*****Wesleyan University RD 2020 Results Thread*****

citivas
Wed, 06 Apr 2016 14:36:15 +0000

Phroia, that is heartbreaking, particularly after such positive praise from your interviewer. Your facts are strong in every way except one. I’m sure you’re correct that in the end it was the grades that did you in. For all the talk that schools do about holistic, that’s only true in the margins. Grades, rigor of what was offered at your school and the current/historic performance of other applicants from your school is still by far the dominant factor I think. That’s why more than anything, students are competing with their own schools more than the applicant pool at large.

My S had strong test scores and fantastic EC’s and good grades (3.83 UW) but in a school of overachievers there were some better with better GPA’s. And when you study the data after all the decisions, with one outlier exception in either direction, the strength of his EC’s and everything else gave him a 0.1 boost on his weighted GPA across the board – i.e. he was consistently accepted (with one waitlist exception) to schools where the average GPA of previously accepted applicants from his school according to 8 years of Naviance RD data was up-to 0.1 better than his, and he was consistently waitlisted or rejected where the average GPA was more than 0.1 (with one exception). And he applied to many schools so there’s a lot of data points. Comparing his peers, the same story played out but with various degrees of boost or penalty factor depending on the strength of the EC’s (except for recruited athletes or, to a lesser extent, kids with strong legacy connections who got into schools beyond their stats). So the strength of his EC’s helped, but within a predictable and relatively minor range within his school’s historic GPA data per college. Given some of his EC’s were interesting and his role significant, had the application process truly been equal in it’s holistic approach you would have expected to see more variation in the range of schools that accepted or rejected outside the GPA averages. The fact is they have all these things down to a near science. All the non-GPA stuff matters in the margins of kids on the bubble, but doesn’t trump the hard data for most decisions. Of course there are people with exceptional hooks where this wouldn’t be true. And even a perfect GPA can be hurt by kids sufficiently weak in EC’s (since there are enough great in both). But for most people, the data rules and you can have a very good idea where you will get in based on it.