<p>Pinatas are only used by second tier schools and large state flagships.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>But your name doesn’t make it into the pinata unless you’ve met the a-g requirements.</p>
<p>I thought the first tier schools would dro[p off the balcony of the Ritz or the 4 seasons, not the radisson… Times must be tough.</p>
<p>The secret’s out. Now comes bribery of the unpaid interns.</p>
<p>Is it against TOS to post a youtube link? Hope not. This is a little skit done by On Harvard Time on the topic of admissions:</p>
<p>[Inside</a> a Harvard Admissions Decision (On Harvard Time) - YouTube](<a href=“Inside a Harvard Admissions Decision (On Harvard Time) - YouTube”>Inside a Harvard Admissions Decision (On Harvard Time) - YouTube)</p>
<p>Ritz or Four Seasons would be too obvious. They use the Radisson. Sometimes the Ramada Inn, if the Radisson is booked.</p>
<p>They sure have a lot of fun rippin’ on Yale.</p>
<p>[OnHarvardTime's</a> Channel - YouTube](<a href=“OnHarvardTime - YouTube”>http://www.youtube.com/user/OnHarvardTime#p/a/97E1110667323339/1/4KpSdXZy0eo)</p>
<p>The Radisson or ramada-- what about maybe the Masters Inn? (get it? groan…)</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>For a 2400, one needs to have 3 800s. For a 36, one needs to have 2 or more 36s and 2 or fewer 35s, i.e., 35.5=35.75=36.0. I guess the number of having 4 36s must be less than 100 each year. At least one poster mentioned that his son got a 36.0.</p>
<p>Well, ok, rejected applicants with perfect scores = the ultimate minuscule niche interest group. I sympathize, anyway.</p>
<p>^ and if I felt that such students didn’t have equally fine alternatives elsewhere, I also would “sympathize.”</p>
<p>lake42ks - there are 3 36s in my kid’s high school (1 April, 2 June). It is a public school. The announcement in April had a quote from ACT head that there are about 400 or 500 36s each year.</p>
<p>@epiphany, #531: Excellent opportunities elsewhere, yes; so the alternatives are fine, I agree. </p>
<p>Equally fine? That’s another thread, longer than this one. I am not so sure that they really are equally fine, particularly given the reductions in the cost of HYPSM for students from lower-middle to middle class, largely pulling financial considerations out of the picture, and perhaps even making HYPSM cheaper than the alternatives. </p>
<p>Plus, it’s all-round happier to be accepted everywhere than to be rejected at several places–I would find your viewpoint that rejection doesn’t warrant sympathy more persuasive if your daughter had not been admitted everywhere.</p>
<p>LoremIpsum’s son, who got a 36.0, skipped 12th grade and went to Brown this year, if I remember correctly. I sense they are OK with that.</p>
<p>3 36s in your school, texaspg?! That’s amazing. Are they true 36ers or 35.5ers (as if that matters)? Being in the ACT country helps, isn’t it? I doubt any of those kids aren’t smart and reached that at the first or second try. But, their scores could hurt them more than help them.</p>
<p>I am not sure they differentiate between 35.5 and 36 but I could be wrong. They had 3 in the school district last year if not a single a school. Texas is not really ACT country unlike some midwestern states where it is mandatory (the school district paid for one free test this year for either SAT or ACT).</p>
<p>Here is the blurb - Nationally, roughly one-fourth of 1 percent of students receive a top score. Among test takers in the class of 2010, only 588 of nearly 1.6 million students earned a composite score of 36.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>^ Additional logical fallacies from QM. (Students are owed “happiness” by elite colleges ;); admisisons to elite colleges provide “happiness”; students who are “admitted everywhere” possibly don’t deserve to be admitted everywhere, since it means that students whom parents judge as equally fine have been rejected.) And such rejections are unacceptable – except that such rejections are mathematically inevitable.</p>
<p>I will point out that an underlying premise which silently controls your remarks is that your judgment about who does and does not “deserve” admission is superior to that of admissions officers at the respective colleges. (i.e., you could not believe that a student in your region was not accepted; it “must be” faulty admissions decisions – except that again, you actually never saw the entire file of the student of whom you speak; you had some core information about him, and that’s all; and you had no comparative information, which is the point I made previously). When we’re talking about admissions of unhooked students to elite schools, we’re talking Wonderful, More Wonderful, Most Wonderful, and Difficult to Imagine Wonderful. People who are below wonderful are not in the running even. And people who for any reason have not sufficienty expressed (or had their teachers sufficently express) their true wonderfulness, are in trouble in those competitions.</p>
<p>Re my daughter:
She’s hardly alone. There are lots of cross-admits; they have occurred before her admission year and lots more occurred after and still occur every year. Cross-admits deserve their admissions, including all those I haven’t seen. And while cross-admits are an indicator of several committees at several different colleges observing some important commonalities about those students, students with multiple rejections from those same colleges have been subject to similar scrutiny.</p>
<p>Do you remember the story of andi’s son?
<a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/parents-forum/47867-were-picking-up-pieces-but-what-went-wrong[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/parents-forum/47867-were-picking-up-pieces-but-what-went-wrong</a></p>
<p>(I copied the url, which is searchable on CC as We’re picking up the pieces, but what went wrong, but when one clicks on this link, it goes nowhere. Hmmm.)</p>
<p>Ostensibly had everything it takes (brains + talent), deserving admission to several of these top schools. However, after careful reflection and much discussion, the family realized that (a) the college choices had not been diverse enough, and (b) the application efforts themselves could have been better.</p>
<p>He took an enriching gap year, applied to MIT & some others, was accepted to MIT and went there. It’s not that his family did not have an entire online community “sympathizing” with them; they most certainly did, and I was among those verbally & emotionally sympathizing, including on- and offline conversations about that. But just because there was abundant sympathy does not mean that the initial results were off. </p>
<p>I witnessed, and participated in, a very similar situation locally, recently. A student of mine (just like andi’s son) was applying to schools similar to his peers (though not as rarefied as andi’s son’s list). And my student’s peers had virtually identical scores & grades to my student. However, my student refused to put effort into his essay, whereas they understood what was required, and submitted to those requirements, because the goal mattered to them. My student (like many students, including many on CC) claimed that the essay “shouldn’t” matter, and that therefore, since he had so little respect for such an exercise, he was going to do the minimum necessary. The “tragedy” was that all those peers got into the schools he applied to; he did not. </p>
<p>Many might “sympathize,” but others might say that he made his own bed. I discussed the situation later with an officer at a different college. I said that I blamed myself for not being successful in persuading the student how important the essay was, especially for that college. The ad officer’s response was No, I hadn’t failed; rather, the student was not ready to attend that college if he wasn’t mature enough to put aside his personal distaste for a crucial element of the application package to that college.</p>
<p>And just to correct, my daughter did not “get in everywhere” because she only applied to 3 Ivies, not all 8 + Stanford, which many students do now. She was only interested in those 3 Ivies + Berkeley, and had she not had her EA acceptance to Y, she would have had a long list like others do.</p>
<p>I think it was the 2003 Admissions year (or was it '04) when Yale had a real blowout in the EA round. When a different meltdown occurred elsewhere (I think it was Columbia) the following year, I went into the CC archives and read a long post by a Yale reject, who ended up going to Providence College for undergrad, and then Yale for grad school, and she was thrilled. (What’s to “sympathize” about?)</p>
<p>There’s also the thread by newmassdad, whose precocious daughter took her SAT’s a litle too early and did not do as competitively against her peers (therefore), but who is extremely bright & talented. (an andi’s-son type). She was rejected at Ivies, and at first Dad was very upset. She ended up at Chicago, where she did some fantastic research and had great opportunities. I think she was PBK and maybe a Rhodes scholar going to Oxford.</p>
<p>Sometimes rejections make people redouble their efforts and are wonderful learning moments: they are able to reflect on what “went wrong,” and/or be philosophical about it and re-gear. If they truly have the stuff that others claim about them, they in fact turn that negative energy into something positive and “show” the world. My student, btw, has done the same thing. Out of defeat he snatched victory, leveraging an opportunity at an elite U as a fast transfer. For all I know, he may now be outpacing all those peers whose admissions were more instant.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>In which case, a few things follow:</p>
<p>(1) it is always up to any such student and their family & school support group, knowing what the possible gains are in such an opportunity, to maximize the chances of admission to high-financial-aid U’s by making sure every “i” is dotted and every “t” is crossed, in that package. I have no evidence that that did not occur in the situation (for example) in your region; I do not know that the package was imperfectly expressed. And you do not know that the application was perfectly expressed. I will tell you, though, that if the student’s intellect was truly a soaring one, and the application truly expressed those heights of excellence, said student, had he applied to many elites, would most likely have been admitted to at least one. So my eyebrows are raised (as with andi’s son) if there are zero returns on effort, if indeed the applicant is superb. Admissions officers are trained to recognize Superb.</p>
<p>(2) Like it or not, the particular e.c. (not only the level of accomplishment in that e.c.) is now an important aspect of admission. There’s no way of knowing, without seeing the competition, what variations in e.c. achievement & commitment are being compared, aside from a general description of Very Good, Excellent, Outstanding. </p>
<p>(3) The statement of purpose in the app is more important than many students realize. Those who are able to be precise and coherent are the ones who have the most chance to be clearly remembered by the committee. (My student admitted later, that same admission year, that he had been fuzzy about his reasons for enrolling. Yeah, no kidding. He was not ready to be focused until just about the time admissions results were due.) So even writing a great essay is not in itself enough of a communicator. As with all “insane” competitions (professional athletics, Olympics, jobs in dense markets), lack of care in one area can sink an entire effort. Every ingredient is crucial, when you’re talking about acceptance rates of less than 9%.</p>
<p>So again, if every element was perfect, and the student’s intellect was demonstrably on a par with those who are being accepted that year to that same U, either such excellence was imperfectly communicated, or there were reasons having merely to do with national variety (elites are of course national campuses) and/or e.c. diversity which the student did not quite meet. Could it have been a fluke in his case? Yes, of course, but the flukes are a lot rarer than most on CC understand. If a student applies to only one Elite, the chances of admission are narrower, and it can “look” as if the whole process is arbitrary and random, but it’s unfair to project this way, because (for example) Harvard is looking for slightly different things than Columbia is looking for. (That student might have had better results by choosing Yale or Stanford, if a single school was chosen, than if he or she chose H.)</p>
<p>What appealed to my second daughter in a U, and what she wanted in location, was different than what her sister wanted. Yet they both needed equal (heavy) levels of financial aid. It was simply tough luck for my younger D that only one Ivy was a good match for her, and that that Ivy lost all of her application materials, and that the other private colleges she selected had less generous financial aid to offer. Therefore, she chose a reach public with great financial aid. Like my older D, she is hardly alone. Lots of students on this board are in the same spot. Life’s “unfair.” What else is new?</p>
<p>Right about now I’m glad I’m 3000 miles away from some of these schools…</p>
<p>epiphany - stellar posts 536 and 537!</p>
<p>
I agree with this, but I think some of the outcomes would make sense if you were a fly on the wall in the admissions committee. But with you, I think that some of the decisions may be based on caprice, mistakes, misunderstandings, unstated prejudices, and who knows what else. If you happen to have the same name as the bully who beat up the admissions officer in third grade, that could affect your results. And the fact that these super-top students who get rejected by one or two top schools usually get admitted by several other top schools makes me think that some decisions are made for reasons like this, because they are being made by fallible human beings. </p>
<p>If a student who looks like a superstar gets rejected by a significant number of top schools, then I have to wonder whether there is some unknown bad thing in the packet–it could also be a mistake, or an unexpectedly bad rec, or even something that is being misunderstood.</p>