Some average excellent students may not really be aware that they are excellent. From elementary school on, these kids get separated into gifted and talented and AP classes where they are surrounded by others just like themselves. When all of their friends are high achievers, they can believe that this is how everyone’s experience goes. They don’t know what it means to be lost seeking inspiration for a writing assignment or to be humiliated when called upon by a teacher. The truly excellent student is usually quite aware of his or her excellence. Even in a sea of high achievers, he stands out. Unfortunately, this is who the average excellent students often compare themselves to, not the slackers, strugglers and Average Joes.
These students are excellent first and foremost.
They are average only in that they are not as rare in the world as they (often) are in their schools.
Especially if they are our kids, these students are special. And they have gotten a lot of outside validation for their specialness, whether scores, prizes, awards, whatever. Just look at the resumes here on CC, even up thread. To AOS at top schools, they are a dime a dozen and often interchangeable. It doesn’t take anything away from the kid, though.
I understood exactly who @Lindagaf was referring to when she came up with the term. The great student who’d clear the academic screen by a nice margin then, in spite of numerous other achievements, have no great way to differentiate him/herself from all the others in that pile. Not the one who’d be featured in the alumni magazine if he/she had the good fortune to get selected from the pile.
My daughter is average excellent and one example is she was one of ten kids in her school on the math team. She would get a couple of hard questions right at the math meets. That helped her get a 750M on her SAT on the first try.
Her best friend usually gets all the questions right, and translates the question into French to pass the extra time she has, she also skipped a grade and got 790 800 on the SAT.
If she were at a school without her friend, we wouldn’t know that she was “average excellent”, we might have thought she was brilliant, when seeing her friend we learned what brilliant really is.
I always thought when Lindagaf brought it up, it was a cautionary tale and was meant to help, and it did help us in forming a college list.
Many average excellent kids could do the work at top 10-50 colleges, but end up at top 50-100 colleges because of the spaces that went to Athletes, Legacy, Donors, URM, and Full pay students with equal stats, and of course the brilliant students.
Considering only 7 % of all people in the world go to college, and average excellent kids are in the top 1-2% or so, we’re still talking about a pretty impressive group of students.
I would say, too, that sometimes, we, as parents focus too much on either the “average” or the “excellent,” and fail to take into account that it is the combination of terms that most clearly identifies both the opportunities and the challenges for our average-excellent students.
I’ve known some parents who fixate on the “excellent” part of their child’s profile, and refuse to admit that their kids are competing with lots of other students who are just as intelligent and hardworking as theirs are. They run the risk of encouraging their kids to make decisions that could lead to disappointment if the acceptance gods are not looking kindly on their applications.
OTOH, I will admit to perhaps focusing too much on the “average” part of the description. Maybe because she was a late bloomer who was decidedly “average average” until 3rd grade or so, when teachers started noting, “You know, she’s quiet but there’s a lot going on in that brain of hers.” And maybe it was because of my reference group. (For example, just this year, I saw the AP score distributions for the first time. I was amazed. After I saw them, I texted my daughter and apologized for not making a bigger deal about her good scores. She responded with a laughing emoji, so I guess she wasn’t traumatized by my neglect.)
It’s the combination of average and excellent that contains the true insight, IMO.
@Akqj10, many “average excellent” kids actually end up at schools 20-50 (or if you like, just outside the Ivies/equivalents).
^^^ Yep!
Or, here in the midwest, at state flagships.
(And I have an irresistible urge to add “Not that there’s anything wrong with that” to both @PurpleTitan’s and mine own observation.)
I agree with @PurpleTitan.
Most kids in this category should be able to land in the 20-50 range, and some will be able to squeeze into the 15-20 range. All of the schools higher than that are difficult to get into, but the best chance is probably Northwestern.
While they may attempt to do so, most Ivy/peer elite graduates are much more likely to be the former rather than the latter while some of the folks who were rejected or never even bothered applying to Ivy/peer elites end up manifesting themselves as the former years or decades down the line.
It’s also a bit presumptuous for adcoms to feel they have the ability to ferret out applicants with an “it” factor beyond that of randomly throwing darts on a board while blindfolded.
After all, Harvard did admit folks such as Owen Labrie and Ted Kaczynski, Stanford admitted Brock Turner, and other elites have and will continue to admit folks they thought had the “it” factor who end up spectacularly failing in life after admission.
@cobrat: “It’s also a bit presumptuous for adcoms to feel they have the ability to ferret out applicants with an “it” factor beyond that of randomly throwing darts on a board while blindfolded.”
Agreed, though that is someone ascribing to them.
@Much2learn: “Most kids in this category should be able to land in the 20-50 range, and some will be able to squeeze into the 15-20 range. All of the schools higher than that are difficult to get into, but the best chance is probably Northwestern.”
. . . .if they apply ED, that is.
Also UChicago ED.
Possibly Duke ED or Cornell ED.
I would define average excellent as a child who is/was a big fish in a small pond, who qualifies to move up to the big ocean, but who isn’t a big fish in the big ocean.
For example, I was watching the swimming nationals yesterday. Obviously anyone who qualifies for the national championships is an excellent swimmer. But only two per event make the team in individual events. The person who comes in third often misses the team by hundredths of a point. The person who comes in last usually isn’t far behind. The people who were 3rd through 8th are average excellent.
There are thousands of students who are qualified to be in the Ivy League, but there are 2,000 who are better. The May be 2050th or 9879th.
Exactly, there a whole lot of average excellent students at the top 15 schools that got there ED. The RD acceptance rates for places like Northwestern, Brown, JHU et. al. are around 8-9% but the EDs about three times higher. I wonder if you have to be truly excellent to be accepted RD there.
"A few caveats about the headlines:
- The Karen Arnold study was based on students who graduated high school in 1981. A lot could have changed in the past 36 years.
- The Karen Arnold study only followed students for 14 years after high school graduation, so they stop following people after 32-33. How many people change the world by 33?
- The Karen Arnold study only included 33 schools in Illinois. Those schools may not represent the full range of schools in Illinois or the US. The sample could be biased and under-powered in statistical terms.
It’s undoubtedly true, there’s a lot more to success in life than HS or college GPA, but we shouldn’t read too much into a study that’s more than two decades old at this point."
Agree, in addition, it tracked only 81 vals and sals, how can you make wholesale conclusions based on such a limited sample?
I don’t disagree with any of this. Nonetheless, I do believe that’s what the adcoms at some of these top schools with holistic admissions are attempting to do. Whether they can do so successfully is another issue, but they are looking for something that differentiates an applicant from the mass of an ever increasing number of students with top grades and test scores. My adding the link about valedictorians was not to say they can’t achieve great success, but to drive the point that it’s not always the students at the top of the class who end up “changing the world.” They may be people with lower GPAs and/or test scores (if they go to college at all), but with a gift of vision to see things in new ways none of us have thought of before.
How many will ever fall into that category? Very, very few, and certainly not me. 
Oh right, JHU slipped my mind. They may be the easier in the top 15 to get in to of all. Definitely if ED.
Well, unless you count ND, Vandy, and WashU. Honestly, plenty of average excellent kids get in those places too. Also through Dartmouth ED.
Furthermore, Caltech stresses academic potential to a greater extent than the other Ivy-equivalents. Being brilliant academically (not average excellent, but at least excelling by a more objective metric) is typically enough.
@EllieMom - your list is very intriguing, but when you say brilliant, eccentric, you’re not describing the truly excellent are you? The ones that have the excellent grades but also have one more unparalleled thing going for them? Because those kinds of people are typically not attending the top schools, they wouldn’t have the grades to even try. Even if Steve Jobs, Barack Obama, Miles Davis (imo, representative of the non-conventional people you’re discussing) applied today, they would probably go the same route they went, Reed, Occidental, Julliard.
quote applied today, they would probably go the same route they went, Reed, Occidental, Julliard.
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Julliard is actually considered the apex of elite in the conservatory/performing arts world.
And Reed is considered top shelf elite by most academics and many well-informed employers. Granted…not so much by those who only know their local/regional sports schools or Ivy or bust types.
You know, I get tired of the emphasis on the “top 15-20 schools”. Hate to tell you but there is a LOT of intellectual life and top notch learning in the flagships and other top 50 schools. In fact, a lot of more intelligent et al students are in the non tippy top schools than in them. There are only a relatively few spots available in those schools and many elite students do not even consider them desirable. Off the radar for many reasons, including locations. I guess it is an east coast thing to think their schools are best and there’s no life outside their area- so provincial (like all of us).
There, my Midwest mindset protest. btw- how schools identify gifted kids and run gifted programs is not necessarily the way it should be done. Also- I had heard that 25% of Americans were college grads once upon a time. It is not at all reasonable to use worldwide figures as opportunities for college intellectually worthy students do not exist everywhere.
Do others notice a trend here? Many ways to say the same thing. Skewed views based on where we each are coming from.
“Most kids in this category should be able to land in the 20-50 range”
The type of student this thread if focused on is conservatively going to be admitted to many outstanding schools like Illinois, Wisconsin, Tulane, Lehigh, Northeastern, University of Rochester, Boston University, Case Western Reserve, Tulane, and William and Mary.
Most students are not losing much, if anything, by going to one of these schools. Every one of these offers an amazing education. I would be proud to have a student at any one of these schools.
@Much2learn That’s exactly where mine wound up…and by choice rather than default. Her top-30ish school is the perfect place for her. But if she/u hadn’t been so clear-headed and independent, the school that was ultimately her first choice might have been overlooked between the striving for excellence at an “elite” vs. the settling for average at “sure-bet” local state directional.
PurpleTitan, I don’t recall saying they don’t. Some indeed end up at Ivy/equivalents, I left open that possibility, did you?