What is the profile of an "Ivy caliber" applicant?

PaperChaserPop · March 11, 2010, 10:45pm

The wife analogy is not apt because “love” is not involved when adcoms select their applicants. Individual subjectivity is checked by committee voting/discussion in all elite schools.

epiphany, I thank you for our PM discussion. I did not ignore you. EC is weighted heavily in the last model. Assigning points is an attempt to integrate an upthread idea on weighting. These assigned weights/points are open to discussion. I’m not attached to them.

You are assuming if a college accepts students based mostly on stats or quantitative measures then the students there would “all look alike.”, but we know this is not the case in our heavily stats based State U’s. You are also assuming that if this college raises the stats/quantitative bar higher than most, then it would not be an interesting place to be. To some, such environment may be extremely interesting and stimulating. Many high achievers are very dynamic and interesting. Like we said before, some just operate at a different level.

The Harvard example reminded me of something I’ve thought about - what would happen if the same group of applicants applies to Harvard again. Would the same group be admitted? I don’t think the group will be identical; however, I’d guess 60% or more of the unhooked would be the same. If the two groups are completely disjoint or if their intersection is trivially small, then we can’t build a model. Btw, I agree with your “just as good” point. The assignment of weights does not necessarily imply an ordering of bad or good, but rather a reflection of preference tuned to a particular college or a group of colleges.

Re: “sparkle”. I did not factor in app essays in the model and I called it out. How is a sparkle spotted in a static application? Except for a few schools, e.g., UChicago, most schools say essays don’t make or break an application in vast majority of the cases. Ditto on interviews. This topic is interesting. Perhaps we can expand on this.

Now, I’ll take a detour here. Please stop associating my interest on this thread with S1’s pending admissions results. They are unrelated. I’ve been selling his admitted schools to him and at the same time discouraging him from getting too emotionally attached to any pending school, including his #1 choice.

CountingDown · March 11, 2010, 10:52pm

Ummm…I’ve heard a couple of adcomms at excellent schools talk about how they evaluate candidates and they have explicitly said “Make me love you!”

Pizzagirl · March 11, 2010, 10:55pm

I completely disagree. It’s not love in the romantic sense, of course, but it’s certainly a sense of intrigue and curiosity. A sense of “this is a kid I’d really like to get to know, who would contribute positively to the campus environment, who would be a great roommate, lab partner, class participant, club member.”

And I absolutely think individual subjectivity isn’t necessarily checked by committee voting / discussion. If Adcom Member A, who covers a given region and knows what he’s doing, says, “I have a really good feeling about this kid” and the kid is otherwise reasonably qualified, why wouldn’t the other Adcoms take that for what it’s worth? They can’t debate every candidate to death. They have to trust one another to cover their given regions to a large extent.

Haven’t you ever interviewed for candidates in the workforce? It’s the same thing. Yes, there may be some “technical” qualifications (certification, X years of experience in the field, etc.) but at a certain point it all becomes about whether you think this is a person you want on your team. And that’s based on impressions and gestalt and gut. And it cannot be reduced down to a series of quantifiable metrics, any more than your choice of your wife over dozens of other lovely women can be.

cellardweller · March 11, 2010, 11:22pm

This pretty summarizes it: THERE IS NO FORMULA. I interview kids for MIT (not an Ivy, I know), Marite for Harvard, and other posters for other top colleges and we still can’t tell who will be admitted. As Marite said, we can often tell the kids who for sure won’t make it, but is nearly impossible to pick the lucky winners. There are simply too many factors and too many qualified candidates. Don’t you think that if there was a formula to get in to the top school we would know it by now? I am a mathematician by training and I would have loved to derive a formula for acceptance to MIT so I could tell the kids how to maximize their chances: how many APs, what competitions, what SAT scores… It just doesn’t work that way. Top schools have dramatically increased their outreach, so what seemed to be a sure thing ten years ago, simply no longer works! Even among so-called academic superstars which at MIT may mean IMO medalists and Intel/Siemens finalists there is no certainty of admission. MIT is not looking at building a class of math geniuses any more than Harvard is looking at building a class of future CEOs. Talent comes in many forms.

The best analogy I can think of is American Idol. The candidates are selected from a huge pool of talent. Arguably all the contestants past a certain stage are excellent singers. You have some of the top experts at picking talent on the panel and they still can’t reach a consensus on who gets on to the next week and who gets cut. Even the panelists vary in their assessments of the same candidates week to week. If there was formula for picking the next American Idol, don’t you think the industry experts would know it!

At all elite colleges, admission decisions are made by committees. There are frequent disagreements and the decision to admit or deny may rest on such factors as how many candidates of the same gender, ethnic background or region they already admitted that day. If they already admitted several football players, musicians or legacies that morning the next one may be out of luck. You could be a highly talented math wiz, but if your case comes up after they admitted an IMO Gold medalist, you may not look so hot anymore. Whoever is in charge of your application is your advocate: maybe a particular adcom just didn’t pick up on your uniqueness, while another one may well have thought you were the best in their pile. A few schools have lifted the veil on what actually goes in committee meetings and it is not a reassuring picture. At least judges on American Idol have to provide some rationale for their decision. Not so in admission committee: if somebody doesn’t like a candidate for whathever reason, they are out. If it is late in the afternoon and the committee wants to break for the day, maybe they will be more lenient towards an otherwise maginal candidate.

Eventually, the committee ends up with a class they feel is diverse enough, but they could have arrived at it in thousands of different ways with totally different results and be just as happy.

LongPrime · March 11, 2010, 11:36pm

IMHO:
It’s Fate. It’s been preordained.

We don’t know what is going to happen next, but so far, DS has been very successful in doing what he wants to do. Many many instances, we wonder how his life would have been different if he had been accepted and attended one of the named engineering Ivys.

menloparkmom · March 11, 2010, 11:59pm

“How is a sparkle spotted in a static application?”
It is spotted by ad coms who read an essay that makes them sit up straight and say “WOW”! It is spotted in essays that adcoms REMEMBER .The students who COME ALIVE in their essays, the ones who stand out in some way, the ones who the adcoms attach a “tag” to- [ the Geology kid from Gunn, the asian basketball player from Paly, etc, etc…] are the ones adcoms will fight for in committee reviews, AND are the one who get the votes to admit.
PCP, you obviously have not read many years of accepted threads on CC, where kids mention over and over again receiving personal congratulatory notes from their local ad coms, who compliment them how great their ESSAYS were. If essays were not an IMPORTANT consideration for those adcoms, then why would they mention them? Why not say, “wow, I was so impressed with your SAT scores” Because their SAT scores do not set them apart from the thousands of others with similar scores, but their ESSAYS did.

“Except for a few schools, e.g., UChicago, most schools say essays don’t make or break an application in vast majority of the cases.”

What they SAY is that an essay won’t give an academically poor student a 2nd chance. What they DO SAY is that for students who DO make the first cut, who ARE well qualified, the essay CAN make the difference between an acceptance or a rejection. And what they DO say is there are so many well qualified students that apply, that ad coms are FORCED TO LOOK FOR REASONS to reject an application, and an essay that does not resonate with an ad com, that does not make him “fall in love with a student” is reason enough for a rejection.

ParentOfIvyHope · March 12, 2010, 1:31am

PizzaGirl:

This was totally uncalled for. I don’t think I share any traits with PCP.
My intentions on this thread were purely to help parent understand how much of the admission process is quantifiable.

ParentOfIvyHope · March 12, 2010, 1:37am

PCP:

I think you just totally ignored websites like e-harmony. The basis of which is quantifiable measurement can be used to match two individuals and which is same as pairing an individual with an institute.

There was an essay floating on CC of a student accepted to Harvard the basis of which was ‘in love with the institute’.

epiphany · March 12, 2010, 1:40am

^ but much more of it is non-quantifiable than quantifiable. Much more.

ParentOfIvyHope · March 12, 2010, 1:43am

^^^: But that doesn’t mean you can’t quantify it.
Even institute like Princeton shows clearly that a student with just a SAT1 > 2300 has 30% chance to get accepted than an average applicant who has less than 10%.

epiphany · March 12, 2010, 1:55am

Yes it does mean you can’t quantify it. You’re providing no justification or evidence that nonquantifiable features are quantifiable. There’s no metric for most of the categories that are the deciding categories.

ParentOfIvyHope · March 12, 2010, 1:59am

I think most of the categories are quantifiable. Will you please list the deciding categories?

Pizzagirl · March 12, 2010, 6:21am

PCP and POIH, how does your belief that it’s quantifiable – and for example, one of the qualifications would therefore be rack up x number of APs with scores of 4 or 5 – square with the fact that many applicants come from schools that either don’t have APs, have a limited number or only allow students to take one or two per year and only beginning as a jr or sr? How do you think they account for the fact that in some communities the teachers push Intel, Siemens, etc and in others the teachers wouldn’t know those things if they tripped over them?

I spoke with a UChicago admissions director just last week who made a presentation at my kids’ school. I explicitly told her about this thread and she laughed. Her territory includes both NJ, home of the overprepped, and MS and AL. She emphasized repeatedly that they read a kid in context of his environment. Why does she spend so much time traveling to schools in her territory? To get the FEEL for the atmosphere. So she can evaluate The kid from Short Hills and the kid from rural MS in their context. Which is subjective.

Why on earth would your metric give more points to the kid who was Val of Short Hills vs Val of East Nowhere, MS? Hers doesn’t. The kid in MS can’t help the fact of his area and high school, which may not offer APs, college bound peers, etc. It merely reflects your
upper middle class dutifully push all the right buttons to impress the Ivies mentality.

My nephew just got into Williams last night, and has gotten into Vandy and CMcK. He has some Ivy apps pending. Whether he gets in or not doesn’t make him any less Ivycaliber. It just means he won or didn’t win the lottery at that point. Period. Your kids are both Ivy caliber. Great. Dirty little secret - that’s not the end goal of life.

marite · March 12, 2010, 8:59am

How do you identify “sparkle?”
An essay need not have “sparkle.” S1’s essay, even to my fond maternal eyes, did not have sparkle. It was not the sort that would land in anthologies of successful college application essays. But it revealed something about him that suggested he would be a very good fit for the colleges that admitted him (they were rather similar, which made it difficult for him to choose among them eventually).
S2’s application essay did not sparkle, either. But it suggested that he was a team-player and had a wry sense of humor; in other words, he would not spend all his time holed up in his room doing problem sets but would be part of the wider college community. For both, that was enough .

PaperChaserPop · March 12, 2010, 9:05am

I mentioned interviews in my last post. In the workforce, unlike college admissions, interviews are often decisive. In college admissions, interviewers are not even on the adcoms. If you want to draw parallel here, it would the equivalent of finding sparkles in job resumes.

We either have to agree we are saying the same thing or agree to disagree on how much individual subjectivity is checked or not checked by the committees. I did say checked, not eliminated.

marite & cd, your experience as interviewers is invaluable to this discussion. I’m intrigued by the quote above. What percentage of kids you interviewed fall into this category? If the percentage is non-trivial, then you’ve just increased the admissions rate for the rest. Perhaps the applicants who are not in this category can be considered Ivy-caliber candidates. Granted, many still get rejected. Also, can you confirm that as alum interviewers, you don’t have applications in hand for your interviews? I’ve often wondered about this.

This exercise is not to say with finality who will and who won’t get in through a formula. This point seems to be lost on this thread as many posts take on an all-or-nothing stand. I’m trying to build a model. Model is an abstraction of the real. As an abstraction, it does not represent reality 100%. I never claimed finality. To understand a complex operation from the outside, we often build a model based on the behavior we observe. We tune the model to make it closer to what it models. The model becomes useful when it can predict the behavior most of the time.

Most definitely not reassuring. However, since people don’t change overnight and (I guess) adcoms don’t replace all their members every year and have some sense of continuity, then there are trends we should be able to observe over time.

MPM, I agree essays make or break applications some of the time, but I’m not convinced that they are decisive in most of the situation, because in part I believe there is a good correlation between high academic achievement and good essay writing. Given how easy it is to get help on essays, it would be risky to put too much weight on essays.

Let’s not confuse dating service with how men select wives from whom they have dated. I agree with epiphany on this.

Now comes the quote that gave me my lighthearted moment in our intense discussion.

marite · March 12, 2010, 10:46am

PCP:

I am not an interviewer. My knowledge comes from shepherding two kids through the college application process (I knew zilch when S1 was considering college), learning from CC and knowing how Ss’ friends fared. I also happen once in a while to hear or overhear what some GCs and adcoms have to say. For example, S’s Gc was stunned that an Asian-American girl with perfect SAT and SAT-IIs (not a frequent occurrence at our school!) was rejected by Emory (she got into Brown, which has a history of accepting students from our school). The GC also told us that Swarthmore is not very welcoming of our students (The only one I know who got in was a legacy) but they have better luck at Williams or Amherst. Why that should be so? I have no idea.

Pizzagirl · March 12, 2010, 11:04am

Au contraire - that’s how to make your 2200 kid stand out from all the others. Because he or she has a unique voice to contribute. Whether he’s telling a story about picking socks off the floor, learning sign language, or kicking the winning goal at the state soccer tournament. That’s what makes the 2200 kid with the 3.8 GPA more intriguing and interesting than the 2300 kid with the 3.9 GPA. It’s the color commentary. It’s what makes the adcom want to admit this kid, not feel obligated that they have to because he’s passed the requisite smartness test.

Besides, even if there were a formula, once that formula became apparent, the adcoms would just change it, so what’s the point?

Here’s an example: A few years ago, someone noted that kids who did those expensive painting-houses-in-Ecuador types of trips were viewed particularly positively by top schools. So, every upper middle class parent worth his or her salt dutifully packed junior off to Ecuador or Peru or wherever so they could dutifully write on their essays about how their eyes were Opened Up by The Poverty They Saw and how they Loved Helping People and how Underneath It All I Learned We Are All The Same.

And it worked. For a short time.

Then it became apparent that too many people were following that formula, and the top schools said – enough – we’re tired of kids who were overcoached / prepped to chase something because they think it is meaningful to us. We’d rather have them follow their own passions, whatever that might be, instead of doing things just to make us happy.

What makes you think that even if you could identify such a profile / model, that it couldn’t be changed on a whim? From the results I see both on CC and IRL, I certainly see a backlash against the overprepped / overcoached kids who dutifully check boxes out of obligation versus demonstrate passion and interest in a topic and / or are just great bright well-rounded kids.

Don’t you think that sometimes the adcoms get a little bit of glee from turning down yet another upper middle class kid from the 'burbs who has had every opportunity, has dutifully taken the requisite # of AP’s and done exactly one varsity sport and done the requisite community service – because life is more interesting if they take the kid from Wyoming who can rope a steer and seems like a diamond in the rough? And they know that the other kid will surely get into some good school and do well, whereas the opportunity they are providing Wyoming Cattle Kid is truly life changing for him? I sure would if I were an adcom. And I say that as the parent of upper middle class kids from the 'burbs.

midmo · March 12, 2010, 11:09am

You are confusing ability to write well with willingness/ability to write the sort of the thing admissions committees want to read. I know a certain young man who was way past the minimum on your scoring rubric before his mom got tired of the exercise, who thought questions like “tell us what you do for fun” and “tell us about a life challenge you overcame” were silly essay questions. This fellow writes very well, won a national writing award in hs, scored an 800 on the SAT writing test, got 5s on the AP English exams, but was not in a mood to write essays about such things. The adcoms evidently thought the essays were a good way to assess fit, in which case this fellow proved himself not to be a good fit by his disdain for the essay questions.

EDIT: On the other hand, he very much liked “describe yourself as a mathematical function”, an optional question for another top school. The adcoms there liked his answer, evidently.

I suggest that essays are crucial, but not in a predictive fashion.

bovertine · March 12, 2010, 11:47am

I read this book from an admissions lady at Stanford answering questions about how they admitted people. It was fairly detailed. I’ll ignore the hooked candidates, because I’m having a hard enough time remembering what she said about the unhooked. But I do remember a few things.

First, she said the head-honcho went through the aps and discarded those with GPAs under 3.0 and test scores under 500 in all areas. So there was a bar, but it was pretty low.

Then, the aps went through series of readers who graded them in two areas -academic, and personal (ECs, essays, etc). They were rated from 1 to 5, 1 being best. Each area was basically given equal weight. She said 1,1 students were very rare (maybe 20 a year). Academic was fairly numbers based- like PCP has written here. The personal had some guidelines but was more “holistic”. A 1 personal score was usually someone like a Gold medal Olympic athlete, or the Siemens winner. But it was pretty loose structurally and definitionally.

But even after these were compiled and a kid had a two number “score” she was very clear that there were no absolute rules. They basically got together in a room and hammered it out in several stages. They started by splitting the kids into 20% admits, 20% not-admit, and the rest “swim”. It was a fairly non-programmatic process she described, with a lot of soul searching, nit picking, and wrangling. She said it really helped if a kid had an advocate on the commitee (or was that another book?).

Anyway, all this stuff is fascinating to me for some reason, and I have absolutely no dog in this hunt.

marite · March 12, 2010, 12:01pm

This process sounds quite a bit like the one for Wesleyan as per The Gatekeepers. The adcoms went back and forth on the student from Harvard-Westlake (eventually denied) and from an Indian reservation (admitted because he was championed by one member of the adcom despite his low stats).

What is the profile of an "Ivy caliber" applicant?

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