<p>Quantmech - I am beginning to believe Harvard went to the single optional essay to eliminate the weight of essays altogether (parent1986 should get additional points)although the cynics have said on other threads that they just want to collect application fees by making the supplement very simple. </p>
<p>I was being sarcastic when I said teachers have it in because LORs are the deciding factor if essays and ECs are eliminated from the equation. I do understand it is no fun admitting someone solely based on the statistics you mentioned but the thread started on Mr. Shelby’s assertion that Ivy’s don’t care for merit. However, we seem to be no closer to resolving why some students get passed over like Silverturtle or the hotly debated Dallas kid on this thread. Is it that each college thinks some of these students are expecting to attend a different school and ignore them?</p>
<p>I have seen mention of QMP. Short of researching all your posts to get to the bottom of it, what does it stand for?</p>
<p>I don’t believe you ever will discover why one kid is passed over and one accepted, unless you sit on an admissions committee. Unless you see all the kid’s complete admissions packages, you cannot truly judge. </p>
<p>They are building a class. If it was all stats based, everyone would get in. It’s not based on that alone.</p>
<p>Maybe an admissions essay is simply a tipping point. Or athletic merit. Or demonstrated interest. Or musical talent. Or…whatever.</p>
<p>Read “The Gatekeepers”. It’s somewhat predictable and somewhat random, this process of college admissions.</p>
<p>Once they remove the URM, International, legacy, athletics, questbridge, other hooks, super achievement in something etc, we are left with those plain hardworking do well in everything kids. They account for something like 30-40%? We are only trying to predict how they admitted.</p>
<p>It is the $64,000 question, Texaspg. I just don’t think it’s possible to truly understand it, since we can’t see how they all compare with the subjective details on their applications.</p>
<p>You can have the proper stats and say all the right things on an application. </p>
<p>Maybe you have killer essays but not the best recommendations. Or you have excellent recommendations, but not enough of whatever unique X quality you are looking for in an applicant. </p>
<p>Or it can be about random adcoms, exhausted from reading essays and files and they are simply too tired to be impressed with an applicant’s file.</p>
<p>Lots of unknowns. It would be great if we could have a formula, but I just am disinclined to think we can truly figure it out. </p>
<p>And there are probably 5 or 10 times as many of them (with “near maximum” stats – all A grades in the most rigorous schedules at their schools, 700+ in each SAT section, etc. – and no glaring defects like poorly written essays, ghost-written essays that look ghost-written, poor interview reports or teacher/counselor recommendations) as there are admission spots in the super-selective schools. Distinguishing between them may well be like splitting hairs, and it may be hard to distinguish the result from a lottery (and if the admissions committee did it all over again with the same applicants, perhaps in a different random order, would it get the same result?).</p>
<p>I think it is important for an applicant to think about what he/she could offer a school. It is beyond just being an obscure instrument player or a Div I athlete, a school is a living community, it needs all kinds of people, but it probably doesn’t need obnoxious, self centered people. Stats are important, but if there are a dozen candidates with very similar stats, but 2 of them have certain skills or personality that could enrich the campus, those 2 may get admittance and others not. We have talked often of Asian machines, they have very high stats, but a lot of them seem to focus on competitions rather than ECs which would give back to the community. After admitting few of those high achievers, a school probably needs some students who would be in the student government, run events, be in the school plays…</p>
<p>I would think “total package” is probably more important when one is applying to top tier liberal arts schools, whereas engineering schools probably care more about pure stats.</p>
<p>UCB - I keep considering the proudmomofS’ original message.</p>
<p>If you look at the general population, no one cares whether someone from Exeter got picked over them or someone from a little town in Kansas. Following the idea that all politics are local, the bafflement is purely based on picks within their own school. If no one gets picked, they are fine as opposed to number 15 being admitted and number 1-14 being turned down. If you look at most threads in April or all those Asian kids threads asking why, it is always one of disbelief at utter unfairness of the process (no one has answered why some Asian males that are best in their schools in California have been passed over for someone much lower down except tell them they need to be content with where they got in).</p>
The thing is, though - they DO need to be content with where they got in, if they want to get all they can from their college experience. Because they can’t know why they weren’t admitted, and neither can we - and the decision wouldn’t be reversed even if they were told why. And I don’t think there’s anything nefarious , unfair, or underhanded in kids 1-14 being rejected but kid 15 being accepted - however infrequently that happens. If we’re talking about CC threads, we have only the rejected student’s take on it - so yes, it goes back to the fact that the rejected student does not know what the admissions committee saw. From the school’s point of view, it’s accepting the best students for its entering class. Why would Harvard intentionally overlook 14 more qualified kids - what would Harvard get out of that?</p>
<p>Frazzled1 - That is truly the question right, why are they ignoring 14 people and taking the 15th. Really does nt matter what Harvard gets out of it, would like to know why.</p>
I think it’s important to note that this is probably very infrequent. The majority of students at top schools are top students in their high schools. And I suspect that the majority of those who aren’t top students in the high school have something that makes it pretty obvious why they were accepted over students with better stats. if the recruited football player gets in over the valedictorian, you may grouse about it, but you don’t ask why.</p>
<p>I will admit that it’s often very mysterious why a particular student is accepted to schools A and B, but rejected from C and D.</p>
<p>With regard to students admitted to one or more of the most competitive schools, but not all and perhaps not to their first choice, I really do wonder how much yield has to do with it. There are scholarships which exist to entice students away from more competitive schools. There have been threads about the Robertson at UNC. How much does HYPSM have to want a student to offer them a place if they know they are going to have to compete with such a scholarship to get that student? Of course, applying EA or ED pretty much eliminates that scenario. I wonder if concerns with yield may play a role in what some might perceive to be unusual outcomes? Is it possible some students will be exceptional enough that most or all schools may want to take a chance in getting them even if it looks like they might be heading elsewhere?</p>
<p>@texaspg–QMP started out standing for QuantMechPrime, as kind of a lame joke: QuantMechPrime, as in “distinguished from QuantMech” or as in “the derivative of Quant Mech,” both standard mathematical notation (groan here). xiggi suggested the interpretation as QuantMechProgeny. Works for me.</p>
<p>SamuraiLandshark, I agree with you, that unless you sit with an admissions committee you won’t know why a few of the students with excellent objective (known) qualifications were not admitted. </p>
<p>Where we differ is in the remark “Unless you see all the complete admissions packages, you cannot truly judge.” That suggests that a majority of intelligent, well-meaning people who reviewed all the applications would reach the same conclusions. I don’t actually buy this. I would guess that if the applications were reviewed by the same admissions committee de novo in a later year, or even in a different order in the same year (and the memories of the decisions in the earlier decisions could be dropped), some of the outcomes would be the same (probably a large majority), but some would not. I’d expect that the changes would particularly affect the students with excellent objective statistics, EC’s, and letters of recommendation, and at least reasonably good essays.</p>
<p>The fact that different Ivies compose their classes differently (i.e., some top students are accepted by some and rejected by others) tends to support this view. I don’t think all of the decisions differ in an explicable way, e.g., because Harvard needs someone who plays the oboe, Yale needs someone who plays the tuba, and Princeton needs someone who plays the French horn.</p>
<p>To oldfort, post #467: If you look at the students’ posts on CC, as I have been doing since 2005 (“I need to go home and re-think my life”), I believe that you will see that a very small fraction of the top students who have been rejected are actually “obnoxious, self-centered” people. A few do come across that way, but I am willing to cut them a little slack because they are upset by the decisions. The majority don’t come across that way, though.</p>
<p>There are top students who are really good people, who wind up not being accepted by the HYPMS group. silverturtle is one–from all indications I have, a wonderful human being.</p>
<p>Why would anyone compound the unhappiness of a truly top student who happened to have unlucky outcomes, by suggesting that it is the student’s fault, or that the letters of recommendation weren’t good, or that the student is obnoxious and self-centered? It’s just not true, in a large number of cases.</p>
<p>Since we’re on the topic of kids who might be “shut out” of Ivies or other highly selective schools, I will beat the drum I always beat on this, and say that I think some kids who want top schools don’t apply to enough of them. If you apply to Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and your state flagship, your chances of being “shut out” of Ivies is significant, even if you have superior stats.</p>
<p>I’d also like to comment that the tag “robotic” sometimes gets thrown at top students who are rejected by top schools. I have never met an applicant who actually is robotic. In my opinion, this is one of those labels with discriminatory impact, that would be better dropped.</p>
<p>I agree that I haven’t met any kids who, in person, seemed “robotic.” However, I do think that there are kids who might have difficulty making themselves look interesting on paper because their activities are very similar to many other kids. Perhaps we could come up with a less perjorative term, such as “insufficiently differentiated.”</p>
<p>I agree with this if the main goal is getting into a top school. However, a student seriously interested in a particular field of study may only apply to a couple of top schools, which actually have the best departments (or are perceived to have the best :))</p>
<p>I think there are many students (mine included) who are particularly interested in attending college with lots of very high-achieving students. They do need to understand that this environment is offered at more than four colleges, though.</p>