<p>Some people have said that the way college admissions for elite colleges are set up is that they first look at your GPA + test scores and weed out those who are qualified and those who are not. Then, they look at extracurriculars. And in the event of one student being equally qualified with another, they move on to essays. </p>
<p>But then, you see people with comparatively lower test scores make it over students with comparatively higher test scores. And essays are supposedly very important, so how can it be the 3rd consideration? Students with "worse" extracurriculars make it over those with better. It's very inconsistent. So how does it all work? Do they look at your body of work as a whole or do they take it from one aspect to another? </p>
<p>At elite schools that is definitely not the way they admit students. Essays and recommendations are quite important: they want to get a feel for the student as a whole. GPA and SAT scores have some importance, but adcoms also want to know what you’re interested in and how you’d contribute to campus.</p>
<p>They definitely are important, but it’s not like some number that they put into a formula or something they use to rank students. They’re bits of information about the applicant that help them get a picture of the applicant as a person. They definitely want students who are strong academically, but they also want people who are passionate about learning, nice to be around, good leaders, etc. A rule of thumb that probably has some truth is that at elite schools, 2200+ SAT scores all are equivalent and a 2000-2200 isn’t a big mark against you.</p>
<p>@T26E4 is right, taking a rigorous schedule and succeeding academically are very important at top schools. However, this doesn’t mean that they rank students by GPA or anything like that: they reject plenty of 4.0 students and accept many students with lower GPA’s who excelled in other areas, such as volunteering, academic competitions, or leadership.</p>
<p>One other piece of the puzzle, for the “elite” schools. There are too many qualified students applying to the top 100 schools in the U.S. So many of these schools want to glean from your application “package” (the whole package) WHY you want to go to THEIR school; they want to feel like you could sit down with an admission’s rep and tell them 20 different unique facts about their school that explain why it is the right school for you. Recently, I had a conversation with an Ivy rep – he was laughing about the student who applies to “Cornell, Dartmouth, Columbia, Yale, Harvard, Princeton and UPenn.” OK - outside of the fact that they are all Ivys, what do they have in common? How can someone who likes Cornell or Dartmouth, for example, also think that Columbia would be the perfect fit? But if you can explain the “why”, it will go a long way.</p>
Absolutely. It is funny (and sad) to hear kids try to explain why they want to go to their “dream Ivy,” because the reasons are almost always generic and could describe 100 schools. As opposed to the kid who likes Middlebury for language, Oberlin for music, or Carleton for snow.</p>
<p>GPA is not just weed out, the higher the better; of utmost importance. 54% of Harvard’s class was 4.0 gpa and average gpa was 3.94 including hooked applicants. Well over 90% ( I think 95%) of their students were in the top 10% of their class for these Ivies, including hooked applicants and those from prep schools like Exeter and Andover where it’s hard to be top 10%.</p>
<p>Schools look to create a well rounded class so if an admissions department feels that a particular candidate brings something special or unusual to the table, the school may choose to accept him/her with less than perfect stats. </p>
<p>Old Way before everything went to computers: take application, fold it into a paper airplane and send it gliding across the room towards two large bins, one marked admit, one deny, and anything that instead falls to the floor goes to wait list.</p>
<p>New way since everything now goes to computers: print out application, fold it into paper airplane and send it gliding acroiss the room toward two large bins, one marked admit, one deny, and anything that instead falls to the floor goes to wait list.</p>
<p>As you can see, traditon is very important to the admission process even with introduction of modern technology.</p>
<p>Yes, “generic” can be a killer. For the most competitive, re: “WHY you want to go to THEIR school…why it is the right school for you,” I’d shift that a smidge to: how you present yourself that “shows” you understand what the college is about, how you will fit into what that is and will contribute, and are what THEY want and need, in attributes. That’s more and needs some research and thinking. </p>
<p>A lot of how they review depends on the college. All the Common App schools agree to be holistic. (Obviously, some colleges care primarily about a stats/coursework minimum.) For first cut at competitive privates, they should read the whole. I think it’s safe to say, you get a fair shot. Then there is usually more time on the kids past first cut. Sure it can be idiosyncratic re: who reads what first, but the whole gets attention, unless there is some overt, negative showstopper in there. </p>
<p>Is this really a question of whether your stats can supercede issues with the ECs, writing, LoRs? </p>
<p>As for the airplanes, I daydream about some arbitrary cutoff- like, we’ll just review the first 15k apps, no matter what. </p>
<p>If you read The Gatekeepers: Inside the Admission Process of a Premier College by Jacques Steinberg, (12 buck online) you can get a lot of details about how it goes at one selective college. Others will be similar more or less. There are lots of articles you can read online from NPR and other credible sources. Search for Amherst and there has been several reporters 'given an inside the ‘admissions committee’ view.</p>
<p>I have never heard anyone credible describe the process you heard, alibaba, for elite colleges. I is possible that is used at some state uni’s, even selective ones.</p>
<p>There was an article written by person hired by UC Berkeley, one of many hired to read applications. I don’t think they said specifically, but the implication was that all application essays are read. The UCs are ‘holistic’ meaning they consider all parts.</p>
<p>You can also look at the Common Data Set for each college/university. There is a section C which has Basis for Selection section and you can read “Relative importance of each of the following academic and nonacademic factors…in admission”, so you can see the parts that count as Very Important, Important, Considered and Not Considered. At Brown, GPA, Test scores and Essay are marked Very Important’ Extracurricular activities are marked Important.</p>