<p>Interesting that in a couple of the case studies she seems to weight the SAT score more heavily than the ACT. I thought colleges say they don’t prefer one over the other. Seems not the case for Stanford. I wonder how that affects kids like my son who have to send in ALL scores to some of the more select schools but whose ACT is considerably better than the SAT. I wanted him to not even send the SAT and pretend he never took it but don’t want to be dishonest when they ask for all scores.</p>
<p>Yeah, that 2230 and 35 comparison was odd, the 35 is better, no?</p>
<p>posting for future reference, thanks</p>
<p>that was the best set of videos on admissions yet! Thanks</p>
<p>Wow, cool insight!
I just finished watching the fourth video and have some comments.
1: Eh, you can really see why that person might not necessarily be Stanford material
2: I hope the person got in if the counselor confirmed extraordinary-ness but at the same time I found it weird that the person was only in ECs with titles in them.
3: Good applicant, like she said I also would’ve checked the essays.</p>
<p>4: Ok, seriously what the hell. Of course grades are not everything but this person hardly seems strong enough academically to take classes at a very competitive school (600 in Math, other low scores + no GPA (fishy) + rank of top 15% (the number 15 implies that she was not in the 10%+ range)). Also, consider the fact that basically every high school with a newspaper has an editor-in-chief, and that at least two of her ECs suggest some parental finagling (interning in French consulate as a sophomore? Highly unlikely that she did that alone at the age of 14-16) (taking cooking classes in France and travelling in Europe takes no skill at all, only deep pockets). I was under the impression that schools were able to spot applicants like these, and it’s not even like she was that strong academically anyway. I don’t even know why you would include travel on college applications, to me (as someone that probably has more braggable vacations than her) that just seems like a way of bringing your SES somewhere inappropriate.</p>
<p>Edit: Oh, and I thought that Stanford didn’t care if you took more than 3 APs, but she seems to suggest otherwise for basically all applicants. And I wonder why she does so much speculation regarding rank. Tons of schools don’t even report it; it’s not like the students are hiding anything.
Watching the last two now.</p>
<p>If there’s anything you can learn from the fifth applicant, as well as the fourth, it’s that you should go out of your way to do quirky/unique ECs and that it’s somehow an accomplishment to be Pres/VP of a club containing two active people, lol. But she was still obviously strong.</p>
<p>The way she evaluated the sixth applicant seems odd. Perhaps she is simply not familiar with CS, because she committed the classic newb mistake of thinking that knowing lots of languages is impressive. Obviously it’s good to know languages, especially different kinds (e.g. Assembly, C, Python, PHP all have different niches) but at the same time I feel like she is confusing the difficulty of learning programming languages with human languages. After you learn how to program in one language, especially a lower-level one like C, the rest of the languages are pretty simple in my opinion. It’s like learning Spanish, and then listing Galician, Andalusian, Madrileno, Argentinian, and Castellano as other languages that you know. To an uninformed person that seems impressive, but in reality they are just slightly altered forms of the same thing.</p>
<p>It seems kind of unfair to say “he’s good but we need to see the essays” because his profile shows that he is (probably) not a great writer to begin with, and that his strengths are in CS. Also, it seemed like she kind of shut him out when she read about video games and stopped giving him a very fair evaluation. If he hadn’t put videogames and perhaps didn’t seem like a nerd I’m sure she would’ve gone on and on about “doing ECs outside of school” and probably wouldn’t have skipped over his research and other ECs. </p>
<p>Oh, one last thing: to all of you out there at schools with lots of AP courses, it would be in your best interest to have four or more scores with scores of 4+ to report, since this admissions reader (and surely others) operates under the notion that having less means that you are not a super strong student. She also wants you to take more than the normally required minimum of 2 subject tests if you want to impress her.</p>
<p>Last last thing: I wonder if this sample represents a typical group of applicants to Stanford, or a carefully selected one. Statistically, if the chance of admission is 5% for each applicant, there is over a 70% chance that none of these students were admitted, but she seemed to be enthusiastic about the middle four, with a few caveats. There were also no (mentioned) hooks: no URMs, no athletes, no (significant) legacies, all of which make up an important portion of Stanford’s entering class. The average applicant also seemed pretty strong in her eyes. I would expect most applicants to have ECs somewhere between #1 and #4 with slightly higher test scores, in the low 2000s.</p>
<p>I didn’t think anyone submitted AP test scores with an app at all.</p>
<p>Also, she acted like the ones there were all they had when obviously any taken as seniors wouldn’t have scores and thus wouldn’t be listed.</p>
<p>Still, it was interesting.</p>
<p>So is what’s starting to happen in this thread, IMO. People have begun trying to scrutinize the videos in order to find the ambitious high school student’s version of the philosopher’s stone: the secret for getting into Stanford (or Harvard or MIT…).</p>
<p>Well of course. It’s CC after all :)</p>
<p>I was a bit confused why she said the 2230 was better than a 35. Anyone else catch that? Do admissions officers prefer the SAT?</p>
<p>I noticed that she didn’t recognize the person that only took 1 AP; the fact that she was in the IB program. She had CAS and the EE listed about origami algorithms, does anybody know if an IB diploma carries more weight than AP tests? Or is it just that AP is more well known than IB?</p>
<p>
@Slytherclaw12:
Yes, Ms. Andrews whiffed on that one. I was thinking the same thing. Actually, it’s pretty embarrassing that an “experienced” admissions officer didn’t pick up on the fact that the applicant in question was doing the IB program. Makes me question her experience. The IB program has existed for many years…and applicants certainly had IB on their applications when Ms. Andrews was working in the Stanford admissions office.</p>
<p>FWIW, strong colleges view the IB program favorably. I had several friends in college (top-tier university) who had earned the IB diploma. Some state flagship universities don’t appreciate IB as much as AP (as evidenced by which IB classes/test scores get AP-like credit).</p>
<p>I don’t understand why admissions officers compare the student to the others at their same school. In our town, my son attends the most academically challenging school. Thus, it’s filled with high achieving students and it’s hard to get the top grade in a class because the scores are graded on a curve and the other classmates are so academically strong. Should he have attended one of the other schools where he would have probably been in the top 5% of his class because the school wasn’t as challenging and the students not as high achieving? It’s as if a student gets punished for attending the more challenging high school. Am I looking at this correctly?</p>
<p>You’re not looking at it incorrectly, but I think you’re also not looking at it from the perspective of HYP & other leading privates. </p>
<p>Time was, a fairly small number of schools–Exeter, Andover, Lawrenceville, Choate, Boston Latin and others–were even more over represented in leading colleges’ freshman classes than they are today. The colleges decided they wanted more diversity than that. One way to accomplish that is by taking top students from a wider variety of schools, rather than more students from a limited number of celebrated preparatory schools. And HYP et al. can do that; they’re private colleges. </p>
<p>Is your son getting short-changed? I dunno. What’s your objective, getting him educated or getting him into Princeton?</p>
<p>These videos are great! Really really helpful.</p>
<p>Posting for future reference as well</p>
<p>Future refernece. Thank you, these are incredibly helpful!</p>
<p>Is it still considered rigorous if you self-study AP courses instead of taking the class? The teachers at my school are horrible, so I’m self studying AP Cal BC and AP Bio</p>
<p>I just hate how they don’t look at their “financial situations” more. Some people don’t have the opportunities to do some things because of money. Like for case #2, she says it would’ve benefitted the applicant if he had went to Germany or something. Maybe he didn’t have enough money to go to Germany, or do more with his passions.</p>
<p>While others, who have the money, have much better opportunities.</p>
<p>great info, thanks!</p>