<p>I don’t think it’s as much of top scorers getting shut out of the elite schools as it is the shock of being replaced by far less qualified admits.</p>
<p>less qualified in what way? </p>
<p>SAT scores? Football players?</p>
<p>Re Post 579:
Studying only CC Results threads – which admittedly is a tiny portion of reported results to Elites – here’s what I’ve discovered, in order of frequency, to be the prominent reasons for perfect score rejections, based on comments made by those students:</p>
<p>(1) inadequate application effort, including any aspect of the application: neglecting important info, important aspect to a statement of purpose, little effort in the essay
(2) arrogant attitude: student expected to be admitted based on stats; conveyed that in comments on the thread (thus, probably in the app. itself, in tone and/or by virtue of spare effort)
(3) lackluster teacher rec’s. In more than half of such cases I’ve read, the student also admitted having a poor relationship with one or more recommenders. (makes one wonder why that recommender was chosen, and/or if the student had an attitude problem with all his/her teachers).
(4) poor choice of college for that student’s expressed interests & available profile. If student could not see the fit was bad, the college could.
(5) weak e.c.'s.
(6) bad luck: similar students from same h.s.class applied to that college, with equal stats & more impressive “other” academic achievements, and/or with extremely impressive e.c. achievements (as opposed to mere e.c. ‘participation’)</p>
<p>With all due respect, I don’t think people who are now bitter about getting rejected wrote their essays in the same bitter vein. Concerning #6, I don’t think there is any way of knowing whether people were passed over in favor of people from the same high school with the same stats but better EC’s. I doubt people would be bitter if people had virtually the same stats but had less impressive EC’s than those taken.</p>
<p>I don’t know about your other points…it would be pretty illogical to complain about rejection from a top school if you had lukewarm recs…Also, if the person didn’t care enough to try to write a decent essay I don’t know why that person would be incensed that they didn’t get in.</p>
<p>I really don’t buy that great writers score poorly on the SAT writiing section. My guess is that John Updike and JK Rowling would do just fine on it. A really good writer can write to the requirement. Sure, they can also riff about something arcane and experiment with language. But they also know the nuts and bolts of putting together the dreaded 5-paragraph essay. Kind of like a piano student who needs to master the etudes before the concertos. Or the figure skaters at the Olympics who first have to go through all that boring stuff where they make designs on the ice. I think we have way to many “creative” kids writing very undisciplined stuff in high school that the typical harried high school English teacher declares is brilliant. It is kind of a drag to write logically and in an organized and clear fashion. That’s why so few kids can do it. That’s why so many 6’s on the SAT writing section.</p>
<p>Your points are well taken, collegealum. I’m only referring to cases where the rejected student specifically said that he or she put little effort into the essay, and/or thought the essay was “stupid” or “pointless” – that type of thing. And regarding the “bitterness” comment (although I don’t think I used that word), some students say specifically, “I’m bitter.” Other students (I was really talking about arrogance), express disgust at denial of admission, with specific reference to “my scores should have gotten me in,” and “the other people from my class who got in were less qualified.” Many students actually say, ‘I didn’t work that hard on the essay but think I should have gotten in anyway.’ (I’m paraphrasing, of course.)</p>
<p>Illogical or not (I agree with you, again), CC students often complain about rejection when admitting their recs were lukewarm but “shouldn’t have mattered.” Or that “the jerk of a teacher gave me a lousy rec but what does he/she know,” that kind of thing. Other rejected students with bad recs, bad essays, bad effort, or bad e.c.'s admit they didn’t deserve to get in based on one or more of those facets. (Not everyone rejected is bitter, or arrogant, but the reasons for the rejection, or possible reasons, are often indicated right in the student’s posting.)</p>
<p>“Concerning #6, I don’t think there is any way of knowing whether people were passed over in favor of people from the same high school with the same stats but better EC’s.”
^^ Students often know this because they compare such information. Other students assume (correctly or incorrectly). Again, the info on CC is SO incomplete; I’m just noting incidences of frequency here. And a student would certainly have little/no information beyond his or her own h.s. class. (But could have been affected by the bad luck of a perfect scorer outside of that subsection of the pool, with better add’l features.)</p>
<p>Mammall–you don’t know me, so you can take my word on this or not–I really don’t care.</p>
<p>But, my D who got the “6” is an excellent writer. She got a 770 on the SAT verbal, an 800 on the PSAT writing section, an 800 on the multiple choice part of the SAT 2 writing section, and a 4 on Lit AP. She has won numerous writing awards throughout her life, and, while heading toward a Phi Beta Kappa graduation at a top LAC, was the go-to person for proofreading of papers among her friends, including the English majors.</p>
<p>I saw the essay, and as a college writing instructor, can attest that it was organized, on-topic, interesting to read, and grammatically perfect.</p>
<p>it is not “kind of a drag” for her to write correctly.</p>
<p>Epiphany,
Hear, hear to your post #576. I have always said that my kids pulled me – it was not me pushing. A middle school teacher told me when DS1 was in 8th grade about one EC that became DS1’s solution to getting challenging work, some big awards, and opened up a variety of other ECs that have expanded his horizons. He knew of DS’s passion, knew another similarly situated kid who was pursuing it, and mentioned that DS might be interested. DS took it and ran – sometimes to the detriment of his GPA, but there will be no questions in his application that he LOVES what he does, and will go to no small lengths to pursue it.</p>
<p>FWIW, I was never once asked to write a 5-paragraph essay at my demanding, elite university. Never once. Not only was I never asked to write in a logical, boring fashion, I would have been severely down-graded for staying within such parameters. It was assumed that the student was employing logic & structure; any essay not demonstrating that received an automatic F or rejection for a redo. Beyond that, style, in the development of the expository information & argument, was expected, even if not “creativity” per se.</p>
<p>mammall: Actually it is quite conceivable that Rowling (maybe not Updike) might score poorly on the writing portion. With 25 minutes and a cookie-cutter topic many accomplished writers would not have the scope to “flex their writing muscles.” In addition, having been privy to grading procedures, it’s possible that the best essays don’t receive the highest scores. Frequently essay, fiction and poetry contests for kids reward the most conventional production, not the most accomplished.</p>
<p>As I’ve stated elsewhere, I truly admire your daughter’s accomplishment, but performing well to conventional expectations is not everyone’s strong suit. (I am not saying your daughter is conventional or that she doesn’t have truly remarkable accomplishments. I am saying that one of her many talents is scoping out what’s expected of her and being able to provide it.) Not all talented writers have this gift.</p>
<p>Sarah Lawrence’s program, arguably the best writing program in the country, won’t even consider these standardized scores.</p>
<p>I make these comments as a published writer and English professor. (BTW I would ace this writing test, but that’s just me.) I also don’t think Rowling is an exceptionally gifted writer, though she is a dazzling story teller.</p>
<p>The comments in post 586 echo the experience of the student I referred to earlier. That student, like garland’s D, had also “won numerous writing awards” prior to college application, which appears to be one of the reasons for acceptance to a premier elite institution, where she is, indeed, currently writing. (She hopes to stay in the East Coast, and one of her main goals is to write for publication.) She was also editor of her nationally acclaimed high-school newspaper, took writing classes with a prominent author, etc. She is currently producing for 2 college campus publications.</p>
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</p>
<p>My concern, which Marite picked up in the very first reply of this lengthy thread, is the student who has a favorite college, and would really like to get into that college, who perhaps thinks that high test scores alone are enough. Some applicants don’t think that they can rely solely on test scores. Some applicants, whatever they think, have enough other desirable characteristics besides test scores from the point of view of their favorite college that they will get in for sure. And plenty of applicants do get into their first-choice colleges, with or without high test scores. I thought I would open the thread, as I said in the opening post, because I have observed many other threads on College Confidential in which high school students show great anxiety about increasing their test scores, as though that is the single most efficacious thing they can do to increase their chances of getting into their favorite college. And there are threads on CC, every year, in which some students self-report about themselves or a “friend” that a student has high scores, perhaps peak scores, but doesn’t get into the student’s favorite college. That’s all: I figure at this point in the admission season students (and their parents) may as well have an opportunity to consider what else besides scores is considered by colleges in making admission decisions. Applicants can do with that information as they wish. </p>
<p>In one of my more recent posts in this thread I expressed the thought that a high-scoring student ought to end up with an admission result of getting in SOMEWHERE pretty decent, even if not the student’s most desired college. All of us parents who have been on CC for a few years recall parental self-reports of students who ended up with NO admissions at the end of the admission season, and I hope regulars here have all figured out how to avoid that kind of result. The thread has made clear that some parents, and thus some of their children, think it is “natural” or right that SAT I or ACT test scores ought to serve as a guarantee of admission at some colleges (as apparently they do, at some colleges). Parents who grew up in other countries may be particularly likely to think that admission tests are a guarantee of admission to top colleges–in the other country I have lived in the longest, they basically are. </p>
<p>Any Common Application college could, in principle, deny an applicant for any reason or no reason at all (and some colleges have far fewer spaces for entering students than they have applicants), so I thought it might be helpful to consider what other issues matter to admission committees at various colleges. Marite’s very first reply was only the first of hundreds of interesting and thoughtful replies that have broadened the scope of this thread beyond the issues I began it with, and I have enjoyed reading the discussion. I do think that students should be free to make up their own minds (even as against the minds of their parents) about where to apply and about how to prepare. My usual advice to high school students is DARE TO BE YOURSELF (shouted for emphasis), and as long as students apply and prepare with their eyes open and focused on current reality they can do whatever they like.</p>
<p>I think someone who is good at writing probably could force themselves to write in a style that would be rewarded by the scoring system, although it might be a painful experience (LOL.) They have books of high-scoring essays out there these days.</p>
<p>^^ and the student that I just mentioned again did, collegealum. Yes, it was painful. She forced herself to be conventional & boring, & thus scored high in the second sitting. She eliminated any sophistication whatsoever in her submission the second time around. It’s just that she never dreamt she would be punished for showing exceptional ability.</p>
<p>^^Yeah, that was my impression from perusing some of the high-scoring essays. I think a combination of verbal SAT and english/humanities recs is a better way of assessing talent in this particular area.</p>
<p>Just as this thread previously dovetailed with the “let’s define unqualified” thread, and the ACT Nat’l Report thread, it currently dovetails in some respects to the “Role of class rank in college admissions” thread. A recent reply from AdOfficer on that latter thread reinforces some points I was making on a previous page here about the importance of teacher rec’s in the assessment of the applicant. Such recs reveal much more than a student might believe, & can be pivotal in the final decisions where everything else (stats and all) look equal or comparable to likely admits.</p>
<p>English/humanities recs – any recs – can be really valuable, but also put the students at the mercy of the skill and character of the recommender. </p>
<p>Heaven help the student whose favorite teacher is not so good him- or herself at writing effectively, or who commits the cardinal elite-college sin of praising a student’s great work ethic rather than his intellect and creativity. Teachers at Exeter know how to write a Harvard recommendation, and if they don’t know someone teaches them. Teachers at Podunk Sr. High don’t necessarily know, and don’t necessarily feel like being taught, either. (Maybe, like mammall and others, they believe that SAT scores are recommendation enough. Or that Harvard’s “twisted admissions logic” is not worthy of their respect.)</p>
<p>And then there’s the issue of conflict with teachers. </p>
<p>I was a very good English student in high school. I went to an elitist private school, where no one was going to sink a college application with a lukewarm recommendation, and I was so clearly the top student in my class that no one had any interest in doing anything but promoting me for the greater glory of the school. But I had constant low-level conflict with English teachers, many of whom were not as good at literary analysis as I was, or had the tastes of a different generation. The chairman of the English Department, my 11th grade teacher, once told me it was too bad I had such an “Oriental” cast of mind – and he didn’t mean East Asian. Had I been less the golden boy, or less the politician, I could have had some trouble getting a cleanly enthusiastic English recommendation. (And my last few years of high school I was doing most of my serious reading in Spanish and French, so my English teachers weren’t even seeing my best work.)</p>
<p>My daughter, also a skilled English student, had such regular conflict with her English teachers that it just became part of our seasonal calendar – fall was the time for working through conflict with English teachers. Ultimately it always worked out, because she would adjust and they would adjust, but she was lucky that she never had a teacher who decided to “teach her a lesson.” (Actually, she rarely had an English teacher who decided to teach her anything. She seldom got substantive comments on her papers. They were well-written, and she would get high marks; intellectual or substantive weaknesses in her arguments went unnoticed, and opportunities to improve her style were unexplored. Even grammar and spelling errors were missed sometimes. There were a couple of exceptions in outside classes she took, but generally her main English teachers weren’t challenging her.) I’m sure her English recommendation was fine, but in part that was because she got her 11th grade teacher to write it in the spring, immediately before the teacher retired. If my daughter had waited until fall, she would have been in trouble.</p>
<p>These were elitist schools I’m talking about, too. I’m sure there are situations were a skilled student registers as too big for his britches, and teacher try to take him down a peg. Sometimes the student SHOULD be taken down a peg. But sometimes not.</p>
<p>I’m sure this happens to science students, too. A supposedly-good student who is incapable of working through conflict with a less-gifted teacher may not really deserve a place in a top college, because he’s not showing aptitude for being part of an academic community. But I wouldn’t want to put excessive weight on recommendations, good or bad.</p>
<p><a href=“mammall:”>quote</a>
Most of the defense of the academic competitions as better measures of intellect than the SAT/ACT center around math and science.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>From the United States, roughly a thousand people a year get 800 on the math SAT, compared to 4 people who get gold medals at the international math and physics olympiads. Although both outcomes are in large part (for most students, as correlations, etc) measures of parental involvement as you correctly point out, the difference in selectivity by itself indicates which is the more cognitively demanding measure. It is also true that the subject matter of olympiads is more cognitively loaded than the SAT,ACT,AP,IB and other standard exams.</p>
<p>The SAT verbal components are less discriminating than the math/physics competitions, but I imagine that a battery of SAT, AP or IB tests covering writing, literature and several foreign languages to the extent available, might be a similar ability demonstration using off-the-shelf credentials.</p>
<p>One would think that Scrabble or crossword championships could be significant verbal metrics, but these tend to be won by many of the same people that are good at math, chess and computer programming.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>This is also my assessment. At our high school, the top 4% of the class is designated as high honors and receive a special commendation from the principal and the faculty. That award is also noted on the transcript and in the guidance counselor report to the colleges. With rare exceptions, all these kids get into a top 10 university or LAC, while not necessarily the one they hoped for.</p>
<p>The top three reasons I have found for highly academically qualified students to fail to get into a top college:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>Not applying to enough top colleges: Even a super-qualified student has no guarantee of acceptance at HYPSM. If they only apply to Harvard, Yale and Princeton in the regular round they can easily be shut out of all three even if they are a good fit for any of them. With a 10% acceptance rate, your combined shot at admission to any of them is still at best only 28% if you apply to all three. You may have to apply to six or more top schools to have a greater than 50% to get into any one of them, simply because of the concentration of top applicants at these schools. </p></li>
<li><p>Failure to do your homework: A college application is not unlike a job application. If you don’t know what the company sells your are not very likely to be hired even if you have the skills required for the job. Few companies will also hire you without checking some references. Unless you are a true national academic superstar, (which according to Harvard adcoms only constitutes about 15% of any admitted class) you need to sell yourself through your essays and recommendations from teachers. A good recommendation or essay won’t get you in, but a bad one can sink you. Send that same essay or recommendation to all schools and you may have a train wreck. </p></li>
<li><p>Major character flaws: A few elite schools place great emphasis on personal character and will use interviews and essays to narrow down the field. A poor impression can be fatal. MIT for instance has been very successful over the past decade at weeding out anti-social types even if they are strong academically. They will work hard through the essays, recommendations and alumni interviews to detect such tendencies. If you present a borderline suicidal or psychopathic personality, the school won’t take the risk to admit you.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>^ I disagree with #2. A Great essay/recommendation CAN and WILL often get kids in. Especially at those schools that love essays, like University of Chicago. Write a great one and get great recs makes up for mediocore SATs and EC’s and etc.</p>
<p>
I have to agree with this … I have no visibility to either the discussions of admissions committees or my recommendations but after 3 years on CC I’m pretty sure I way “over performed” on admissions because of one of my recommendations … which I guess pulled me from a middle of the pack applicant at 20-30% acceptance schools to an admitted applicant.</p>
<p>The second thought is many posts talk about the more qualified students losing spaces to less qualified students … when I read these I often wonder how much is really known about the qualifications of the “less qualified students”. One of my (less mature) highlights of high school was seeing my class’ val (who was an arrogant grade grubber) almost have a heart attack when he heard I got into his first choice school when he was rejected … he certainly had a higher GPA and I would guess he assumed he had higher SATs … but I actually had higher SATs (and tougher courses).</p>