I can only speak for the Ivy League college I used to work for. Students could request their admissions files–which became their student files once they matriculated. Alas,all the admission rating sheets and comments were shredded once the student accepted their offer, so none of these were retained.
As for disparate scores, this was frequently the case. That’s why the aggregate score was used. In truth, however, during committee meeting little reference was made to these scores. Instead, the discussion centered around what was unique or exceptional about the candidate.
What I said was, “It’s not necessarily a simple yea or nay or even a show of hands.” Obviously they need to make a decision. And yes, mackinaw, you’re right, after considerable culling. “Lots of reviewers can look at a file, depending…”
The real point here is there is no one way all schools do it or all in a tier. Eg, I know of no “aggregate score.” It’s not rack and stack.
It could be that the disparate scores can be explained by “Oh, yeah, Joe scores everybody lower than the rest of us; we just allow for that.” This is not a scientific process.
There’s also another wrinkle on this–individual variations between graders. Rater A might rate almost everyone a 7 while rater B scores almost everyone a 5 so B’s 7 is worth significantly more than A’s 7. An individual looking at their record would be unable to account for the difference in the rater profiles because they only see their file. Likewise, raters would be expected to have different values. Using myself as an essay reader, I’d be much more swayed by clever elegance in writing than I would be a story about overcoming adversity but I recognize others may swing the other way.
Now THAT is fascinating. I’ve read the Gatekeepers and a ton of other tell-alls about admissions, but there are some nuggets in here that I’ve never seen, or rarely so.
Like a preference for city or “small town” kids over suburban kids:
Ouch.
Or the acknowledgement of athletes being awesome time managers who excel:
Not unusual once one gets away from a subset of super-selective schools that have the luxury of “building a class” from a large pool of academically top-end applicants. Every other school presumably just looks for what they see as “the best”. For them, “building a class” may be limited to avoiding overpopulation in especially popular capacity-limited majors or divisions, where they explicitly have higher thresholds (holistic or otherwise) for those majors or divisions.
People should understand that the Chicago Admissions Dean in that article retired seven years ago, and was replaced by a successor who would not have said at least half of those things. The current Dean was probably hired with the mandate to make Chicago’s admissions a lot more like Yale’s, which he has, mandate or no. Careful readers will also note that the “harried” admissions staff was processing 7,000 applications (vs. 30,0000+ now) and accepting 45% of them (vs. less than 8% overall now). Chicago probably got more than 10,000 early action applications this year. The process described in that article belongs to an earlier, more gracious age, where the admissions staff had a lot more room to take risks and a lot more time to contemplate doing so.
I’m sure the process today is not fundamentally dissimilar. But the attitudes, pace, and style are different. And no one would say “We’re not ‘building a class.’”
I mentioned earlier when I posted that Chicago admissions article above that in 1999 when this article was published, Chicago had a higher acceptance rate than it does now. If I recall correctly, when my son applied in 1996 about 25-30% of applicants were admitted. That is why I “knew” that he would be admitted, since his numbers put him well within the top 25% of admitted students.
So the idea of “building a class” wasn’t possible in the sense that it’s used here. But now that Chicago is admitting less than 10% of applicants, it’s in a different world. That said, I suspect that the O’Neill approach survived in some critical ways. Chicago did and does celebrate brainiacs, pointy students, and even eccentrics. They want people who are going to thrive in the particular intellectual atmosphere of the college.
I knew my son would thrive there because when asked what his own priorities were for colleges, his simple criteria were he wanted a college where it’s ok to be a thinker, and that was located in a major league city (defined by sports).
@fragbot That’s a good point. I’m not sure what kind of essay reader that you are, but it’s interesting to note that the ACT and SAT readers are trained to evaluate essays with respect to a strict rubric. The expectation is that all readers (regardless of their background, biases, etc.) will yield a similar score. The rubric addresses grammar, the length of the essay, supporting evidence/data, acknowledgment of counterpoints, refutation of the counterpoints, conclusion, etc. If an ACT/SAT essay reader gives a score that is out of whack (more than one point?) with other readers then that reader is dropped from the roster (or so I have heard).
If a university’s admission committee wants to normalize the process and thereby reduce the kind of disparate numerical results mentioned upthread, it should provide some sort of rubric for evaluation of the applications. Why should it be permitted for reader A to give substantially different scores than reader B?
So this is exactly what i believe is happening at our school - urban school, 70% reduced-lunch, generally seen as a 'tough" school. The Ivy acceptances flowed in in December! But they were mostly to the 30% of the kids with no financial or education issues.
This happens to some extent at our high school - sadly a lot of the reduced-lunch crowd aren’t taking the most rigorous schedules. But those that do. They are golden!
In our area, there are a number of upper income, mostly white parents who have chosen a particular large urban high school in the belief that their kids are more likely to get into a selective college from this high school, which has a high percentage of reduced/free lunch kids (about 60%). These are parents who paid for expensive K-8 private schools but are quite frank about saying they think their kids will be more competitive coming from this particular high school as opposed to one of the private high schools. This is a big high school that has a lot of course offerings, FWIW. I don’t know how accurate this belief is, but I do know these kids have gotten into schools like Stanford and Harvard. But who is to say whether they also would have from a private school? My own kids go to public school, but a different public high school with about 25% reduced/free lunch population. There is no one majority ethnic group at my kids’ school.
@LionsMum It is not as if the selective colleges aren’t used to this trick. And when they evaluate candidates, they look at the candidates’ individual circumstances. Going to a school with a large URM population does not mean you will be treated as a URM. In the case of the Ivy League university I worked for, we considered what resources an individual student had available to him (her).
All in all, private school students do have a leg up in the sense that they usually have much better resources. Universities also place a lot of emphasis on diversity, so will never accept more than a certain number of students from any one school or geography.
@SouthernHope I cannot speak for your school, but the Ivy League universities I know will bend over backwards to identify and recruit low income students or students who have faced unusual challenges. We used to say that if you were from am upper income professional family you had to walk on water.
Demographic information always appears on the first page of the app: where you live, what school you attend, your race, your parents’ education levels and current employment, etc. It stands to reason that well before AOs turn the page to see grades, test scores, essays, and so on, they have made an assessment about where they will “set the bar” for the applicant. The demographic information could just as easily be suppressed or moved to the last page of the app.
@excanuck99 I’m sure selective colleges are aware of all the tricks, and of all the kids using college counselors, essay coaches, etc. And yet, those things continue because they appear to work. I’m not faulting the colleges for this, just pointing out that that is how the game is played. I went to an Ivy League school and have conducted alumni interviews for 15 years. I don’t think it’s a “lottery.” But I do think many applicants would succeed at those schools, and the adcoms have to reduce the application pool from, say, the 15-20% who would be great candidates, to the 6% who are offered admissions, and sometimes those tricks bear fruit. Also, it may be that the upper income professional kids have to “walk on water” to get admitted, but my understanding is that those students still represent the largest demographic at the Ivies. Having that kind of background assists a student in “walking on water” – they don’t start at the same place as lower income kids, and so are in a different place at age 17. This is NOT to say that those kids don’t work hard and have impressive accomplishments – they certainly do! But I don’t think they have to do more than other candidates – they just start out at a better place.
Again, some try to make this into something hierarchical or even binary: he is or he isn’t (fill in the blank.) The bar is the bar and, as many have said, over time, it’s not the CC notion you have to have a 2350. Or that some hard luck tale will do the trick. (Hard luck won’t carry you through a 4-year experience at a super competitive college.) The whole app is weighed.
LM, there’s a lot of discussion on CC about some kids starting in a better place. That doesn’t mean that all present a good app, after stats and some essay coaching, or that the higher SES kids, in general, show better thinking.