What do I do with test scores?

honeybee63
Mon, 09 Dec 2013 13:19:48 +0000

It is difficult for some students to be ready to commit to a college in the fall of senior year particularly if they have not had the chance to visit colleges yet. For Questbridge students there is the added piece that applying to a private school, an OOS school etc. may be brand new ideas. For many of these students, unlike the typical CC kid, they are just dipping their toes into the whole endeavor and they may know little or nothing about the QB partner schools other than the Ivies, which are known by reputation alone. One way that QB applicants like this can take advantage of the QB match opportunity, without committing to a college prior to investigation and experience, is to rank only non binding colleges. A significant minority of finalists chose this route according to the lists they all posted this year. Or they rank one or two colleges they are sure about plus some non-binding colleges. The idea is that if they have a non-binding admission from Yale, Stanford, Princeton, or MIT, it frees them up to kick safeties off their list and maybe apply RD to a small list of colleges that still appeals to them, even after being matched to a non-binding college. It gives them time to visit or research more in depth, and to apply to some smaller or larger schools, or schools with a different campus culture, or whatever else matters to them. Students who may have started the entire process, including looking at colleges, in August may not be ready to commit to a college when rankings are due a few months later. I’m sure that the non-binding colleges know this, and have the latitude to make this opportunity available, for just this reason. GA2012MOM, can’t you see that a kid who was “matched” with MIT might later visit and apply to Amherst (for example) RD and end up preferring Amherst :)? Another scenario is a student who ranked one or more favorite LAC’s above the non-binding Uni’s, and even after being admitted to one of the latter, wants to try for an admission to the favorite LAC again in RD. My D was matched to her first choice binding school but if she had been matched to e.g. Yale, I don’t know if she would have re-applied to her LACs just to have the option next spring when she had done more thinking, visiting and even grown up some more…now maybe she wouldn’t have wanted to and would have snapped up that Yale match (lol!) but it wouldn’t have been terrible if she had chosen to apply RD to her preferred LACs. It isn’t necessarily the case that OP is just being greedy or cavalier about her match, although it certainly may look like that esp from the POV of students who weren’t matched.