While I think being Asian was a factor in the boy that didn’t get in to U Chicago and all of the other top schools, I agree with @calmom that there must have been something else going on if he got in to no top schools. I suppose it is possible that he was just one of the unlucky ones that no one took, but I think there must have been something missing in his app. Might have been a blah essay, or like @calmom says, maybe we don’t really know some other information that may have hindered him. Sounds like he’s very bright, nonetheless, and is probably killing it at his state flagship and in the end, he may do even better having been the big fish…
@calmom, your daughter sounds like she not only positioned herself well with her choice of major and in finding the “need”, but she also was able to prove to admissions that she is much more than a test score. All of the top schools claim to look beyond test scores and to look at applications more holistically, and I think a lot of us question if that is really true. I’m glad to hear, in at least the case of your daughter, that is was. Sounds like her application was really strong and she was one of the ones that really stood out. Good for her.
As it relates to test scores in general, and maybe this is a topic for a new thread, but I often wonder how admissions would look if everyone took the standardized tests “cold”, or with minimal prep? I hired a great tutor for my daughter who is going to a top school and did get in to an Ivy…and she was able to get a 99th percentile score. But if she had NOT had the tutor, I’m sure she would have been much lower. I’m really stating the obvious here, I know, but I often remind her and other kids that think they might be more worthy of spots because of their scores, that the kids applying with lower scores may not have had access to the tutors that they had, or simply didn’t want to play the game and spend the money/time on tutors even if they could afford it. There are LOTs of kids with high GPAs, especially in a world where so many schools are no longer “ranking” kids, but less kids with incredible test scores. All things being equal, are the kids that had the tutors really any more qualified than their apples to apples peers (same gpa, same SES) for the top schools??? Probably not.
I’m curious, @calmom, did your daughter have a tutor or do any other kind of excessive preparation for her standardized tests?? A 27 is a very decent score for MOST colleges in this country, so she obviously is bright.
Taking it a step further, how many of the kids at U Chicago that had amazing scores would have gotten a 27 on the ACT if they hadn’t studied excessively or had a fancy tutor? I’m sure there are some that would have still scored above a 34, but overall, I bet many of them would have at least started with about a 27 if they didn’t go nuts with the preparation.
Again, I don’t mean to open a can of worms here and go off topic, but I thought this was a relevant point to make given the current conversation.
As it relates to the main topic of stress, preparing for the SAT was extremely stressful for my daughter and many of her friends. As her mother, while I was the one writing the check to the tutor, I often questioned my own judgement and questioned overall if it was really worth it. She was already jumping through hoops at her HS for all of her AP classes, her volunteering, her varsity sport, etc. Why should she have to do this at all??? Without her score, she probably would NOT have gotten in to the schools she got in to (unless she really stood out like @calmom’s daughter), but in the end would she really have been any worse off? Would she really have amounted to less because she went to a school like Boston College over a school like Dartmouth or Georgetown, where she absolutely needed her 99th percentile score to get in??? She would have been the same person either way. And while maybe the academics might be a bit “stronger” at the “harder” schools, would she not have achieved success at the second tier school?
In the end, we played the game and she is going to the “harder” school. But there are days I wonder if we had to go through all that we did…and if it was worth the STRESS.
Again, I’m off topic and this is a probably a topic for a different thread, but this has all been running through my mind while reading this thread so I thought I would share my thoughts.