Need Advice-Is this appropriate?

calmom
Tue, 29 Sep 2009 04:54:38 +0000

Quote:
Your daughter was an exception. There are certainly exceptions, but a read of any common data set will tell you they are few and far between. See the under 3.6 thread and others where parents have posted their results for otherwise strong candidates with one weak stat.

There are few parents posting what you are–that their kid got in anyway.
You’re really saying that one out of four freshmen at a typical highly competitive school was a recruitable athlete or had some other very strong hook?



I think hmom is dead wrong – I listed 4 different schools where my daughter was admitted despite bottom quartile scores. She certainly wasn’t an “exception” 4 times over – it wasn’t an accident, and the reach schools were targeted to fit my daughter’s strengths. Olymom’s poker analogy is much more apt – you’ve got to work with the cards in your hand. My daughter simply was able to focus on her strengths and identify the colleges where we thought those strengths would be the greatest asset.

I actually was right 100% the time on my daughter’s reaches. My daughter also applied to a high reach (Brown) despite my refusal to pay the application fee because I didn’t feel she had a chance – it didn’t fit the “underenrolled department” criteria; hence, as I predicted, they did not accept her.

There is a point at which scores really are too low, and that can be identified by looking at more detailed breakdowns of score ranges in the common data set, when available. But it’s not the 25% mark – its much lower than that.

I think the problem is that the same people who tend to place great weight on stats, particularly test scores, often also evaluate schools by broad factors such as reputation and ranking, rather than looking for a mutual fit. By “mutual fit” I mean a place where the kid will be happy and where the kid also offers something that the college is likely to want and will make the kid stand out among applicants.