<p>nedad,</p>
<p>I believe that you are correct but are the LACs school moving away from that a bit? The reason I ask is that one LAC, Williams, only accepts the common application and the supplement has no additional essay. I am sure they are not the only LAC like this.</p>
<p>At the time of his app, S's school required a supplementary essay and he sent the third in as his own extra - kind of like a cover letter that tied everything together.</p>
<p>Slice of life essays are always the best! Pick one situation and let the AC see your personal side. There are many ways to give the message of your being a committed, dedicated, hard worker without using those words. That is the secret! They want to know who you are and what makes you tick, but want to read about it through your experiences. That holds their attention and makes you stand out as an individual application.</p>
<p>I agree with NEDAD. The AI acceptance rates at Williams (which were roughly in line with those described at Dartmouth by Ms. Hernandez) confirm what he is saying. Only academic 9's (or 1's for a flipped scale), get accepted at nearly 100% rates. An academic 9 is a very lofty standard. </p>
<p>Every other applicant, even academic 8's, must have their app chosen over other apps with similar academic ratings. Hence, the importance of establishing an identity in the admissions office that fits with the particular school.</p>
<p>A word on essays: This is not an essay contest. The real power of the essays is providing an opportunity for the student to "control the message" (to borrow a political term) in a way that black lines on a Common App Form do not. The essays can emphasize and tie together an application into something that has an "identity". The entire goal is to make an adcom say, "You know...this sounds like an interesting kid. I can picture him or her adding something vibrant to campus life here."</p>
<hr>
<p>As for colleges not talking about AI indexes: You only read about it in the context of athletic admissions. The Ivy League regulations have standards for "how low" the member schools can go for recruited athletes. The league regulations are written in terms of how many "standard deviations" below the academic mean the cut-off can be. In addition, colleges establish a distribution for their recruited athletes (so many 3 standard deviations below, so many 2 standard deviations below, etc.). For any Ivy League school to comply with the Ivy League regulations, they have to calculate AI for all applicants. When it comes to the COFHE schools and similarly selective privates, I would assume that they all use some form of coded academic rating on the application folder, unless there is reason to believe otherwise.</p>
<p>This is all very interesting for the students who indeed took the SAT and SAT subject tests. Several of the schools, Yale included, require ONLY the ACT and NO SAT subject tests if the ACT scores are submitted. Now, I'm aware of the "equivalency" tables of ACT with SAT scores (e.g., a 35 composite + 1580), but how is an AI calculated for students who don't submit any subject tests (e.g., from the Midwest) or those who submit just one or two?</p>
<p>qguru,</p>
<p>Good question . . . I would assume that they would use the SAT Equivalent for both the SAT Reasoning and Subject Test sections. Though that is just a guess.</p>
<p>
[quote]
However, many schools do not rank, though the colleges can estimate
[/quote]
just curious, how would they estimate this?</p>
<p>Andi:</p>
<p>In many cases, the high school provides a GPA distribution table in the school profile they submit with the transcript. Thus, even though they "don't rank", colleges can assess the applicant's position.</p>
<p>In other cases, the guidance counselor rec provides rank information. For example, the phrase, "one of our top 2 graduating seniors academically, Bobby excels...." would pretty much nail it down.</p>
<p>In other cases, the adcoms just plain know the school well enough to know just by looking at the GPA.</p>
<p>The problem for consumers is that GPA and class rank is inextricably tied to the lay of the land at a particular school. For example, you might need to be ranked #1 or #2 from an average public high school for a given college, while being in the top 20% at Exeter or Thomas Jefferson might do the trick. That's the part that makes answering "Here are my stats; what are my chances?" questions here impossible. I try to encourage parents and students to do the research based on actually acceptances from their own high school to try to get a sense of what GPA or class rank has been successful at a given tier of selectivity.</p>
<p>To the OP, of course your d has a great shot. Hope you won't mind if I butt in and tell you, though, that when my ballet dancer d looked at Amherst we heard a lot of complaints about the lack of dance on campus and the difficulty of getting the bus to Smith in any expedient way for classes. I suggest looking at Williams, which has a very good dance program and is a similar school.</p>
<p>Thanks interesteddad. I remember our GC saying that the school would absolutely NOT give any ranking info out. If the school's profile, which they post on their web site is the same as that which they send to the colleges, then I don't see how adcoms can deduce anything about a kid's rank. However, if the school DOES send the colleges information that would allow them to determine rank with some accuracy it would seem unfair to students if they couldn't get knowledge of where they stand in their class in so far as determining their app chances.</p>
<p>
[quote]
This is all very interesting for the students who indeed took the SAT and SAT subject tests. Several of the schools, Yale included, require ONLY the ACT and NO SAT subject tests if the ACT scores are submitted. Now, I'm aware of the "equivalency" tables of ACT with SAT scores (e.g., a 35 composite + 1580), but how is an AI calculated for students who don't submit any subject tests (e.g., from the Midwest) or those who submit just one or two?
[/quote]
</p>
<p>There is no need to guesstimate the missing components of the AI. The AI has built-in mechanisms for the various alternatives. When no Subject Tests scores are present, the formula repeats the SAT information. When there is no stated rank, the formula converts the GPA. For small schools (below 300 seniors) the GPA is slightly more generous. Schools that use a 0-100 scale also fare better without a stated ranking. </p>
<p>The AI is composed of three components:
1. the mean of the highest math and verbal SAT I;
2. the mean of the three highest SAT II tests (if and only if 3 SAT III scores are reported) or a repeat of the SAT I component
3. a number representing the student's secondary school class rank converted to the same 200-800 scale as SAT scores). </p>
<p>An ACT composite score (again converted to the SAT scale) can be substituted for either or both of the first two components. The last digit of the scale is dropped, so that the highest possible AI is not 2400 (800 x 3), but 240.</p>
<p>We always hear about the vast differences in SAT scores between regular students and athletes. Here are a few numbers from Yale for the years 1999 through 2001:</p>
<p>SAT Male Students 1455 1453 1440
SAT Male Athletes 1361 1364 1355</p>
<p>SAT Female Students 1438 1439 1433
SAT Female Athletes 1354 1356 1336</p>
<p>The ratio athletes to all students is about 1 to 5 for males and 1 to 7 for females.</p>
<p>
[quote]
The AI acceptance rates at Williams (which were roughly in line with those described at Dartmouth by Ms. Hernandez) confirm what he is saying. Only academic 9's (or 1's for a flipped scale), get accepted at nearly 100% rates. An academic 9 is a very lofty standard.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>A lot fewer than 100%. This is from an article about admissions someone posted on the Williams board:</p>
<p>
[quote]
The admission staff
wait-listed or rejected nearly 300 of the 675
applicants to whom they had given their top
Academic 1 ratinga pool of students that,
on average, ranked in the top 3 percent of
their high school classes and had SAT scores
of 1545.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Xiggi, you'll probably disagree, but 100 points or less difference is not statistically significant for the SATs. That's what I was told as an Ivy interviewer for years and years - that kids can go up and down so much that they look at a range around a particular number, not the number.</p>
<p>Of course, for purposes of the USNWR rankings, the higher number is better. And yes, I do understand that these are averages ---which, btw, means some regular students could score lower than some athletes.....</p>
<p>nedad, for a population, a 100 point difference in mean SAT score is very much significant.</p>
<p>It is true that that standard deviation of the SAT is about 100 points. that means one cannot say that an INDIVIDUAL having a score of, say 100 points apart from another individual, is statistically different. But this is not true for populations, or groups of students. You would need to know the distribution of scores in each population, and the numbers. I would guess you would find the difference to be quite significant.</p>
<p>Thanks APARENT5, You're right about the dance program at Amherst. Smith is much better, particularly for ballet. We visited Williams and did not like it. Found it kind of stuffy, and too many jocks. Maybe it was all in the one day visit, but our gut feeling was that it was not a good match for our daughter.</p>
<p>If the Academic 1's average 1545 SATs and top 3% class rank, that gives us some idea of the cut-off for a 1 rating. I'm guessing that the floor is somewhere in the range of 1525 SATs and top 5%. Perhaps combinations like 1600 SATs and top 5% or 1500 SATs and valedictorian will get you a 1. That's seems little more lenient than the AI calculator here on College Confidential.</p>
<p>It's interesting to see how many academic 1s Williams gets. 675 out of 5822 applications is about 12% of the apps.</p>
<p>BTW, I believe that, in many cases, when an academic 1 is "missing a spark", that is often a failure to properly focus the application and draw the adcom's attention to a specific area of interest -- one of the real dangers of a extensive "laundy-list" application.</p>
<p>Andi, I've always thought that the "we do not rank" statement of many schools is a little disingenuous. There are a number of occasions which "require" or at least ask the h.s. for a student's rank. (That goes beyond UC's ELC, but that is one of many examples.) If a school reports rank, they do rank, period. They just don't <em>publish</em> the ranks.</p>
<p>However, again this is a little disingenuous. We all know that "unranked" students (whose status is not disclosed to them) are keenly aware of precisely the ranks of most of the students in their class -- or at least of the "main players." They can tell you who is where on the scale, even through about #8 or 10, if they know each other well & hang out together.</p>
<p>What purpose does it serve "not to rank"? Well, one could say it theoretically reduces the emphasis on numbers, that it makes a class or a school less "competitive" internally, but we have not necessarily seen that to be true. Classes that my daughters have been a part of in middle & high school have been either competitive by nature, or not -- based on the personalities, goals of the students, and to some degree also based on the educational levels of their parents (indicating implied or stated expectations of students).</p>
<p>Within the same schools, with "no rank" policies, classes with a higher number of very educated parents were in fact more competitive than classes with a lower number of very educated parents.</p>
<p>And as to revealing rank to a student, for purposes of informing them as to college choices, that is also a valid issue. We would have only been making a guess at that ourselves, until her ELC letter arrived that fall.</p>
<p>Here is my guess as to how a h.s. administration would justify non ranking. One would be leaks within the class of the <em>official</em> info -- rather than keeping it in the guessing/supposition realm. The other would be (& I understand it is), concern about jeopardizing college chances for very large classes with many high achievers within tiny decimal points of each other. For example, large publics in our State tend to be either fabulous or horrible, as to student achievement. A private h.s. will have a more academically diverse student body. A competitive Public (including certain urban publics) will be located in a wealthy area with large numbers of high achieving children, or will pull in from a larger region, guaranteeing a critical mass of high achievers. Such competitive Publics in our area tend not to rank, therefore. The other end of the public spectrum has a variety of policies, but many more of them rank.</p>
<p>AI is a formula, yes. But I thought (Xiggi) that Hernandez has said that the formula varies somewhat as to college.</p>
<p>I don't know if this is unique, but my daughter's IB program issues rank out of the entire county school district. So my daughter's rank is X/10,000.</p>
<p>Andi,</p>
<p>I just wanted to follow up on what others have already said about class rank and reporting. At my son's school they provide a grade distribution chart. They also weight grades with an extra .5 given for Honors/AP classes and an A+ is a 4.5. On the distribution chart they provide the number of students in each band, i.e. X had > than 4.5, Y had between 4.25 and 4.5, etc. </p>
<p>With the class size you can do the calculation of the range of a student, say 7%-11%. Further, the adcoms can make further gradations based upon how high up in a particular grouping the student is. For example, the student may fall in the 4.25 to 4.5 range but have a GPA of 4.48.</p>
<p>That is why certain ECs or other items on the application become more important, i.e. actual scores on the AP tests. This enables the schools to compare within a national pool instead of just your school. It is also one of the ways Hernandez says that students can get the Adcoms to improve the class rank component of the AI. That is why so many students get in to the Ivy's from certain prep schools.</p>