<p>PCP said: “It is really an intellectual exercise for me. I’m drawn to the mysterious - my wife falls in this category.”</p>
<p>Two things:</p>
<p>1) to the extent parents or students take this intellectual exercise seriously - and some will, since your “just an exercise” warning label is buried deeply - I am concerned that these innocents will obtain additional anxiety and stress around an already stressful situation; I also worry about the false hope - if only my kid scores above 30 on the PCP Ivy-caliber matrix he/she is eligible for the Ivies - that will lead people to invest even more deeply into the “only Ivy matters” culture, and that’s a sentiment NOT to be encouraged in this world</p>
<p>2) Please let us know that you have NOT done the same thing with your wife . . . cranial follicular density; cuticle length/width ratio; smile frequency index, the other “standard” measurements, and the like :-)</p>
<p>PCP, are you trying to get people to tell you that your children are indeed a 100% “Ivy caliber” applicant? </p>
<p>I would echo what PG said. He got in U of C (out rank 3 of IVY) EA. I would say he is indeed an undisbuted “Ivy caliber” applicant. Especially if he is going to be an Econ or phys major.</p>
<p>It appears that PCP’s eldest son may have to “settle” for U of C. It’s clear to me that PCP is trying desperately to find the formula for his younger kids.</p>
<p>If I could advise his oldest son, it would be to be far from home when he checks his email on March 31. It’s basically a no-win for him. Even if he gets into HYP, PCP will be back on here looking for a Phi Beta Kappa formula.</p>
<p>It’s no wonder he tunes out in school now and then. Who could listen to this stuff all day?</p>
<p>Wow. It looks like I’m in a bloodbath. CC is a scary place.</p>
<p>It is rather unfortunate that some posters are turning this into personal attacks, some at every possible opportunity in various disguises. Why second guess someone’s motive? The same folks who urge me to take what adcoms say at face value wouldn’t take my words at face value. </p>
<p>I’m just an anonymous poster who, at present, refuses to accept the process cannot be made more predictable. There is a huge difference between more predictable and completely predictable, and I’m certainly not advocating the latter. I’ve learned a great deal on the admissions to tippy-tops since last summer, and I have shared some of what I learned on CC. I want to build profiles/models on this thread to further elucidate this process, but clearly this forum is not a place for it. Let me just say this – I would have done this exercise regardless of where my son had been accepted or rejected.</p>
<p>I am willing to take PCP at his word: that it is purely an intellectual exercise. I still think it is pretty futile. I think one could predict who won’t get in; it’s much harder to predict who will get in among the many many “Ivy caliber” applicants.</p>
<p>I am not ascribing motives to PCP, and I haven’t gotten personal. I just find it odd that someone who solicits opinions and data both publicly and privately, then proceeds to ignore that input (or seems to), in preference for an untestable model that seems to oppose most, if not all, known admissions assumptions and histories in the CC world at minimum.</p>
<p>I also agree with marite’s last post that rejects are easier to predict than admits, but one could, I believe, say more definitively about rejects that either they lacked that edge of being exceptional across the board, or (I suspect at least as often) failed to communicate that in some aspect.</p>
<p>Again, just understand that occasionally demographics itself will be the killer, despite the pan-exceptional applicant who may be out of luck in terms of regional overload.</p>
<p>“I’m just an anonymous poster who, at present, refuses to accept the process cannot be made more predictable.”
and that, in a nutshell, is why you will always be frustrated. Because you refuse to believe what others know to be true-admissions decisions are made by humans, not computers, and for that reason alone, will always be less predictable than you would prefer.</p>
<p>The people who actually do the admitting TELL you that a lot of it has to do with “spark” - what catches their eye, what stands out. They TELL you that they don’t assign more brownie points to the 2350 than the 2300; both are perfectly fine and evidence that the student is intellectually capable of succeeding in that environment. They TELL you that their freshman class includes the juggler, the kid who plays the accordion, and the kid who teaches scuba diving to paraplegics. They turn down 2350 Intel first place winners for 2200 Intel second place winners all the time because the second kid attracted their attention. They tell you they are not looking for an automaton class that dutifully checked off a certain number of achievements off a predetermined list. They tell you they are not just looking for valedictorians, they are not just looking for kids who attend the top private or public schools in the country, and that the Nebraska kid who won the pie-baking contest may indeed have the edge over the carefully-prepped Boston area kid who was dutifully shoved towards every AP and science contest known to man. </p>
<p>Why don’t you believe them?</p>
<p>Why don’t you believe it’s about spark and interest about one point – and that doesn’t mean that someone who was rejected wasn’t interesting, it’s just that (to the orange example) they can only select so many appetizing oranges?</p>
<p>It seems to me that the more it’s about filling in a formula, the more it becomes about fitting the kid to the magical Ivy, as opposed to finding the school that’s right for the kid. Because it’s backwards. The starting point is not “what buttons does my kid need to push to get into an Ivy,” which unfortunately appears to be your starting point. The starting point is “what makes my kid tick and what environment would best be suited to enhancing that.”</p>
<p>PCP, let’s say we are trying to develop a formula. There is a much easier way with solid data.</p>
<p>Wait until April 1st. Go to each and every one of IVY school board. There will be hundreds of “I am In” posts with actual stats posted. Copy down all and put them into a spread sheet. You can run all type of regression and T test etc between those “in” and those “out” stats. If you have the software, you could even do some optimization with set conditions. </p>
<p>My feeling without the data says you can’t build a model with only those stats, even with hundreds, if not thousands, of actual data points. </p>
<p>If there were a formula, some rich company with $$ and statistical brains would have built it years ago.</p>
<p>CC isn’t a representative sample of the Ivy-applying population, though. It’s heavily skewed towards the coasts, particularly the Boston metropolitan area and to a lesser extent the NY and SF areas. It’s heavily skewed towards a certain “type” of applicant. Since it’s not a representative sample, any regression model (or discrim, or CHAID, or whatever) wouldn’t be terribly meaningful. Plus, who knows whether the stats posted on here are real or the figment of a high schooler’s imagination. Plus, there is no proxy for things like strength of teacher or GC recommendations, or quality of essay (other than self-reported “I’m sure they are good” which is meaningless).</p>
<p>If these schools wanted a formula, they would know how to build it and they wouldn’t need ad coms making decisions. If there were a formula, then these places wouldn’t be special. A place full of people who all dutifully punched the same buttons and all look alike (all maximized number of points on the PCP Scale of Achievement) is not an interesting place to be.</p>
<p>It’s subjective. Go listen to different symphonies play the same piece of music sometime. You won’t believe how different they sound. You can’t quantify how they are different or which is better for that matter. In the end they just sound different.</p>
<p>So if I could find a woman who had, objectively measured, thicker hair, a smaller waist, more even teeth, more symmetrical features and a higher IQ than your wife, would that then mean that you would love this new woman more? After all, she’d be higher quality.</p>
<p>I started on page 41 and made a couple of posts. I should have finished reading to page 44 before I said anything because it looks like maybe we really are winding down this time.</p>
<p>I thought the wife and the orange analogies were very good.</p>
<p>Perhaps PCP is looking for data that will justify his particular way of parenting. I suppose that if you lead your child in a certain academic direction, especially given the enormous sacrifice made by high achieving kids, it is important to keep the goal in mind. Kids need reassurance that their efforts will pay off, and the big reward is that Ivy acceptance. And in this case, it doesn’t so much matter which school; it only matters that it is an Ivy.</p>
<p>Doesn’t even matter if the school is right for the kid! It’s an Ivy! And, you know, impressing overanxious upper-middle class suburban Boston neighbors is the important thing, not the actual kid himself – he’s just a prop!</p>
<p>PCP, remember on the “3.6 and applying to top 20” thread that we participated in – Hunt (I believe) said something like “When it comes to the top 20 schools, there are around 40 of them”, which really summed it up – it’s not just about the very tippy-top, there are plenty of excellent contenders. Everyone else on that thread seemed to internalize that point of view, and top 20 was merely a shorthand for “really, really good.” Did you internalize that too? Because it seems that the closer you get to D-day, the more anxious you are about your kid’s Ivy acceptance. Even though he’s already won the game with a UChicago EA acceptance.</p>
<p>PCP. If, indeed, let’s say Harvard selected by the types of metrics you propose, then that would mean that they could run all 20,000 applicants through some computer, rank them from 1 - 20,000 and then select the top 2,000 (or however many they select to fill a freshman class). And if those kids all disappeared tomorrow, they’d have to settle for 2,001 - 4,000. And if THOSE kids all disappeared, they’d have to settle for 4,001 - 6,000. And so one. And these classes would be inferior to their first class.</p>
<p>But they have said that even if those scenarios happened, they would have JUST AS GOOD classes if their first choices disappeared tomorrow. That they simply can’t accommodate all the great kids in their applicant pool. What does that tell you about the process? Does it say that they are ranking and picking The Very Best along quantified metrics? Or that they are picking The Ones That Intrigue Them The Most among many, many kids who are academically fully qualified – and who are, indeed, Ivy caliber?</p>
<p>It’s not like Chicago is a slacker school, folks…S1 has not exactly complained about the quality of intellectual, academic or social life there. (au contraire!) He has had incredible opportunities and is thriving.</p>