<p>hey does anyone know how the admissions committee compares you?
like do they compare you against the people at ur school specifically or if they compare you against the rest of the pool be it EA or Reg. or is it just a standard?</p>
<p>What’s the difference? They have many means of comparison, and they probably use whatever is most useful. The student who goes to a high school that isn’t geared towards elite college prep is likelier to have a 4.0, but is probably less likely to have taken a zillion AP’s, participated in intense extracurriculars or research, attend a school where the guidance counselor to student ratio is 400:1, etc. </p>
<p>The student who goes to a high school that is geared towards elite college prep probably has had more educational access and enrichment, probably has a guidance counselor who is more familiar with “the ropes” (to the extent that they exist), but is probably more likely to have more B’s on the transcript.</p>
<p>An admissions person at any college would have to be verrrrrrrry clueless not to take these differences into account. In my limited experience, I’ve seen students here from all sorts of high schools, whether they be the kind that shuttle students off to elites by the busload or ones that send a kid to an Ivy every 10 years. In the end, I don’t think it matters all that much.</p>
<p>I’ve given up debating how they read applications. It honestly doesn’t matter…</p>
<p>I can’t be sure if this is true but my guidance counsellor told me that the apps are divided up. At most one or two people review your app. He or she (or they) then takes the apps that they think should be admitted to a committee. Most of the time, the committee accepts the reader’s recommendation. If the reader thinks someone is borderline, someone else is given the chance to review the app. </p>
<p>If this is the process, there is some luck involved. One person may like your essays where someone else may not. Hopefully, the one who likes your style is the one who reads your essays. </p>
<p>My guidance counsellor isn’t the best, so who knows if this is true. Anyone else have better information? </p>
<p>But think about this. If a school gets 4,000 early apps and has 20 readers, that 200 apps per person to evaluate in just a few weeks. That’s a lot of reading but doable. But if the process required each app to be read by two reads, the burden is now 400 apps per reader, and it couldn’t be done, so maybe my counsellor is correct.</p>
<p>Thinking about it serves no positive purpose for me. So I’ve decided not to worry about it and just see what happens next month when decisions are released.</p>
<p>If I remember correctly, there was an article written a few years ago that described a UChicago admissions round. In that article, the whole thing was portrayed more as a round-table type discussion, with maybe six people weighing in on an applicant and debating his admission.</p>
<p>Who knows if that was ever true, though. Maybe a remnant of when the school received less apps?</p>
<p>I think that happens at most private colleges, but not with every application. It’s more the pool of applications that don’t have an easy, obvious consensus recommendation, either to admit or to deny. You can’t have a meaningful discussion about 13,000 applicants in a committee, but you can about a few hundred.</p>
<p>Here’s a link to that article:</p>
<p>[Inside</a> The Admissions Game | Newsweek Culture | Newsweek.com](<a href=“http://www.newsweek.com/id/87965]Inside”>Inside The Admissions Game)</p>
<p>There are two other books I’ve read that “go inside” the admissions process. They are The Gatekeepers, by Jacques Steinberg, and Admissions Confidential, by Rachel Toor. All three describe admissions committees in one form or another, and they all chronicle different elite schools (Duke, Chicago, Wesleyan.)</p>
<p>However, I would argue that even these books are not necessarily truthful to how the overall process or committee works. Both the Newsweek article and the Steinberg book were written by reporters, so the admissions offices were probably very cognizant of what they let the reporter see. Admissions Confidential is a memoir, and, as such, could very well suffer from another kind of bias-- exaggeration to make a point or to make something dramatic.</p>
<p>I don’t think obsessing about this stuff is effective or productive (but hey, what good am I telling you that-- I read the books I mentioned when I was in your shoes!) You will get a decision and you will know what that decision is. </p>
<p>If it makes you feel better, over the years that I’ve been a college student and have listened to people talk about their college application experiences, I’ve noticed that almost nobody gets into all the schools they apply to-- not even the kids who get into the tippy top schools. (My friends at Harvard got rejected at other schools.) CC anecdotal evidence confirms this tendency. </p>
<p>I’ve also noticed that your admissions outcomes now won’t determine your future college success. One of my good high school friends is “big man on campus” at his superelite school (not Chicago)-- what people don’t know was that he was deferred, then waitlisted, and fought his way in. It was most likely his desperation to get in and his gratefulness for going there that made him achieve everything and more once he was there.</p>