I hope someone in URochester’s admissions department is reading this thread. 
I hope the Director of URochester’s admissions department is reading this thread!
Don’t be coy. Email the Director of Admissions, and let him or her know what people think.
Somebody should have told her, “You may be right about only 2 getting in, because all the kids with early admissions to Harvard and Yale will probably drop their Duke apps.”
When D1 visited Harvard, she asked several questions and the Harvard host prefaced each response with the phrase, “If you are lucky enough to be admitted to Harvard, …”
D1 took this as very arrogant. I tried to convince her that the Harvard graduates I have known are not like that at all, but they don’t listen at that age, and refused to apply.
I suggested that instead of letting it bother her, that could she make it a game and preface her next question with, “If you were lucky enough to enroll me, …”, but she would not do it. lol
We toured UChicago and the admissions officer said “the lowest ACT score we’ve accepted was 19…but that was along time ago”.
UChicago is relentless with their mailings to every one of those 21 (or 19) and up ACT students. Having sent several to college now, in my book, they are by far the biggest chasers of an application fee. btw, I just went through this entire thread, sorry I don’t know a thing about Amherst 
D has been getting a lot of mailings from Vanderbilt–far more than from Chicago. Her siblings, who were better students, got nothing from Vandy.
Not to sidetrack, but agree with both posters above - UChicago and Vanderbilt both sent mailings multiple times a week to our house for awhile. More than any other schools. Such a waste of resources, but they were really well done from a design perspective, I will give them that.
I was surprised how blunt they were about the test optional option at Union College – the admission officer flat out said that if an applicant is below the school’s standardized test averages then he/she should definitely apply test optional.
And agree about UChicago’s flood of mailings – we all felt it was way overboard.
After visiting two nearby colleges that proudly showcase their schools’ honor codes (Bryn Mawr and Haverford), we asked at the Swarthmore info session about that school’s honor code. The admissions director shared a confused look with the student admissions representative and then they answered that the school does not have an honor code. Really? No honor code whatsoever? I’ve never heard of such a thing!
Today feels like the first day all summer that my daughter didn’t get something from Wash U in St. Louis! We were shocked.
@SoccerMomGenie. There are philosophical and practical reasons why a university may not choose to have an honor code. https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/05/28/why-colleges-should-ditch-honor-codes/
Fair point, @maya54 , but still a foreign concept to me. There can be a huge range in the types of honor codes that are adopted by colleges and universities, but don’t they at least need something that says that students agree not to cheat on exams? Some honor codes say “no cheating” and we expect you to self-police, and other honor codes say “no cheating” and the school administrators will watch you like hawks. Cheating is not against the law; I would think that you also cannot punish a student for cheating unless the cheating violated something. Usually the “something” would be an honor code. I’ve got to believe that schools such as Swarthmore have some sort of honor code that would make it a violation to cheat; perhaps it’s what I would consider an honor code by another name.
In fact, I just now looked it up. Swarthmore may not have an “honor code” but they have a “Student Code of Conduct,” a doctrine of “Academic Freedom and Responsibility,” and “Standards of Academic Integrity.” A better answer to my question at the info session would have been to identify these codes of conduct, and possibly describing how they differ from the concept of an honor code (if indeed they do).
I am confused about having to question an honor code as certainly every school has an expectation to be honorable and not cheat. Beyond that, it is just marketing and packaging the same basic premise, so it is just spin.
Some schools – and especially Haverford, where the Honor Code evolved out of the Quaker heritage of the school, and plays a central role in creating a self-governing community-- it is not marketing. Grinnell’s “self-gov” is not specifically under the umbrella of an Honor Code, but plays a similar purpose. Both are very different from W and L’s academic Honor Code which, I’m told, has only one punishment for cheating – expulsion.
I saw a lot of unlocked bicycles on the Caltech campus. They said bikes don’t get stolen much because of the honor code. I haven’t been on many other campuses, but unlocked bikes seemed odd to me because bike parts get stolen from locked bikes at our local UC.
They also said many people don’t lock their dorm rooms. (Partly because a lot of students there can pick locks anyway, so why create a challenge.)
Even on campuses where students are trustworthy and honest, there are issues with theft (bikes are a biggie!) due to others coming on to campuses and stealing stuff. Most campuses are fairly open to the public.
Caltech campus is not very big (124 acres). So it may not be as easy for outsiders to steal bikes since they can be spotted stealing. Stanford campus is 7800 acres and people stealing bikes are outsiders taking them off campus. It is easy to find stolen bikes still on campus because they get registered when student gets one and an abandoned bike or stolen bike still on campus will have a known owner.