don’t want an arms race’ - and then accepts primarily students who have won the arms race. The net result is that schools that were barely selective to the parent generation are now aspirational schools for their children, and to add insult to injury the whole generation get slagged for being slackers
*Thomas Jefferson School for Science and Technology, a public charter school in Northern Virginia, that has more than a dozen Intel semi finalists every year, the highest AP Calc BC performance in the US, etc.
There’s also the possible context of applying to selective business and engineering programs, where calc may be especially valued, vs arts & sciences.
It’s still unclear to me what having the opportunity to take calc in high school means, or should mean, considering that the math track is set in middle school.
A reasonable interpretation is that (a) calculus is readily available in the high school, or at a nearby college without difficult scheduling / commuting problems, and (b) the student’s math placement in middle school put him/her on a track to complete precalculus by 11th grade, without having to cram summer courses or such to get on that track.
However, in some threads on similar subjects, some posters apparently believe that it is necessary to take more extreme measures (putting up with difficult scheduling / commuting problems to take calculus or more advanced math at a local college, even at the compromise of other academic course work, or cramming math courses in the summers to get on the track to reach calculus in high school).
What college admissions readers think in this respect is known only to them.