Suprise Acceptance Stories?

briansteffy
Thu, 29 Nov 2007 21:21:18 +0000

I was talking to a pharmacy student today. His class had 700 plus students. There are only 125 left ( add another 150 who came in mid-stream for their second degree). He had a sub 1100 SAT and a so-so HS GPA. In HS he was into cycling, but not his school work. Now he’s near the top of his class, while those with the great credentials flunked out. This story is not directly related to the initial post, but it is a data point that suports the old adage that the purpose of the 25th HS reunion is to confirm that HS GPA and SAT/ACT scores are not great predictors, though many have wrongly accepied and internalized the conclusions of these measures; that they do not have what it takes. I have seen plenty of marginal HS students bury those with the great credentials in the classroom. I say this as someone who never broke 1100 on the SAT and was in the bottom fifth of my HS class. I was into baseball, football, and reading what I wanted to read - not what I was told to read. None of the universities or colleges that I have been a prof at would have accepted me out of HS. My S is a marginal HS student, as he gets up at 5:30 to lift for football and gets home at 8PM from theater practice. He also fences and maintains a political blog; little energy left to do the more tedious homework assignments (zero) and certainly no time left to study for the SAT (the SAT is just a run-of-the-mill aptitude test - to study for it is antithetical to its intended purpose). But I have no doubt that he could handle any college. He is certainly more interesting than all the dime-a-dozen ‘distinguished honors’ students that were in my classroom today. All that he needs to do is schedule more time for studying when he goes to college. Another story: the only college that my wife could get into was a two-year college. She went on to out-publish most of her associates at a major big-ten university. How does the old Bob Dylan verse go? “we all meet again on the way down”.