<p>Exactly. It wasn’t this “x points for a 2150, x+10 points for a 2200, x+20 points for a 2300” type of rubric. It was a holistic impression of how academically inclined the kid was, which was a combo of some impression of the scores plus other things gleaned from the transcript and from the entire picture of the applicant.</p>
<p>And I really am appalled by the supposed metric of “x points for being val of a top 100 hs school, x-10 points if it’s top 101-500” or whatever was in PCP’s metric. Colleges know that the hs a kid attends isn’t his doing / choosing but it’s a function of where his parents chose to live. They KNOW that and they take that into account. Just like the UChicago admissions person said to me last week.</p>
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<p>Yes, that’s the impression I got from the Stanford book too. The academic evaluation was more quantitative than the personal evaluation or overall admission decision, but there wasn’t a precise rubric. At least she didn’t share one if there was.</p>
<p>I wouldn’t discount the importance of athleticism in the Ivy League. Princeton and Dartmouth (each about 4,000 undergrads) field about the same number of men’s and women’s NCAA varsity teams as Michigan (~25,000 undergrads)- so a 6X time greater rate of athletes on campus. Intra-college team sports of all types are a huge component of the Yale culture. </p>
<p>Obviously sports are not a money game for the schools (no TV!) and only a few recruited athletes get around the academic hurdles for admission, but athletic success in high school is very succinct means of demonstrating qualities of health, energy, competitiveness, discipline and the ability to work cooperatively in teams that complement academic achievement.</p>
<p>bov: interesting stuff. </p>
<p>i can attest to a holistic admissions review of my daughters app by a top 10 school. she is an athlete but at a top 10 school the grades, tests, etc., are very important as well as the essays and other personal factors, you don’t get “in” on your sport alone. sports got her in the door but her essays and a good SAT score helped close the deal. we know this because she got direct feedback from admissions. Granted, “direct feedback” from admissions is an advantage some athletes get in the process.</p>
<p>at elite schools with small student bodies the admissions officers are “building” a class so they look at everything closely and holistically to build that class with the balance they want. That’s why kids with say perfect math scores get rejected, they don’t want a college class full of perfect math score kids, they want balance.</p>
<p>and they want passion!</p>
<p>I trully believe an essay can be enough to land the kid on the fence into the accept pile. After reading the essays of my three oldest kids I could not imagine an admissions officer not getting a sense of who my kids were and what they had to offer. Their essays were a reflection that they were more than just grades, stats, and EC’s. My daughter with far lower stats was accepted to schools that were far out of her safety/match range…again I believe her essay is what made the difference. </p>
<p>The power of the essay should never be underestimated. By the way none of my kids essays included any foreign service projects or expensive ECs. The three oldest also had amazing letters of rec. that we did get to see. I am sure these letters also had a huge impact on their admission.</p>
<p>^^^^
agree, They want to see a passion. That certain something that can’t really be described.</p>
<p>A unique essay…and apparently a good opening line…can certainly make one 2250+ SAT, 4.0+ GPA, 10+AP 5’s candidate stand out from all of the others.</p>
<p>From the Stanford Alumni Magazine in 2008:</p>
<p>“The undergraduate admissions staff, while evaluating students on their total merit, take notice of the first lines that make essay-reading a particular pleasure.”</p>
<p>[STANFORD</a> Magazine: September/October 2008 > Features > Admissions Essays Opening Lines](<a href=“Page Not Found”>Page Not Found)</p>
<p>^^my kid has truly outstanding EC’s and she didn’t mention them in her essays or resume…left them out of the college application completely…which floored me at the time, I thought it was a big mistake. But instead she wrote about her passions for her sport and the future. College counselors advise athletes not to write about their sport because admissions obviously already knows about that part of you. So you’re suppose to write about other aspects of you. But my daughter ignored that advice and wrote about what she is passionate about which is her sport. It was accurate and it communicated who she is and what she’s all about…it was the truth. And I think they like that a lot!</p>
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<p>The girl (Juliana something?) from Harvard-Westlake was accepted, and they flew her out for a visit. She chose Yale.</p>
<p>There was another girl from H-W who had a drug thing on her record: IIRC she accidentally ate a hash brownie or something, and it was uncharacteristic for her. I think that her results were not as positive, but in addition she wasn’t as strong academically as the other one. I don’t think she applied to Wes.</p>
<p>Sorry to be a nit-picker. :)</p>
<p>I must have remembered wrong. And I can’t check as I gave my copy of the book to another family with a high school senior.
I remember quite lengthy discussions of the girl who ate a hash brownie and reading how hypocritical it was of Wes to turn her down as Wes itself is not drug-free, to put it mildly.
Anyway, in the context of this thread, what is important is that the case was discussed at great length by the adcom (at whichever college turned her down). She was not just a compendium of stats and metrics.</p>
<p>^Exactly. My recollection is that she was rejected by Wes and was a January admit to Cornell when a prof went to bat for her. She was one of the only kids to voluntarily admit to tasting the hash brownie. I thought it was quite unfair that it had such a negative impact on her acceptances. (Don’t remember the Yalie.)</p>
<p>What I’ve heard admissions officers say, is that sometimes an essay will get you in, and rarely it will keep you out, but that most essays are really boring. I could have written post #678, although my son liked the essay question about the math equation, he did not unfortunately like the school! The school he ended up at asked a nice straightforward question in its supplement. “Why do you want to attend CMU and the particular department or school you have chosen.”</p>
<p>I know this is getting off topic, but to clarify about The Gatekeepers:</p>
<p>There were two H-W applicants.</p>
<p>One was Juliana. She’s actually a good example of a super-Ivy caliber applicant: Amazing stats at a top prep school, great ECs (an exceptional dancer), and UHM with a good story (she was on scholarship to H-W). She did apply to Wesleyan, as well as many other schools, got into them all. She’s an example of someone for whom the essay would have mattered very little; she as certainly an auto-admit at Wes, and as close as you could get at someplace like Yale. </p>
<p>Then there was Becca. Okay but not great stats, good leadership (student body prez), pot-brownie incident (which was also the topic of her essay – a risky move). Waitlisted at Wes, Jan. admit to Cornell. They claimed her waitlisting wasn’t all about the brownie, but mainly about her stats, but I have to wonder if maybe writing an essay about something else, and then just having a supplement about the brownie incident, might have serves her better. Her essay was about what she’d learned, but is a good example of how a risky essay doesn’t always pay off. It might have been better to write a more standard one highlighting other parts of her life.</p>
<p>One of the most important things I drew from The Gatekeepers was that the regional ad rep had a strong relationship with the g.c. at the elite prep school-- that even before college apps were submitted, the g.c. was drawing the guy’s attention to particular students – and that the g.c. was a very strong lobbyist for favored students. So I figure that at least among the elite, private high schools, that sort of back door communication is probably extremely important. </p>
<p>So I guess if you want to quantify, you have to add a point system to rank the effectiveness of the school’s g.c. at networking; the quality of the student’s relationship with said g.c.; and the quality of the particular school g.c.'s relationship with the regional rep for the particular college. Or not.</p>
<p>And then you have to balance that with what the Uof Chicago woman told me – which is when they saw a school that they didn’t know / have a relationship with, they dug in <em>more</em> because they wanted to expand the pool vs the same-old-same-old schools. </p>
<p>She was dealing with both NJ schools in well-to-do areas where there were relationships with GC’s … and AL and MS schools in which there is no relationship with a GC because a kid applies to Chicago once in a blue moon from those schools and the GC’s are figuring out how to get money for community college for the majority of the students, not buddying up to UChicago adcoms. It’s all taken in to consideration which is why it is – repeat after me, kids! – qualitative in nature. And honestly one day the adcom could be all about “let’s get some more Short Hills kids” and the next day it could be all about “let’s get some promising kids from Alabama.” And that’s the way the cookie crumbles.</p>
<p>Just realized something that may help our discussion. </p>
<p>I’m looking at admissions as an opaque black box with apps going in and decisions coming out, similar to the input/output analogy POIH said earlier. A lot of things happen inside the box. People can passionately champion their favorite candidates. Subjectivity may trump objectivity, sparkling essays may catapult otherwise lackluster apps, etc. The overall outcome of all these interactions, however subjective each one may be, may still be modeled adequately through quantifiable means. Having this model is in no way a denial of subjective influence in the admissions process.</p>
<p>I’m glad to see folks giving essays more weight, and I’m willing to change my view on this. Essays are not in the model because they are hard to assess objectively, unless we are willing to take at face value what the student says. We see many examples of this on chance or stats posts.</p>
<p>My English teacher said it was the best college app essay she ever read = 10 points
Awesome essay (at least I think so) = 5 points
Wrote it 5 minutes before I hit “send” = 2 points</p>
<p>I don’t buy into PCP’s model…but it’s something we could have some fun with!</p>
<p>All English teachers are not created the same in terms of their ability to judge essays for selective schools. The only opinion that counts is that of the adcom and that can’t be modeled.</p>
<p>Pizzagirl, I’m pretty sure 2boysima was making a joke. :)</p>
<p>PCP, you make the case that a quantifiable model is inherently inadequate!!</p>
<p>You say that the “overall outcome of all these interactions, however subjective each one may be, may still be modeled adequately through quantifiable means” AND that "(e)ssays Essays are not in the model because they are hard to assess objectively . . . "</p>
<p>There you have it: the model works as long as the things you can’t model are excluded from the model. And since the excluded elements are key compennts of admissions decisions . . . </p>
<p>Kei</p>
<p>P.S. Glad to know you haven’t similarly modeled your wife, though :-)</p>
<p>S1’s senior English teacher <em>hated</em> his UChicago and MIT essays. S said this is how he knew he was on the right track. 
(She previously worked for admissions at a flagship.)</p>