Is spike absolutely necessary for Stanford/Harvard/Ivys?

OITB1
Wed, 11 Dec 2024 23:13:36 +0000

“…the issue is that so many parents think their kid is ‘high stats’ because they have straight A’s or a high test score…And the vast majority of those students aren’t ‘high stats’ and wouldn’t be competitive for highly rejective schools.”

Excellent point. In my unpaid (usually unsolicited ) giving of advice to parents new to the process, I often counsel them to figure out where their kid really sits compared to their peers, instead of assuming a GPA that would have been a standout when you were in high school means the same thing today. Which is hard to do when so few schools have class ranking anymore.

I’ve heard too much grousing from parents of kids in our highly educated, highly entitled area about how Johnny or Susie had a 4.3 GPA and took as many honors and AP courses as “regular” ones at the local high school (which, back in the day, would send 20 kids to the Ivy League annually and still outperforms most schools), and they didn’t even get in to…gasp…Virginia [or insert school of similar prestige/selectivity level that the parents thought was already insulting when their college counselor told them that was the ceiling]. I want to say to them "Dude, your kid was in the second quartile of their high school class. They were NEVER getting into [_____________], even in 2017. It’s not the Woke demon that kept them out of Vandy or Berkeley or wherever.

I’ve seen the same on CC. Not all 4.0’s are created equal. A lot of people don’t even seem to acknowledge the distinction between finishing in the top 10% of the class with straight A’s at even very good public schools and finishing in the top 10% of the class with straight A’s at a college preparatory school with selective admissions. We’ve been told numerous times by kids who’ve transferred from our very well thought of public to the nearby private high school that the AP courses at the former were easier than the honors courses at the latter (which caps how many AP classes a student can take). So talking about a 4.0 student with 10 AP’s under their belt, without further context, can be seriously misleading. There are literally hundreds of thousands of that general profile finishing high school every year.