Parents of the HS Class of 2021 (Part 1)

[AlwaysMoving]

I mentioned earlier how hard it’s going to be for colleges to spend the extra time doing holistic reviews with less test scores and ECs, and fuzzy grades from online classes.

The blog post from Dr Graves at UGA is a window into this problem and how they are handling it:

As in the past, we are looking at the academic information first, and for some applicants, we will admit them based on their extremely strong academic work.

“Even though we’re committed to holistic there is a group that we can admit on stats, rigor, and HS very quickly.” They’re not going to waste precious time on this group. I bet test scores are a big part of this group.

For another large group, their academic information is very strong (core grades, core curriculum choices, and if sent then test scores), and we have been reading these files for the past 5 weeks.

First, this is “another large group” which means the first group was large too. This group is the ones that are taking sometime, but not too much. They probably have the GPA, APs, basic activities, etc, but not test scores or they’re from a HS that they’re not familiar with.

At this point they have admitted two large groups.

For another group below that, we have a large number of strong applicants whose academic work is strong, but not as strong as the first two groups. We will defer these students so we can have time to review their files in more detail (the information you referred to).

This is the group where they’re looking into hard and it’s tough. This group will eat up a big amount of time, so they will defer to RD date. They know there are a lot of excellent apps in this group, but they have to find them. It’s also a large group, but they’re not an accepted large group.

Lastly, we have a small group of applicants where their academic work is not competitive, and we will deny these students based on this information.

They’re also doing a auto rejects of a small group. Tells us that they don’t want to do a deep review before rejecting.

Remember, we do not know what the RD application pool will be like, so we have to be cautious in how we move forward with decisions, as we treat EA and RD the same in the review process."

This is an interesting tidbit to throw in at the end. They don’t know what the RD pool will look like and they’re hedging. They also probably don’t know what their yield is going to be from EA.