So who do I get compared against?

egreen
Thu, 07 Jan 2010 17:48:22 +0000

Okay, so for example regions such as ‘south-east’ or ‘north-west’? That would be rather broad, but I am somewhat familiar with how admissions is divided up by regions. I have just always heard that colleges care more about how you compare against individuals in your high school or local area than how you compare to others in different high schools.

For example, they would realized that kid X goes to a public school while kid Y went to a prep school, so they look at the applications a bit differently. If X’s school only sends 20% of the graduates to college and X has used all of his opportunities while Y goes to a prep school where 30% go to ivies and he sits in the middle (we will, for the sake of example, say the two are roughly equal in stats), colleges will be more inclined to accept X due to overcoming obstacles/adversity or something along those lines.

This is just what I have heard about admissions, and if it is true (which if it is not, please let me know and explain how it does work) I simply do not understand who my closest competition would be, because home schooled students have such a variety - such as students who strictly take classes at their home and receive grades solely from their parents versus students who take classes with other ‘home schooled’ students etc. - of different circumstances.

As for the post above concerning SAT IIs. I have taken 3 and did fine on them (one low 700s, one mid 700s, and one high 700s), so I doubt that would make too much of a difference on my application. It is my understanding that, for home schooled students, colleges look at SAT IIs as a way to see how much material the student has learned since they do not have standard grades or courses; however, that isn’t really an issue for me because more than 90% of my grades have come from sources other than my parents - with a large percentage coming from college professors.

I honestly wasn’t sure whether to mark myself as a home schooled student or not, but I didn’t want it to look like I was attempting to ‘trick’ the college into thinking I was a private school student (although under state law I am). I have sent all of the colleges I applied to transcripts from my ‘school’, the colleges where I have attended, and a master transcript where college classes are weighted equal to AP classes.

So making the assumption that test scores are all good enough that they do not need to be considered - meaning that I am academically capable of being accepted - does my competition then become everyone else in the pile? If so, I would wager that there would be quite a few of academically qualified applicants and there are not many slots, as demonstrated by the < 20% acceptance rates, so how do they sort the top 10% prep school student versus the top 10% public school student? If the approach is to holistically evaluate each candidate, it only makes since to evaluate their circumstances, but in order to do that, their needs to be a control group, an average, or something, right?

Any more thoughts on this would greatly be appreciated.

Note: I know I bring up prep schools a lot, but this is simply because I realize that the majority of the acceptances given by T20 schools are to prep school students because of the academic rigor of the prep schools’ programs.