On the ratings issue, it might be helpful to reflect on what Yale said in their podcast. So here is one of their earlier statements on this:
[Hannah] All right, so you’ve probably noticed that we haven’t talked much about scoring applications. We use write-ups in our work cards to keep track of what we’re reading. And we use some ratings, but not really in the way that you would think.
[Mark] Yeah. I think most people imagine that the process is really quantitative, and that there’s a rubric that we’re using, and that, as an applicant, your goal is to maximize your score on each of these different sections. And you are thinking about dividing the application up into these different segments and trying to score the most points in these different areas.
.And that’s really not how it works, . . . because they’re not going to be added together at any point. It’s not going to be split into an algorithm, and we’re not going to rank candidates like we might rank you know gymnast floor exercises, where Simone Biles is obviously going to be at the top because of her largest combined score.
[Hannah] Right.
[Mark] So how are you using the ratings in your process?
[John] Yeah. I think the way that we– or a lot of us think about ratings are indicators to not only ourselves, but other people that are eventually involved in the admissions process for where strengths of the file lie. And so I think the main takeaway, when I’m rating parts of a file, is that they will never be standing alone as a number or a digit in a vacuum. These are ratings that we use to help us better understand the way a file has been read, the way a file may be presented. And none of those ratings are ever looked at independent of a full conversation with so many people in the room.
In a later episode, they elaborate some more:
[Hannah] This [the Activities section] is actually one of the first things that we see when we read an application, and it’s really helpful to lay a foundation for the read, to understand where a student’s presence is felt. And it’s one of the first things we share when we read a work card to the committee. You’ve heard about our committee process in prior episodes, and our read and presentation of these things is pretty cut and dry. We say what you do, sort of maybe the level of commitment, and what kind of impact you’ve had.
[Mark] And we use a rating system. It is sort of a shorthand, though. I want to make clear, this is designed to help us communicate with other members of the admissions committee. It is not being fed into some sort of rubric somewhere.
[Hannah] Right.
[Mark] And we do not have a formula that’s going to award a certain number of points for being a varsity athlete or being the lead in the school musical, or something like that. It is a nine point scale, but the overwhelming majority of applicants, including admitted students, cluster right in the middle. We’re using it to communicate quickly to the members of the committee when they’re looking at our printed slate. So we talked about this in an earlier episode about committee. We can look down a sheet of paper at a series of applicants and get a sense of where the strengths lie in a particular application. It’s like I said, a little bit like reading the matrix, and this can be one of those things, where if we’re about to talk about an applicant and I see a really high value on this extracurricular rating, I know, oh, the student has really distinguished themselves there. But that is not the case for a lot of applicants, including a lot of our admitted students.
[Hannah] Right, right. So just so you know, if you completely left this section blank, you might get a one on that scale. A student who is active in a typical collection of activities without a whole lot of distinction might get a five, and someone who is extremely unusual in their commitment or distinction would get a nine, but that might be an Olympic athlete or a Tony Award winner or something like that.
[Mark] I have never seen a nine.
[Reed] Yes.
[Mark] I don’t know if you have, I have never seen a nine. I have never given a nine, I’ve never been in committee with a nine. I know they exist, but–
[Hannah] Yeah.
[Mark] It’s very, very rare.
[Hannah] Right. Maybe one or two a year.
[Mark] Yeah, I would say probably 99% of our admitted students are rated somewhere between a four and a seven on the scale. And you heard that correctly, right. We admit students who haven’t really distinguished themselves with their activities outside of the classroom. It might be for some students a really important part of their application, or it might not be very important at all. There might be other parts of the application that are really making the case for the student. Remember, it’s not part of a formula.
[Reed] While this place is indeed a place to brag a little bit about yourself, I think it’s important to remember that this is only in service of a bigger goal, which is to help us understand who you are. The context that you’re coming from, and help us see how you’ll engage on our campus. College students are super, super engaged, active people outside of the classroom. Many people are going to tell you that they learned so much from their extracurriculars and their college activities, as sort of compared to their courses. They’ve learned lessons in leadership and collaboration and creativity. And so we want students who are really going to be engaged outside of the classroom here. You’re coming to learn, yes, but you’re also coming to live and to engage in a community.
[Hannah] Yeah.
[Mark] And in most cases, this kind of evaluation we’re doing, it’s not about matching up a specific applicant and their activity with a sort of Yale analog to that activity, right? There are more than 400 organizations on our campus. That’s going to be true at any place that you’re applying, and it’s not our job as the admissions office to make sure that every single one of those organizations has members who are interested and have experiences in those areas.
[Hannah] Right.
[Mark] So in a nutshell, to answer this question, what are we looking for here, I would describe it as we’re looking for students who are seeking to maximize opportunities around them and contribute to their communities in the process. I’ll say that again. We want to find students who are maximizing opportunities and contributing to their communities in the process. As we try to evaluate how your activities in high school might demonstrate this, we have to incorporate a ton of context.
[Hannah] Yeah.
[Mark] Right? Just the number of activities, the kinds of activities that are available, very dramatically from school to school, from community to community. For some students, their individual opportunities are limited because of maybe family commitments or work commitments. And let’s make very clear– those kinds of things can be just as valuable, or even more valuable, than traditional school-based extracurriculars.
[Reed] I can certainly think of many times when I’ve been deeply impressed by applicants and what they’ve done outside of the classroom, but so often, that is from the amount of hours that they put into a job or into taking care of a younger sibling, not just research accomplishments or music accomplishments or other things they’re doing that might be more in a traditional sort of academic lens.
[hannah] Yeah.
[Mark] Yeah, so the types of choices that students have available to them vary dramatically, and even just how much choice you as an individual applicant, is going to vary dramatically. When you have choices, though, what we hope is that this activities list reveals something about you. We hope that it shows how you’ve chosen to spend your time. We hope it reflects your interests, your values, and the kind of contributions that you’ve made to one or more shared experiences with others. And I think that’s a really important point. We are not just thinking about this in terms of your Individual achievement and sort of how you’ve gone along your own individual vector. We are very, very interested in how these kinds of activities have involved your work with groups of other people and your contributions to shared goals.
[Hannah] Yeah, which, by the way, is why it makes no sense to spend your time doing things you don’t enjoy only because you think it’ll help you get into college.
[Mark] I really dislike when I hear students sort of complaining about, oh, I’m doing this, and I’m doing this, and I’m doing this, because that’s how I’m going to get into college. It’s like, no.
[Hannah] Right.
[Mark] You’re approaching it completely wrong.
[Hannah] Yeah.
[Mark] You need to be doing things that you like doing. If you’re not doing things that you like, you’re making it harder for us to figure out who you are, right? If your activities list is full of things that don’t reflect you honestly and openly, we’re going to be scratching our head wondering, who is this person? This just doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.
OK, so (very) long story short, this is explaining how on the one hand, yes they might put down numbers, but on the other, any attempt to reduce that to a formula is doomed, because this is all embedded in holistic review concepts.
And obviously by the end, the Yale folks are in fact sounding just like the MIT folks in terms of what they are advising kids to do. And I don’t think they are lying. I think they are really trying to express how their readers think, how they discuss things in committees, and so on.