Ranking Admissions Factors

yourworld
Sun, 22 Jul 2007 01:35:01 +0000

Depends on your target schools. Some schools dont even req test scores.
If you are talking about the selective schools, your order is fairly acurrate except I would swap 4 with 3. Having said that, the answer you are looking for is more complicated than that really - I know how we like our answer to be in one easy bite but reality seldom is. For example, your class rank is really influenced by your curriculum along with the overall competitiveness of the student body,isn’t it ? Likewise your GPA is influenced by your course work and in turn by the no of honour classes your school offers. So everything is entertwined. I think one reasonable way is to look at your GPA first, and look at the supporting evidence of what that GPA represented. Was that GPA accomplished in highly competitive environment? Did the student take advantages of all the resources available to him/her? If the student is in an environment short on resources, how did the student shows his/her aspirations. So I think you left out one thing, the nature of your high school. Maybe that’s why you put location in at #12. Then there’s another approach favored by many schools that looks at native ability to provide solutions and grasp concepts as measured by standard test scores. It is easier to adminster and screen a large number of applications that way. In that case #1 and #2 may swap.

Finally in my experience with top 15 schools, trying to figure out the order of importance in the top 4 or 5 factors you listed is missing the point. I suppose you want to rank them so you can concentrate on the top factors at the expense of the others. At these schools you pretty much have to be firing on all cylinders and then luck to get in, because of overwhelming number of highly qualified applicants.