<p><a href=“College Admissions: Inside the Decision Room - YouTube”>College Admissions: Inside the Decision Room - YouTube</a></p>
<p>This altered my impression of Amherst in a negative direction. Wonder what others think.</p>
<p>It’s not wise to think that the admissions office speaks for the college. Which is obviously what you have done as otherwise your impression of Amherst would not have been influenced by this video.</p>
<p>OK. I would be grateful if you could advise what the role of the Admissions Office at Amherst is. Do they set admissions policy and procedure without any input or influence from other parts of the college? Thanks in advance.</p>
<p>fenwaypark, I agree with you. There were too many things in that video that had me scratching my head. It could be a pretty honest look at the admissions process in a very short two minutes. You certainly don’t get the feeling that the admissions officers are taking careful and deep looks at the applicants. I’ve got to think that’s the fault of whoever produced this video. I’m just really surprised this has been put there as it stands.</p>
<p>The video is 2 minutes long. It can’t possibly capture the nuances of the admissions process at Amherst.</p>
<p>I was surprised at people’s negative reactions. Obviously this is highly distilled snippets from long meetings, but that said I’m not surprised it essentially looked like a pitch meeting. Terminator meets Bambi. High acheiving muslim student with addict father. High acheiving student with 4 varsity sports. Not so high acheiving but living in a shoe box. They all have the fact sheets in front of them, the same limited set of facts GPA/tests/etc of them based on data and information provided by the students, and there are 1000 maybes.</p>
<p>Would anyone have expected to see a computer anywhere? Maybe I missed it. All I saw were hard copies, pencils, highlighters and notepads. I was expecting that the admissions process at most schools would involve digitized data.</p>
<p>Gotta defer to Amherst, though… I guess. They allowed the video to be taken and distributed, and they must have concluded that it would be a positive thing to authorize for public viewing.</p>
<p>I watched it and just kind of cringed thinking that my essays were looked at the same way and read aloud, not just by individual readers to themselves, but I guess I have to stand behind them. If I had seen this last week I would have been scared to death.</p>
<p>Now I’m just creeped out, a little. “Condor is XYZ but ABC and he said “blah blah blah” in his essay, how many hands up?” And I am picturing why all hands should be up as well as picturing why hands would be down. It makes the process way more human when I think kids with great stats would be so much more comfortable with a computer settling numbers.</p>