<p>Cangel, I do see the admits. I was looking at the enrolled figures. However, this is 4 admits out of over 24 people with 1500+ on the SATs. Quiltguru’s high school have 3 our of 4 kids get in with 1500+ on their SATs.</p>
<p>What I noticed, and what I think Quiltguru is trying to point out, is the percentage of students admitted with a given combination of test scores and GPA. It is 3 admits out of 24ish with 1500+ on SATs, but you must take into account GPA as well, and what constitutes a “high GPA” depends on the high school in question, number of APs, how they are weighted or not, etc.</p>
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<p>What you are missing is that the 4 admits to Yale were back in the graduating class of 2003. </p>
<p>According to the Naviance page below, there were zero admits to Yale in Wooton’s graduating classes of 2004, 2005, or 2006. (The number of applicants per year was 18, 18, 26, and 19.)</p>
<p><a href=“http://connection.naviance.com/fc/colleges/viewcollege.php?cid=3987[/url]”>http://connection.naviance.com/fc/colleges/viewcollege.php?cid=3987</a></p>
<p>I think that’s pretty remarkable. 63 Wootton students have applied within the past three years, most with strong SATs and high GPAs, to judge by the scattergram, and Yale has admitted zero of them.</p>
<p>I suspect that there is a much larger number of applications from Montgomery County schools (and, more generally DC area schools) than the schools in Quiltguru’s neck of the woods, and that may have something to do with it–it’s just harder for Wootton students to stand out in Yale’s pool when there are so many other strong students from Montgomery County applying.</p>
<p>But the good news is–there are lots of admissions to other excellent colleges on Wootton’s list, and terrific students from Wootton and elsewhere attending those other schools will make them even better colleges. I imagine that, by any measure, the average student quality of, say, University of Maryland’s honors program is higher than Yale’s average student quality was back in the days when our current president attended Yale.</p>
<p>EDIT: One interesting observation–the last year that Wootton had any students accepted to Yale was also the last year that Yale had an ED program. (Yale switched to SCEA for the entering class of 2004.) Maybe a coincidence…</p>
<p>So what happened in 2003, was it just SCEA?</p>
<p>Taxguy, the public schools in our area are on par with many of the privates. The info I have on a number of schools and their college results is more detailed than the scattergrams. For our school, for example, URMs, athletes, legacies, development, celebrities, music talent at conservatory level, disadvantaged, financial aid, 1st gen American, national award are all marked with codes. When I look at who was accepted to HPY in the last 5 years, it looks pretty impressive until you remove some of those codes. </p>
<p>The public school neighboring us has one of the best records in the country for college placement, considered the big daddy of them all. But when you look at that school, it beats the stuffing out of most public schools that are highly rated and consider them selves outstanding. First of all their college counselors are very much in tune and in touch with adcoms. They have precedence in that their kids have traditionally gone to these schools. Their advanced math class is not BC Calc but they have kids 2-3 years ahead of the game, taking Linear Algebra, Differential Equations, Analysis courses. Many, many Asian kids, and I don’t hear much of about Asian discrimination around there. Musical talent? Many of those kids are in the Young Juiliiard program and are conservatory level, and/or actively compete in certain national young artist awards and professionally play. There are kids who act on Broadway. They have kids taking and doing phenomonally well in the Olympiads, and they have a science research program leading to Intel competition. A kid with ECs there will get top marks in the quality of their activities. The parents are avid participants and use their superb resumes to help their kids develop theirs. When I see colleges bragging about the accomplishment of the new class, they could well have come from this school. I have no doubt that every single teacher and counselor there is well trained on how to word recommendations for optimum results. Strong athletic programs in some of the more obscure ivy league sports like crew and squash and fencing, which you don’t usually see in public schools. When I saw schools like this when I first moved here, I immediately could see why our old public school in the midwest would not get anywhere near the results as this school, and they were lucky to get in who they did. Had to be geographic factor. </p>
<p>Being located where your public high school is, there are so many other strong highschools that are bunched into the geographic. Those schools may have the URMs and athletes and legacies that tend to be the ones getting into the top schools. The other thing I would examine is the profile that the highschool includes with the transcript, and how the transcript is presented. The schools that tend to get more kid into the ivies don’t tend to rank, and are vaguer about their grades. Every effort is made to let the colleges know how difficult their program is even in the non AP/honors track. Taking away the special status marks, I think that this public school outshines our private prep school.</p>
<p>Those Yale numbers are weird. We’ve had 4 out of 10 with 1500+ scores admitted. (Our Naviance numbers only go back two years.) And for Harvard it’s 8 out of 13.</p>
<p>I am not sure of the location of Quiltguru’s HS, but on all other accounts the schools being compared are likely like ‘apples and oranges’-- Wootton is a large public school in a geographic area rich in high quality High Schools and applicants to elite colleges. The only schools Wootton should be compared with are Churchill and BCC and Whitman and Magruder, etc, and the other Montgomery county large high schools (and in particular those without magnet programs). Years ago, when we were thinking we needed to do an emergency relocation to the county of family origin, I looked at statistics for the county which evaluated the ‘value added’ element of some of the MS and HS programs in the county. Taken by economic indicators, how did the school perform relative to its peers…Some schools had statistics which were comparable to those of more affluent areas, others underperformed. </p>
<p>As far as I’m concerned, if a school doesn’t match the results of its COMP schools-- then the question of why must be answered…but, to compare schools that are different in size by a factor of 10, different in location by 1000 miles— doesn’t say much.</p>
<p>Beyond this, if your child does NOT attend a school which is a ‘feeder’ historically, then I think it behooves you to look at the element of competition in considering where to apply. My son did not even look at the fine LAC he knew his best friend and another student would be applying to-- they all looked similar enough on paper, they other two were legacies, and the school in question would be unlikely to take more than 2 from a relatively small HS. When my son applied ED he was deferred-- the guidance counselor learned that the school towhich he had applied was DEFINITELY waiting to see who the other applicants were-- again, they never take more than 1-2 from our school per year. We counsidered this kind of reasoning highly rational, and I think that in the case of both our kids these sorts of decisions resulted in them having very, very fine application results, with no sense that they ‘lost out’ by not applying to schools where their statistical chances were particularly slim.</p>
<p>True, but comparing to our high school which is comparable in size and also located in a hotbed of excellent high schools I think is fairer. I think we benefit because we are actually seen as a needier school surrounded by wealthier communities. The truth is that we’re just very diverse - economically and ethnically. But it means the top students have less competition.</p>
<p>It is rare that a student is what the adcoms call a “one read admit” at highly selective schools. Those kids will get in without a pause regardless of how many apply to any school, in my opinion, and most adcoms will agree to that. They are just such rare birds, that it will never happen. Most kids fall into the category where if the geographics, or any other hook comes into play with other applicants, they may not get accepted. In our college book that tells where the last 5 years of kids applied and the results, there are hardly any kids who got into HPY without some hook attached. And there are times when a dozen such kids got into Bowdoin or another small school. It’s just that a kid who just might get in is going to have a harder time when the geographics are also not on his side, and when it gets down to his specific school being the geographics of concern, it is not going to help him, whereas should he be the only one from his school applying, the adcoms might want to take him over some from a school that is a regular, particularly if the school he is from, is one where they want to make some inroads. That sort of thing does not happen much, however, if an area is inundated with schools that send lots of kids to that particular college. They tend to clump the schools into categories and they, the adcoms don’t tend to waste much time looking at School A in County C vs SchoolB. They are the same, as far as they are concerned unless there is some major factor that distinguishes them from each other.</p>
<p>Anitaw,
I don’t think Magruder has ever been considered in the same league as the “W” schools are! (socioeconomically, course offerings, etc.) Size-wise, yes, but their results are quite different from Wootton, Whitman, et al.</p>
<p>I attend a small (<250 students) private school in Washington, DC, one of the notoriously competitive parts of the country, and reading these descriptions of competitive schools, both public and private, is making me nervous. My school offers virtually no extracurriculars, let alone high-quality ones; I’m heavily involved in two of them (newspaper and Amnesty) and do a few other things outside of school, but compared to students from many other DC area schools, I doubt I look particularly impressive. Nobody here participates in olympiads or competes for awards; it just isn’t offered to us, and until I found CC I had no idea most of it existed.</p>
<p>Our activities, excluding theater and sports:</p>
<ul>
<li>Amnesty International, student council (does very little except organize the annual Winter Ball), a few culture clubs (Jewish, Arab, etc.) on the verge of extinction</li>
<li>an award-winning newspaper and a half-hearted literary magazine</li>
</ul>
<p>Other factors:
- generally apathetic student body
- virtually no counseling before mid- to late junior year</p>
<p>I would’ve loved to participate in some of the activities or competitions I’ve seen described here on CC, and I’m sure many students at my high school would be qualified for those things, but even though it’s a private school in a competitive area the actual environment isn’t conducive to high achievement unless you are extremely self-motivated (or interested in theater, in which case you’re all set). There is a list of clubs and activities on our school profile, but many of them have been defunct for years or exist only on paper; we don’t really participate in any competitions, and I don’t know where people on CC get their awards from, because at my school it’s just not done.</p>
<p>I’m sorry this is so long-winded, but what I’m mostly worried about is whether applicants from my school will be at a disadvantage compared to more applicants from more competitive schools (again, both public and private) in the same area. We have a decent but not stellar record of getting into top schools, but I’m sure athletes, legacies (most students come from from privileged backgrounds), and minorities play a role in that. With only 50-70 graduates each year, it’s hard to draw any significant conclusions.</p>
<p>Edited to add: I was told by my GC that a 700 on Math IIC is a very high score for my school, but based on what I’ve read on CC it seems as if it’s actually a pretty low percentile. I’m not sure what to take from that except maybe we’re not as impressive as the administration wants us to believe we are?</p>
<p>Camelia, it’s such a self selecting crowd that takes Math IIC that the percentiles are very skewed. A 700 is a very good score and you’ll get brownie points for taking Math II not I. </p>
<p>It’s hard to say if your administration is lying - it does sound like the EC situtation is less than optimal. Don’t forget though that you can have a life outside of school. My main EC (at a different DC area school) was Girl Scouts, my son’s main EC is a part time job. How are the college placements at your school? - sometimes a school with a good reputation (even if it’s possibly overrated) can do very well in the admissions game.</p>
<p>It is difficult when you have a small private school like your to see whether the school is actually an advantage or not in selective college admissions. I have a 6 year data base for our private school, similar to yours, but when you eliminate the legacies, development, “special” (indicates celebrity status of some sort), recruited athlete, URM, outreach, 1st gen to go to college, conservatory level musical talent, national recognition in a skill, categories, you are not left with a heck of a lot to work with. I have come to the conclusion that without those categories, it is a very, very tough go to get into HPY, and you have to be waaay up there in stats. I think being in a rigorous school known to the top colleges does give such candidates an advantage, since such kids seem to always get into the top school if they are a top student at our school, and this is not the case for many other schools where perfect test scores and grades equal about a 50% chance or less for admissions to HPY, but in reality there are so few case that such an applicant from here is not flagged with other preferences as well, that I cannot make it a definitive statement. I can say that the top two in every class for the last 6 years, even without a specialty asterik by their names, still got into HPY if they applied to those schools. Those kids all had very high test scores, so that is not a variable in this situation.<br>
But if you are not way up there Camelia, as you have noted it is difficult if not impossible to tell if being in your school is an advantage, disadvantage or a neutral situation. Since it is a given, don’t worry so much about it and focus on those things that are controllable. Top school admissions is such a crapshoot anyways that you can drive yourself nut obsessing about it, and worrying about an uncontrollable part of your profile, your school, is not beneficial. There are many of us who put so much thought and worry into picking a school for our kids, and come to find it was not the best choice given the particular circumstances of the kid. You can be in a school that overall gives optimum advantages to get into a top college, but you may fall into an individual situation where that school is not benefitting but even impeding your chances just the way things happen to work. This is not a 100% predictable, controllable thing. And not that important in the scheme of things. The value of a highschool to an individual is not just boosting his chances of getting him in a college.</p>
<p>cptofthehouse,
A little update for your post #47, most of the 24 kids who applied early to Yale were in fact deferred, but my son did manage to get in. I know he’s glad that he applied despite the odds, but I do wonder if any of the others would have gotten in had fewer students been applying.</p>
<p>Our high school is 1 for 1 MIT in 2006 and 1 for 1 for Harvard in 2005. No other applicants to either school in over a decade. Does this mean we have an advantage in admissions because we have so few students applying to top schools or does it mean that only highly qualified applicants apply to these schools? I don’t necessarily see a cause and effect here. There are many stories of 5, 10 even 13 or 14 students accepted to a top school from one high school class. Much like looking at admissions by SAT scores alone, I sometimes think we try to read more into a situation than is really there.</p>
<p>akdaddy, we have had numerous applicants to the top schools like Harvard, Yale, Princeton and especially MIT. We are reknown for our science and math, yet we get one or two kids into schools like MIT every two years.</p>
<p>Right, I did see your link to the scatterplots. It is an interesting situation but I am saying that maybe there is something besides number of applicants that is causing such a low acceptance rate. Many public schools have similar numbers with far higher success.</p>
<p>Taxguy,
I think the issue with your school may be too many similar kids [asian, hi sat’s, gpa’s, similar EC’s] trying to squeeze through small portals- 1st]-getting past the regional ADcoms for elite colleges, who see thousands of applications from similar kids [ from both your school and surrounding schools] and may decide to pick just a few kids each year to go on to the full admissions committee- and 2nd] colleges, especially Ivy’s, make admission decisions with the intent of put together a “diverse” class- athletes, kids from different geographic areas, alumni kids, development kids, financial aid kids, geniuses, etc. and not just a class made up of the highest scoring kids, and the result is that many asian kids, who do make up a large percent of hi scorers, are not accepted at many Ivys, in proportion to their stats, partly because there are so many more applying than can or will be accepted by those colleges, and still result a “diverse” student body. And finally, no one should forget about the “babyboomlet”- there are hundeds of thousands more students applying to college now than a few years ago, many to Ivy’s, and there are no more openings than there were 5 years ago.</p>
<p>I b*<strong><em>ed and moaned a few pages back about the high number of kids applying to the same schools ED and EA this year (and how it might affect my son). Well, so far, 10 of the 24 who applied early to Yale were accepted (including 5 athletes who were pre-accepted) and about half of the 29 who applied to Penn got in. It didn’t seem to matter how many applied, so much as the specifics of each student. For Yale, most of our athlete, early-acceptances were girls, so only one of the four non-athlete admits I know about is female. And each had a different set of ECs. Numbers didn’t matter as much as I thought they would, so I guess I was *</em>cough</strong> wrong. It happens.</p>
<p>I am familiar with three high schools. At one, 12 kids (out of a class of 94) applied early to Yale, and one got in (not necessarily the one you would have bet on, although a great choice). At the second, the students collaborated to make certain no more than 5 kids applied early to Harvard or Yale; 5 applied early to Yale (all very credible candidates, out of a class of 550) and none got in. At the third, 7 (out of 150) applied early to Yale, and 3 were accepted. So go figure. No athletes. URMs, legacies, legit developmental candidates – all deferred. (Actually, I don’t know all of the kids who were accepted at the third school, so one of them could be a URM.)</p>