<p>Law school is a professional school, which has a different objective than an UG school. I have to disagree that education experience at Brown would be similar to Cornell. They are two different schools, with different requirements and course offerings. Because of that, different students maybe better served by going to one vs another.</p>
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It is not surprising your friend got into HP, but not Cornell or other top tier schools. An applicant needs to have minimum stats in order to play, but it doesn´t mean that applicant is a fit for every top tier school, and that´s where the radomness comes in. If there are 10 other applicants with similar profile as you applying to Cornell then you may not be able to get in, but if there are only 2 similar applicants at Penn then you would have a better chance there. If you want to go to a school of Cornell´s calibre AND you have good enough stats, then you should apply to Penn, Cornell, Duke, and NU, because most likely you´ll be able to get in one or two, but not all. On the other hand, if your SAT scores are below 2000, it wouldn´t matter how many top 20 schools you apply to, the chance of you getting in any where is probably very slim.</p>
<p>Stanford, Harvard, and Columbia law are all top law schools that may cater to different folks. I know for fact that Stanford offers the most flexible third-year law clinic program in which students may engage in trials and get the opportunity to practice trial law - as students. No other school offers this. Yet, Stanford Law doesn’t suddenly admit bunch of people who apply because of their belief that the school is a good academic fit for them. Stanford will auto-ding anyone below 168 LSAT, period.</p>
<p>And, I see a bunch of people who aspire to attend Columbia Law, due to its location and numerous networking opportunities. Again, Columbia won’t admit anyone below 168 LSAT, excluding URM’s, no matter how touching or great their essays are, or despite the fact that a kid was the president of a bunch of random clubs as a well-rounded college student.</p>
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<p>I agree with your analysis. Hence, my point that admissions at top schools, to an extent, is a lottery. You need to apply to a bunch of schools to maximize your chances of being admitted to at least one top school. If the process was predictable and very meritocratic, there would be no reason for anyone with top scores to apply to many, they would be served well applying to very few handful of schools.</p>
<p>And, more importantly, how do you know as an applicant that you would stand a better chance at Harvard, but not at Yale or Princeton? Or that you may stand a better chance at Brown compared to Dartmouth? You have no clue.</p>
<p>I don´t know why you quoted me then went on to discuss law school´s LSAT requirements. I just said law schools are professional schools, they tend to look at stats instead of fit or other soft factors, and that´s not the case for UG schools.</p>
<p>The point is law schools are all different too, just like colleges are different. Hence, different folks may be better served attending one over the other as you stated is the case for undergraduate. Yet, demonstrating ‘fit’ doesn’t matter much for admissions for law schools. So, why should undergraduate programs care about ‘fit’ as well for admissions purposes?</p>
<p>“Fit” is about whether you match their profile of a successful, engaged kid who can think critically and has proofs behind him that he can tackle the level of academic challenges that school presents, as well as participate in activities that school values. </p>
<p>A liberal arts UG experiece is meant to be more than professional training, (in contrast to law school.) They want kids who are likely to do well academically, maybe even forge new directions, but also contibute to the vibrancy of campus life. What any given school values, in this respect, depends on its own self-image, location, programs, etc. </p>
<p>So, it’s so much more than getting good grades and beating the SAT/ACT. ECs are an important indicator of your “get up and go,” your interests, your versatility, breadth and depth, your ability to stick with an activity and, possibly, rise in responsibility- and much more. LoRs come from an adult educator- and, believe me, some find ways to write between the lines that they aren’t all that impressed with a kid. Essays aren’t just about meeting a word limit- they can reveal writing skills…and even judgment and critical thinking skills.</p>
<p>So, you can’t intuit how admisisons works based on any limited info such as one kid’s stats vs another’s. Or, what one person says. And, comparing UG to law school is apples-to-oranges.</p>
<p>I can see colleges incorporating ‘soft’ factors, including ‘fit’, among admissions criteria. However, I think it is somewhat unfair that a person with 2100 SAT can be admitted over someone with 2300 SAT, just because that admitted person was the president of a bunch of random clubs in high school that nobody else cared about. A difference of 150-200 on SAT is rather large, and I think there are problems at college admissions process.</p>
<p>What I am advocating is not that ‘soft’ factors not be incorporated into the process entirely, but I think the ‘soft’ factors should matter less. It may be to the disservice of the university, and also to the students, that someone with weaker acadmemic promise be admitted over someone who is clearly an academic stand-out. In my view, it would be ideal that college admissions would give boost points to borderline students with strong ‘soft’ factors, but no one should be getting into Cornell with 2100 SAT over someone with 2300 SAT. Yet, I would be fine with Cornell and other Ivies admitting a person with 2300 SAT over someone with 2350. Such system would call for more meritocratic process, moving away from an unpredictable, unfair, lottery-system named ‘holistic’ admissions.</p>
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<p>Although I haven’t started my law school just yet, I met a bunch of my future classmates through admit events and info sessions. My peers, in large part, are just amazing. They are incredibly intelligent and all got there through hard work and their intelligence. After sharing numerous conversations, seeing the types of questions being asked around, etc, I could just see through their academic zeal and intellectual horsepower. I think that the undergraduate student body, hence the learning experience at a college, would be greatly enhanced by admitting students more based on their academic merits, and less on other ridiculous ‘soft’ factors. During my time at Cornell, I happened to run into too many people that, in my opinion, did not deserve to be there. (Perhaps myself included, lol) </p>
<p>Also, surprisingly, the aim of many top undergraduate schools is similarly alligned with the aim of top law schools. The aim of the top law schools to educate students how to think critically and analytically, the skill-sets they believe to be critical to becoming successful attorneys. Isn’t this the type of skill-set that many top undergraduate schools also aim to teach their students? So, why the big difference in the admissions criteria, I ask.</p>
<p>How many of you feel as though we have scared off a couple of hundred people from applying… (AKA: Trying to change to subject so we do not end up seeing a 20% decrease in apps to every Ivy/top school). Sorry to butt in.</p>
<p>Well, I’ve met students who had 4.0’s & 2300 SAT’s that couldn’t sell handwarmers to Eskimos…I’ll use a sports analogy. Would you rather have a superiorally gifted, talented athlete who does not make his teammates better, only puts up great stats, or the slightly less talented player who makes his teammates better? The true measure of an iddividual isn’t how good they do for themselves…it’s how much better they make the larger group that they are part of.</p>
<p>That is a very good point, and interpersonal skills and teamwork aren’t very well measured by the SAT or by grades. However, I think it is equally absurd to propose that EC’s (or most of them, anyway) of a non-academic nature can really tell you much about those attributes, either. Many of the people I knew in high school did extra-curriculars only because of college. In fact, nearly the only ones that did a lot of volunteer work/were in leadership positions in clubs were doing it only for that reason. So if you can’t use EC’s any more reliably than academics to determine these personal attributes, how are you to do it? Well, one way is the interview, but I don’t disagree with that. But my point remains that EC’s are a ridiculous way to build a class, especially since most people with extensive volunteering/club leadership do not continue that through college. For what it’s worth, I’ve always found the underachieving brilliant kids at my school much more interesting and personable than the ones who slave away for college applications.</p>
<p>I agree that on a resume you can’t tell much by EC’s…however if your letters of rec. speak of your leadership, excellence, & character traits that are exhibited through your EC’s as well as your academic performance, then they are insightfull (as well as your essays / interview). How you are viewed by others at your school who have known and observed you for 4 years is important. However my perspective may be skewed…my D got in with relatively low stats, with no hooks, I feel that her leadership, letters of rec., essays, & EC’s revelaed an outstanding person which accounted for her admission.</p>
<p>My daughter’s best friend had around 3.6 or 3.7 GPA in high school (I don’t know her SAT, but according to her it was average). She was a very good writer, and had a certain passion (social equality for race and gender). If you just looked at her hard stats, she looked quite average (maybe even below). She was admitted to Cornell ED.</p>
<p>During her four years at Cornell, she was a member of a top sorority, head of an Asian club, admitted to one of Cornell’s secret societies, graduated with close to 4.0 GPA. She was very out spoken when there was any discrimination on campus - it included in butting heads with some fraternities in their treatment of minorities. She was admitted to every law school she applied to, which included Harvard and Stanford.</p>
<p>I have to say adcom must have seen something in this young lady that many of us probably wouldn’t have seen from a “chance me thread.”</p>
<p>I don’t think anyone could say someone with SAT score of 2100 couldn’t do just as well at Cornell as someone with test score of 2200 or 2300.</p>
<p>Lazykid…I thank God for “soft factors” because the many soft factors that my sons had added up to a very strong application. They were admitted and have graduated and I have no doubt their Cornell degrees have made all the difference in the world in their post graduation careers. There might have been other students who had higher SAT scores, but I doubt there were many who had the so called soft factors. Holistic admissions recognizes people not numbers…thank God machines aren’t picking applicants because it would be a very boring university.</p>
<p>Guess what? It happens all the time. And guess what? Cornell does it a lot. SAT is not the be-all and end-all that you make it out to be in college admissions. I’ve been involved in this process a long time. I’ve seen high scorers not be admitted and low scorers admitted. Why? Because they were able to prove that they had what Cornell wanted, and not what one test grade identified.</p>
<p>I agree that it’s absurd to limit an application to a single test score. It’s very clear that it should also depend on courses taken, grades, teacher recommendations, interviews, etc. But why is it necessary to list the extracurriculars? If an EC is significant enough, I don’t see why it wouldn’t be touched on in at least one recommendation. If it was just something done to get the college’s attention, then it won’t be mentioned. So why doesn’t an application=SAT+grades/courses+recs+interview? That seems to cover everything that can be covered.</p>
<p>My daughter was a pre-professional ballet dancer. She spent 20+ hours a week outside of school on ballet. Most of teachers didn’t know how dedicated she was to dance because she kept up her grades in school, and her school didn’t have ballet as an EC. A lot of her friends in high school were state/national ranked ice skater, tennis player (but didn’t play for school because their coach didn’t allow them), musicians, or worked in hospitality services.</p>
<p>There are also a lot of students who have had to work part time or help out around the house. I would think adcom would want to take all of that into consideration when evaluating an applicant.</p>
<p>Supervisor – if you’re suggesting that College Confidential scares many kids, and needlessly raises the anxiety level of many more, I agree. And there are many reasons for this.</p>
<p>Old Fort – I assume your daughter’s passion for dancing came through on her application and that it was listed as an EC? Right. My D’s main activity was Karate (4th degree black belt), it never occurred to me that because it was not a HS sponsored activity, that it wouldn’t count as much as band, student government or anything else. Likewise, I think the schools look favorably on the pre-professional dancers, nationally ranked tennis players, etc…</p>
<p>Group: On the point of so-called soft stats. </p>
<p>Let’s say that a school is looking to have its alumni be true national leaders – CEOs of fortune 500’s, Governors, Presidents, the real movers and shakers in society. And my guess is that this is one of the goals of a top 20 school.</p>
<p>Now – who is more likely to achieve this, the person with 2300 who basically skated through, or the person who got a 2100, but showed a passion and commitment to a specific activity over many years. Again, my guess is that if you look at the actual leaders, you’ll find the group dominated by those with passion and commitment. </p>
<p>So, if we assume that the person who gets a 2000 or so is fully qualified to do the work load at Cornell or a comparable school – which is generally conceded, then the candidate with a 2100 and commitment is a stronger candidate than the one with 2300 without. IMHO, that’s why soft factors are and should be imprortant.</p>
<p>Of course, these are only my guesses, which are worth about as little as my opinions on chance me threads, so take it for what it’s worth.</p>
<p>I don’t think anyone is advocating for Cornell to mindlessly take high SAT scorers. We aren’t really talking about 2100 vs. 2300 scorers.</p>
<p>What about 1900 SAT scorers? What about students who bombed (and I mean bombed) HS, went to a community college, and got a 3.9 and think they’re now Cornell-material. These are not usual circumstances actually. From reading some of the transfer chances threads, I get the feeling that a lot of people think they can just to a CC, get a 3.9 and transfer into Cornell regardless of how they did in HS. We’re not talking about people who got a 2050, went to Boston College, got a 3.9 and are looking to transfer. We’re talking about people who had a 3.0 and a 1600 in HS, went to a CC, and got a 3.9.</p>
<p>The thing about Cornell is that it has as many really really smart students as Harvard or Yale. The best Cornell has to offer is as good as the best that Harvard or Yale has to offer. But it is very dichotomized as there is a substantial population (including many transfers) who simply flounder around, and keep perpetuating the “Cornell is so hard” myth. I think Cornell should really seek to trim this segment of the student population.</p>