<p>Beautifully put, MrMom. Great example and hopefully clear. </p>
<p>I guess I am sitting in the stands on the 3rd base side,waiting to hear the umps call.</p>
<p>I am here still, which has been a collosal waste of my day, because you keep responding to my posts in multiple posts. But its starting to feel like baiting, so please get your last word in.</p>
<p>When I respond to your posts in multiple posts of my own, it’s because you’ve edited your post and added something that I want to respond to after already responding to your unedited post. This is what happened with your post #95. No baiting intended.</p>
<p>People don’t improve if they don’t have to accept the consequences of their screw ups. The excuses are tiresome. I expect people to take ownership of their responsibilites. I guess I am funny that way.</p>
<p>No, that’s natural. If a guidance counselor makes a perfectly innocent mistake, I would expect him/her to make an immediate mea culpa (“take ownership”), learn from the mistake, and move on with the likelihood that the mistake would not be repeated. What I would not expect is for any college, realizing that the mistake was innocent and trusting that it would not happen again, to penalize other applicants at the counselor’s school. If something similar happens again involving the same counselor, that’s a pattern, and depending on the circumstances consequences effecting others than the original applicant may very well be warranted.</p>
<p>One of the best ways to learn is by making mistakes. Hopefully they’re not big ones and nobody gets hurt. Owning up to and fixing mistakes is also very important. Anyone who feels that they are going to be hammered for the first of any kind of innocent mistake will be much less likely to step forward with an admission and a plan to fix things.</p>
<p>If I was a school counselor and got that call from a school, I would be mortified, would tell the adcomm that I will look into it immediately and get back to them. Then I would call the student in for a little conversation. I would see what the reasoning was for declining an ED acceptance. If they got an EA from another school, which just “happened” to offer a better FA package (just as an example, as the FA packages for EA arent commonly released then) then I’d have the student an parents in for a conference and discuss wht to do, and tor them to understand the potential consequences of this behavior on the school in the future. I woudl then also have a conference call with the school that was declined, apologise profusely, and then arrange for an assembly with the senior class (probably the junior class as well) to review the policies and procedures of an ED application. But again, thats just me. I thake this stuff seriously.</p>
<p>Except for calling for a class assembly, I think that this is all very reasonable. (I think that there are better ways of reviewing ED policies and procedures.) If the applicant’s only reason for declining the ED school was because she liked school B better, and the high school had a policy of releasing final transcripts only to ED accepting schools, I would adhere to that policy. If there was no such policy, I would suggest that one be implemented.</p>
<p>If the college decides the school is culpable in any way, or if it didn’t do everything possible to prevent the violation of the agreement, the college is free to impose any sanction it sees as fit, although I doubt it’s going to be formally announced. Things will just mysteriously happen. Not saying it will happen every time a student breaks an ED agreement, and a GC with a long term good working arrangement with a school may be cut some slack, but it is totally up to the discretion of the admitting institution how it is handled.</p>
<p>I agree with this. Any sanctions, however, will not be arbitrarily imposed. Some questions need to be asked and answered before it can be determined how much culpability, if any the school/guidance counselor has. The college has something at stake too. They don’t want to suppress the number of applications that they receive, and they don’t want to lose out on the top students. And they don’t want to be seen as being anything but impartial.</p>
<p>You seem to think you have some sort of right to be admitted ED, and you really don’t.</p>
<p>Please point out to me my words that have conveyed this impression, because this is not what I think. What I believe is that colleges have an inherent self-interest in treating all applicants fairly, and if they decide to harm a particular category of applicants (say, all applicants from a particular high school), you can bet that they have thought carefully about it and feel that they have no other choice.</p>
<p>P.S. Go Red Sox</p>
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What I don’t understand is why you keep on talking about what you would or would not do, it is irrelevant because you are not an adcom. I don’t think any adcom is reading this thread so you are not going to convince them here.</p>
<p>What I don’t understand is why you keep on talking about what you would or would not do, because you are not an adcom. I don’t think any adcom is reading this thread so you are not going to convince them here.</p>
<p>So I have to be an admissions officer to make this argument? I’m talking about what I would expect to happen, based on personal experience and knowledge. Others obviously disagree, and that’s their prerogative.</p>
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<p>But “innocent mistakes” happen all the time, ones which aren’t bound by things like ED arrangements but still impact future students. I’m talking about when students turn down acceptances. If highly selective school X admits a student or two or three from such-and-such high school, and gets not a single one of those students to enroll because all of them got into even more selective/desireable school Y, the adcom cools on admitting students from that high school in the next year or two. Or more. </p>
<p>On the list of GC sins, mangling ED is small potatoes compared to what many GCs do when it comes to explaining financial aid, merit aid, and so forth.</p>
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<p>I am quite sure in any ED rejection, there is an enormous amount of back and forth and the school knows perfectly well what goes on. It’s still the admitting school’s call because it is a seller’s market. Maybe not in the case of Flagler, but the Ivies, sure it is. They really aren’t going to care about getting more apps from any given HS, let alone one that messes up their ED system, and could care less about top applicants from that school. No other HS will be sympathetic, they played by the rules after all, and will quite frankly be happy to see competition reduced.</p>
<p>Impartial? Really? Top schools would rather be feared (by GCs), than loved. That’s why they are so rough on schools that produce violations of the system.</p>
<p>They really aren’t going to care about getting more apps from any given HS, let alone one that messes up their ED system, and could care less about top applicants from that school.</p>
<p>Many colleges devote significant resources to increasing their applicant pool, even top schools, because there is constant pressure to increase their numbers year over year, or at least not fall off as much as the competition. A decision that would serve to decrease the number of applicants would not be made lightly. Likewise, colleges do care about attracting top applicants, because admitting these students pads their numbers, which in the long run (they hope) leads to increased donations. Would a college ignore a top applicant simply because he/she was from “that” school? I doubt it.</p>
<p>Impartial? Really?</p>
<p>Yes, really. You stated in an earlier post today that “perception becomes reality,” which is something that I also believe. Bad PR because a school is perceived as being less than partial to a specific group of applicants through no fault of the applicants is to be avoided. Negative bias towards a particular high school is easier to explain if the school has a pattern of not playing by the rules. When the problem is an isolated incident that can’t be attributed to the school staff, not so much. And that’s what I’ve been consistently saying: an admissions office will not punish future applicants from a specific high school based on the actions of one applicant from that school who violates an ED agreement, absent any knowledge or complicity of high school staff.</p>
<p>Top schools would rather be feared (by GCs), than loved.</p>
<p>That’s a bit different than what you described earlier: “ED, and all of college admissions really, is a sort of gentleman’s agreement, where we all agree to play by the rules…” If by “all” you are not including guidance counselors, please let me know. In any event, I disagree that top schools would rather be feared by GCs than loved. Maybe certain admissions officers operate that way, but I doubt it’s more than a handful. Top schools compete for top students among themselves, and a guidance counselor that gets dumped on by one top school can certainly steer his best students to another top school that doesn’t instill as much “fear.” Playing nicely (as gentlemen and ladies do) as opposed to being a jerk works in the self-interest of the admissions office.</p>
<p>Schools want to increase the number of applicants, sure. They also really really want to increase their yield. That’s one of the big reasons why ED exists. Why waste an ED admit on a student from “that” school that has a history of blowing them off?</p>
<p>Midd: I was one of the early proponents of one side of this argument on this surprisingly long thread – you were on the opposite side. It seems clear that neither will step back from our held beliefs. I’ll end with saying that I agree with you that colleges likely won’t dispropotionately penalize any school for minor or silly infractions of the ED process – there’s no reason for them to be mindless, brutish bullies. </p>
<p>But I veer dramatically from you on this sentiment:
As I have stated before (and others who have actually input QUOTES from admissions officers that verify this protocol), the selective schools that practice ED have a prime duty to protect the integrity of the ED system which includes blackballing or other sanctions. It’s understood that it may cost them a likely stand-out applicant or two. But the benefit to the college of an intact ED system is a much higher priority than a student for whom they can find 10 practically identical replacements.</p>
<p>I can’t budge on that premise.</p>
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<p>If the school has a “history” of its students blowing off ED agreements, that speaks to a larger issue than just the one student acting on his own scenario that I have been arguing about. If there’s a pattern/history at that school, it would be fair to assume that the guidance staff isn’t doing the job properly, and colleges that are aware of this would certainly be justified in treating ED applicants from the school differently. Hopefully, the colleges should also be communicating with the guidance staff to let them know there’s a problem.</p>
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<p>I wasn’t as clear as I should have been. When I was referring to “that” school in the paragraph you quoted, I meant a school that had an isolated instance of one violation of an ED agreement that didn’t involve counselor complicity. In other words, colleges won’t be “mindless, brutish bullies” and ignore a top applicant because of this type of infraction.</p>
<p>MiddKid86,
I don’t see how a kid can blow off an ED acceptance without the GC’s complicity. The GC has to send transcripts and LORs to any other schools to which the student applies.</p>
<p>My son’s school told us they put a one year moratorium on applications for any student who turns down an ED offer for anything but financial reasons. It was part of the information they gave us when we met to discuss our son’s ED application.</p>
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<p>The GC could be complicit in facilitating application to another school after knowing that an ED acceptance was turned down, and that would obviously reflect badly on the counselor and the high school. Back in the thread I described a not unreasonable scenario where a student applied ED to one school and EA to another at the same time (so GC had already submitted all school docs to both schools), received acceptances from both schools within days of each other, and then turned down the ED school in favor of the EA school without a reasonable justification for breaking the ED agreement. In that hypothetical situation, the GC would not be complicit in any way.</p>
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<p>Good on your son’s school for doing this.</p>
<p>The counselor signed on the agreement that he/she has advised the student on the binding agreement of the ED application. Whatever scenario does not change that binding agreement unless it is described as an exception which is due to financial situation. It does not matter if the student is also accepted EA or rolling or whatever mean by another school or not. The counselor has the right not to submit mid-year or final report to any other schools for that student unless the student has been agreed by the school to withdraw from the ED acceptance.</p>
<p>One could argue, that once the GC sends the final transcript to the EA school, which does not occur until May or June, long after the decline of ED, they are complicit, unless under court order to do so.</p>
<p>Perhaps the ED agreement needs to have the following clause added:</p>
<p>“Undersigned agrees that no final transcript can be sent to any school other than the ED school if accepted by the ED school in the ED period, unless released by the ED school due to inadequacy of the FA package.”</p>
<p>Hello, everyone! I am the OP of this thread, and I apologize for my absence of participation here due to school and work. I have literally read all (122 at this point) posts on this thread and have seen A LOT of mixed opinions and criticism. There are a few misconceptions, I am currently limited on time because I am school right now, but I will try to re-elaborate everything on here…</p>
<p>I have applied to many schools here in Florida. Flagler is the ONLY private school that I have applied to, and it is also the ONLY school that I’ve applied to that offers ED. Having completed multiple undergraduate college applications before, I completed Flagler’s application all by myself, like I have for many others. I read on their website that any student who applied for ED will have some sort of a priority in their application/earlier decision notification. I’ve been highly discouraged after not being accepted into even the weakest schools here, so I decided to play the game and increase my chances of acceptance by applying for ED.</p>
<p>Like I mentioned before, money is not an issue. So, paying the fine or the private tuition is not a factor here. Keeping that in mind, I saw the punishment of ignoring ED as just a negligible fine, and I recklessly carried on. What I have found out here is that by ignoring the ED, Flagler may or may not negatively publicize my name to other schools that I have applied to where they may then reject me for pulling out of an ED contract. That, and other students from my school might be ignored by Flagler because I decided to jump ship.</p>
<p>I have made my decision to IMMEDIATELY call Flagler BY PHONE as soon as I return home, request that my application to placed into RD, and then strictly request an e-mail or a letter back home confirming that I have opted to be placed into RD from ED and then keep that written document as proof. So, I would like to thank everyone here for their valuable and heeded inputs.</p>
<p>Now, onto the last topic here… My GC… After completing the application for Flagler, I must submit my GC’s name and e-mail so that Flagler may contact her, and request her to send transcripts and senior course schedule and what not, with a given username and password where she can safely turn it all in on some online system that they have. She did all of that for me without telling me personally, but I obviously knew she was going to do it because I gave Flagler her information.
SHE IS NO WAY AT FAULT, I UNDERSTOOD WHAT I WAS DOING WAY BEFORE HAND!!
Yes, I purposely applied to Flagler with the ED option with the INTENT of playing the system and attempting to increase my chances of acceptance. Yes, I understand what I did and how it is completely unethical, and everybody here has affected my decision and caused me to initiate an immediate change in my application decision.
I AM AT COMPLETE FAULT!!</p>
<p>Again, thank you everybody, people I know (MrMom62), and people I don’t know, for your wonderful advice and information to back up your statements. I hope now that most of you can fully understand the situation here, understand what I have done, and how I plan to fix it. This thread was very helpful to me, and I hope that it will inevitably be helpful to others.</p>
<p>I will be requesting that my application to placed into the RD pool immediately after school today.</p>
<p>Thanks everybody.</p>
<p>@MrMom62,
It does not need to add that clause as the original agreement already requires the promptly withdrawal from any submitted application and not to submit any new application. It does not make sense to submit any mid-year or final report to any school other the ED accepted one if he/she follow the agreement.</p>
<p>OP, you did the right thing! </p>
<p>Your honor has been restored.</p>
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<p>I agree, and I hadn’t considered that a final year transcript would be required by the matriculating college when I wrote my last post. If the college requires that the transcript come directly from the high school, that’s a huge potential problem for a student that breaks an ED agreement. If, however, the college will accept a transcript sent by the student, that’s a different matter. I think that a high school would have a hard time denying a request for a transcript from a recent graduate, who could then do whatever he/she wanted to do with it.</p>
<p>Does anyone know if matriculating colleges require that the year end transcript be sent directly from the high school?</p>