Need Advice-Is this appropriate?

calmom
Tue, 29 Sep 2009 05:53:16 +0000

To BobbyCT-- I am delighted to know that your daughter’s meeting with the dept. head went so well – and I would think that her chances of admission are excellent. Obviously she has made a good impression on someone who hopes to have her as a student – I can’t think of a more ringing endorsement.

The poster who suggested to you that your daughter’s scores put her at the bottom of the class academically because of weaker “credentials” is dead wrong. My daughter is a senior and her GPA puts her in the top 10% of her graduating class; she has won academic awards and special recognition along the way. Standardized test scores provide useful information to an ad com, but there is no way to know a students’ credentials without looking at the whole picture. My d. has had to work very hard at her school – those A’s certainly don’t come easy – but she has never had the sense of being less capable than her peers.

You haven’t said what your daughter’s intended major is, but the information that the department head has gained about your daughter’s intellect and potential from talking to her is probably much more significant to the university than a test score. They don’t want to know how good your daughter is at filling in the right bubbles on a multiple-choice exam – they want to know what she will contribute to class, how she approaches problems, how she thinks and how she expresses herself. The problem is, for most other students, they don’t have that sort of information from first hand observation – they have to rely on second-hand information from letters of recommendation, hope that their applicants didn’t get too much outside help with their essays, and look at GPA and test scores as the only objective data.

Assuming that your daughter is accepted to this college, when she gets there she will already have a mentor in the form of someone on the faculty who feels invested in her. So if anything that will give her a leg up over many of her classmates.

Anyway… don’t listen to the naysayers. There is absolutely no way that Department Chair would be willing to give your daughter his enthusiastic endorsement unless she was 100% academically qualified for that school. The last thing he wants is a student who would have to struggle to keep up.