@GA2012MOM -I’m at least 60 to 70% sure my GC isn’t on crack.
More seriously, 60% may be a bit high, but a reasonable chance certainly didn’t seem overly high for this student.
If I’m not mistaken, the EA admit rate at UChicago is 12-13%. A number of factors, I think, helped his chances enormously.
-My school is in a region where very few students apply to the US-about 80% of each HS class goes elsewhere at my school, and in most local schools the percentage is far higher. Even out of that 20%, there are only a handful of applicants who want to go to Chicago, because there’s a considerable bias towards colleges on the coasts in the local student pool-the consortium of schools my HS belongs to has had application totals to schools in the Midwest in the low double digits for the last few years…
-This same student has amazing stats-2300 SAT, but he’s earned 7s in every subject he’s taking, in every report during the last 1.5 years. And this is not as common as a 4.0 GPA. The most recent statistics on the IB program that I can find are for 2011, and show over 50,000 IB diploma candidates. Of these candidates, the number with a perfect score of 45 points was 125. This student is expected to do something that is achieved by only 1 in 400 candidates in a group that’s already extremely capable on the whole.
-To that, you can add strong extracurriculars (better than mine), dual citizenship, and speaking 4 languages fluently (and a 5th well enough).
I myself also think this student would’ve had a good chance, had he applied EA.