<p>@ Sikorsky</p>
<p>amen to your last comment.</p>
<p>My view (without a lot of data) is that test scores are used as some minimum standard, in a first pass perhaps to cull the applications. So I am guessing the hurdle there is lower than you might expect. Not everybody at Harvard has perfect test scores. Can being a star athlete, wealthy donor, published poet or Academy award winning child star make up for test scores below this theoretical floor? My guess is possibly. Can it make the difference if you meet the minimum standards? Absolutely.</p>
<p>As a friend of my D at H told us about his first year experience, everybody at H is pretty good at a lot of things. And everybody is very good at something. There are a lot of interesting people at H. </p>
<p>And I would add to that…Obviously, test scores per se don’t make you an interesting person.</p>
<p>For my D, who was accepted to the Harvard-NEC AB/MM program, music was the hook that got her in. The process is like any job interview. Some real person after reading your application has to go to a boss or a committee and say “I really like this person because…” Given you meet some minimum requirements, the message they are going to convey can’t be too complicated. Very fortunate that someone at Harvard decided from among all the uber-qualified candidates that they needed a jazz singer this year. </p>
<p>And moving the needle from 2390 to 2400 is obviously ridiculous in that context.</p>
<p>In a CC thread for music majors, I say this:</p>
<p>Tell your music students to practice and perform their music (passion is important); live an unsheltered, interesting life (so that their essays are page turners); be able to hold up their end of the conversation with an adult over lunch or dinner (and not grunt or be monosyllabic, bored or boring); and don’t forget to study.</p>
<p>I would add here…</p>
<p>If it isn’t music, find another passion and delve deep into it. A smorgasboard of extracurriculars won’t capture anyone’s imagination. I think these admissions people get the fact that to be world class in something you have to commit a lot of time to it. Tradeoffs are a fact of life.</p>
<p>And at the risk of sounding too cynical…</p>
<p>Even raising a few thousand dollars in car washes and bake sales to donate to the impoverished is all too common these days. Even harsher, I would say that mission trips to the Third World are offered by churches like vacation junkets, where being able to pay is as important as any dedication to a cause. More and more people are having that on their resumes.</p>
<p>The title of the thread, “Small Things”…Yup.
Will someone asking this question shed light on the process that is of general value? Yes, so thank you xRonbo.</p>
<p>But with respect to the original poster’s particular case…</p>
<p>The difference between 2390 and 2400 on the SATs? Really? I think the original poster needs to rethink his pitch.</p>