<p>^ I do agree with you about the socio-economic issue. Hence the need for a program like QB.</p>
<p>^Also, I think I only saw one kids with a perfect SAT score who was rejected. The rest of them were in the 2000-2300 range. Of course, that is a very small sample as there were only about 40 posts out of 25,000 applicants.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Not necessarily, but it’s a pretty objective benchmark when you’re looking at self-posted stats. It’s not so easy to quantify what an individual actually accomplished when taking on a leadership role. And it’s meaningless when someone posts that his essays or letters of recommendation were “great.” </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I do, because the 2300 kid might have gotten lucky that day whereas the 2400 kid could manage at least a 2300 ten times out of ten. The ceiling effect comes in to play at the tippy top – if you had a perfect score you weren’t tested to the maximum level of your abilities.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>My younger son had a 36.0 ACT, a 240 PSAT, dual SAT II 800’s, 1/400 class rank, was a National AP Scholar, was captain of two academic competition teams, created his own community service project and had “best student of my career” letters of recommendation. In 2011, he was rejected by MIT and Yale. There were plenty of others that year with similar stats – I know, I looked because of course the question arose: what more could these schools have possibly expected?</p>
<p>This is not a sour grapes post, because he did get accepted to 4 elite colleges and ended up at Brown, which is a perfect fit for him because of that school’s course flexibility (open curriculum) and quirky self-mocking sense of humor. </p>
<p>Nevertheless, I can appreciate Suzy Lee’s satirical lament – many of the elements that elite colleges now look at to make their final selections are more corollated with wealth and family connections than with drive and ability. Yet these same schools pretend in their literature that you are only judged within the context of your own environment. Of course the adcoms know better, but their marketing departments would not want to dissuade thousands of marginal students from deciding to apply, and thereby jeopardizing their single-digit acceptance rates.</p>
<p>I found it in poor taste. “Oh, those lucky gays! Getting into college soooo easy!” Yeah, lucky gays, having random strangers hating you, having a higher than average suicide rate, and not being able to marry in most states.</p>
<p>Ditto with her remark about “wearing a turban”. Those Sikhs are sooo lucky that they’ve suffered an uptick of hate crimes since 9/11. Poor, poor whitebread teenager, being denied such opportunities. I’m crying, I tell you. Crying tears of BLOOD for her sorry plight.</p>
<p>Whining with a veneer of humor over your words is still whining.</p>
<p>to all the offended readers, the truth hurts…</p>
<p>Astounding how this piece cleanly divided the world of CC’ers into those with a sense of humor and those without one. Life must be a bummer for those who manage to be “offended” by everything. And those giant chips must be very hard to balance on their shoulders.</p>
<p>"As the youngest of four daughters, I noticed long ago that my parents gave up on parenting me. "</p>
<p>Funny, because I imagine the element of truth in this. Parenting becomes particularly more difficult when you have more than 2 kids and have to change your parenting style from man-to-man to zone defense.</p>
<p>i thought the article was hysterical. some of you peeps have no sense of humor. you need to work on that. obviously ticking boxes (URM, Lesbian Gay, Transgender, One eye One leg, Three eyes, starting your save the obese children of america charity, save the whales, save the obese whales (nicked that one from some funny kid onCC!) etc is going to help in college admissions) and i do have a lot of sympathy for hard working asian kids for whom perfection is probably not going to be good enough. life isn’t always fair and at least ms weiss can laugh about it (and i thought it was funny that she acknowledged her own laziness) comedy is almost always going to offend somebody i guess. hope ms weiss does end up on SNL!</p>
<p>LongRange,
"Not just rich. FAMOUS. We live in a celebrity-crazed culture. Even the president of a top university falls all over himself at the chance to welcome the celebrity and celeb’s kid to the school. "</p>
<p>Of course. This is a development admit. The number of times that this university will be mentioned in People or Entertainment Tonight will be worth it’s weight in advertising dollars. And it is FREE ADVERTISING!!! So a university gets 1. Full pay tuition 2. Free advertising 3. Likely large donations 4. Other potential students from celeb’s friends’ (other celebs) kids who have equally large potential for 1-4 above. Who wouldn’t take this kid?</p>
<p>“Well dartmouth and brown aren’t HYPSM so a white middle class student can easily get in with top stats. for HYPSM, where it’s a crapshoot, it’s all of the top white students hoping to get lucky, where as all of the top URM’s or LGBTQ’s with 4.0’s and 2350+ SAT’s can feel pretty confident that they’ll be accepted”</p>
<p>Really, have you looked at the acceptance rates for Dartmouth and Brown? I know many kids with top stats that didn’t get into these schools.</p>
<p>And, where on the common application do you declare that you’re gay?</p>
<p>^^^
I do believe there are some hetero students here who would turn gay if it could get them admission to the Ivy League.</p>
<p>Viewer - my kid would be one of them. 2300 and 4.0, and no ivy for him, even Brown, his top choice, that he applied to ED. I agree that anyone who thinks that comment is true is either crazy or very naive.</p>
<p>I think she is a great writer and had some pretty funny points. But what a whiner!</p>
<p>I thought it was hilarious. I also think this thread is hilarious. I am amazed by people who seem to go to great lengths to find ways of being offended.</p>
<p>This my least favorite season on cc, the Season of Unfairness. I found the column mildly funny. If she were really going for satire, it didn’t quite work.</p>
<p>@Viewer almost every gay applicant with an sat score above 2300 is going to write about being gay for their essay. they’ll have a good shot at getting into HYPSM that way</p>
<p>I agree with post #95 & 96. The column was mildly amusing, but this thread is hilarious.</p>
<p>Viewer,
“And, where on the common application do you declare that you’re gay?”</p>
<p>You are too funny! It on the EC section.</p>
<p>But how many of these students’ parents essentially bought their spots through repeated test prep classes, special tutors, college admissions consultants, essay-writing strategists, and family connections to land impressive research positions or internships?</p>
<hr>
<p>And how does a college know for a fact that the above is the case for a particular student? Are they to assume that anyone in a particular school or zip code (maybe they should look up the home’s value on Zillow?!) is doing this? Or should they have a question that asks if they have had the luxury of this type of prep, and ask them to verify with a signature … and perhaps require the school guidance counselor to provide a statement, as well?</p>