Chance me for ED?

Colleges and Universities A-Z Williams College
1

Here be my stats:

SAT: 2280 (800 CR, 730 M, 750 WR)
SAT II : 800 US History 780 Literature
GPA : 4.0 (But Homeschooled)

Awards: N/A

ECs: Obama Campaign Intern, Intern at Solar Development Company (like 20~ hours a week) Treasurer of Psi Beta, Captain of Quizbowl-like-ish team

Community College coursework:

Introduction to Psychology (A)
Shakespeare, Honors Section (A)
Psychology of Human Development, Honors Section (A)
Women’s Literature in the 20th Century (A)

Senior Year Courses: (Courses indicated with an (DE) next to them are dual enrollment courses that I’m taking at community college.)

Physics
The Black Experience (DE)
Psychology of Sex & Gender, Honors Section (DE)
Calculus
Kierkegaard to Camus: Existentialism in Philosophy & Literature
French

Personal Things:

Ethnicity: White
Income: 32k~
Financial Aid: Yup! Lots of it.
Hooks: I’m not first-gen, but I did get invited to Windows on Williams; I’m unsure if that’s a hook or not.

Also, I’m homeschooled.

Chance away, yo.

2

I’m no expert at chancing people, but I’ll give it a shot. First off, the fact that you did WoW is huge, something like 80% of WoW attendees get accepted to Williams. Second, those are some sick classes, and if I saw your file as an admissions officer here, I’d want you in because of how interesting that course load is. Third, you have awesome complimentary extracurriculars, balancing your obvious academic passion for the Div1/Div2 sections with a practical ability in Div3 areas. SAT scores seem satisfactory, nothing glaringly bad… if you write a sweet essay, I’d admit you for sure. That’s just one guy’s take though.

3

ED is your best shot and increases your odds significantly especially with WOW. You are a little light on the testing side (need more AP tests ) and SATs are decent but not great. In particular, your math is low. The magic watermark is 2300. Also, CC courses while better than nothing are often fairly remedial given the general CC student population. It is important to remember they need high scoring SATs to offset the preference groups that bring down the SAT averages. So, I think in regular decision you are on the lower side of desirable candidates. Remember, there about 1,100 accepted for about 550 spots. Many are taken up by athletes, others by affirmative action, and legacy preferences. Also, about 40% are taken early admit which is very aggressive. So, your RD open spots are few and far between and reserved for the cream of the crop (i.e., those that easily qualify for Harvard, Yale. Princeton, and other ivies but for some reason feel more at home Williams or where waitlisted or rejected by Ivies for inexplicable reasons). Other than going for ED, from a probability perspective, you would be better off applying early to a next tier LAC like Wesleyan, Middlebury, Smith, or Vassar where you will shine.

4

@jersey454 I’m not sure what Div1/Div2 (or Div3) means. Enlighten me?

Also, I was able to glean from your post history that you’re a current student at Williams; what was your path to getting accepted? Did anything in particular, to your mind, really /make/ your application?

@HangemHigh Well, I’m home schooled, so I never had AP classes or AP tests. I’m also not sure that CC classes are really any more ‘remedial’ than AP classes; In fact, I would even err on the side of certain CC classes as being more rigorous.

And I wouldn’t really see the point in applying ED at Wesleyan, Midd, (can’t apply to Smith because I’m not a woman) or Vassar ED; I’m pretty sure that I could get into those places in the regular round.

Do you think it would be a good use of my time to take the SAT again? I’d be on my third try and would specifically go and try to get my math score up.

5

At Williams, there are 3 divisions of classes: Div1 is english/religion/foreign language/philosophy etc., Div2 is social sciences, econ, psych, etc., and Div3 is the hard sciences, statistics, math, etc.

Is it possible to take the ACT? If you’re better at that test inherently, it could be very worth your while to add that to your SAT scores, especially since you don’t have other standardized tests like AP scores to help them judge you relative to the population as a whole. Of course, that’s inherently difficult since you can’t be compared to people at your school. If not, I honestly don’t think it’s a terrible thing. Just 35% of people admitted to Williams had an SAT math score of 750 or above, so since your other two scores are above 750, you should be okay. You’re well within the top 50 percentile for even your lowest SAT score, so I don’t see how 20-30 points difference on the SAT is going to make or break you as an applicant. Would a higher score be better? Sure, but if you can’t make time to retake the test, I wouldn’t beat yourself up over it.

My path to getting accepted was to get as much leadership on my resume as possible, but I kinda realized late that that was going to be key. To compensate, my senior year I started a tutoring business with 12 employees and I wrote my essay on that, so I guess that would be my key to my application. Really, just try to be as interesting as possible. When I was writing my essay, I kept envisioning a few people sitting in a room, looking at the same SAT scores and GPA’s and classes and essay prompts and thinking “god, how boring is this?” I had a former teacher help me edit some of the essays, and when he tried to take out some of my more colloquial language, I kept it in. Anything that helps give your paper real voice - if your friend or teacher can’t help but read it and think “_____ wrote that for sure” - is interesting and good. In my opinion, the essay is the key to the application. Write it, speak it, love it, and it will become the make instead of the break.

If you want my scores and grades, I’m okay giving them out, but PM me for them please. Same with my overall list of extracurriculars.

6

Suggestion if you REALLY WANT to take another test—

If you’re concerned about your Math score, how would you do on the SAT Math exam, preferably the more advanced one? Taking one subject exam should be less stressful because it’s less time consuming & the material is content focused, like a final exam.

And, a correction re: Div 1 vs Div 2 courses: Some courses that one would consider “humanities,” as opposed to social science, are Div 2, such as Philosophy & History. If you go to the Williams website & search for Division 1 or 2 or 3, you’ll find the list. (The divisions are important when determining whether breadth requirements are met; one needs 3 courses from each division in order to graduate. Some courses are designated as in more than one division)

(also, Psychology is a biological science and the department is part of the Science Quad, but is Div 2)

7

DressingIron, I disagree with almost everything in Hangemhigh’s post. First and foremost, your scores are stellar – 1530 is 100 points above the average for the entering class verbal/math scores, you can hardly do any better and Williams is not going to look at you any differently if you add a few points to your math score. Look at the admissions results reported here year after year – interesting applicants with far lower scores than yours get admitted all the time, and applicants with nearly perfect scores get rejected. Williams truly is looking for an interesting, engaged, well-rounded class, it can afford to be more about fit than some larger universities who are more number oriented (within reason of course, but you have nothing to worry about with such excellent SAT scores, is the larger point).

You should apply ED to Williams, for certain, if it is your first choice – at that income level, you are almost sure to get a massive financial aid package if admitted, and I agree that there is a SLIGHT edge in applying ED, but that is generally exaggerated here. Whether you apply ED or RD, you will have a solid chance of admission – you seem like exactly the type of candidate Williams is aggressively pursuing, and your odds are I’d say no worse than 50-50 either way, which is a lot better than the average applicant.

Rather than waste time taking the SAT again when your score is already so high, I’d instead focus your time and energy on writing great essays for the your application and editing them again and again until you feel every line is perfect. That will be important for a home-schooled candidate. Also keep pursuing deeper involvement in your EC’s, especially leadership roles as jersey recommends, to show your continued commitment to your extracurricular interests. But overall, I think you’ve done basically all your can to position yourself for an EXCELLENT chance, and if you don’t get accepted to Williams, you will get into plenty of other great LACs. But I have a feeling that Williams will love your application if in your essays your intellect and desire to attend shine through.

8

@Ephman Thanks, your post was both really encouraging and helpful. I’m hoping that once I attend WoW, I’ll be able to a) learn a little more about the school and b) get a better sense of what Williams is looking for in an essay; when I submitted an essay for WoW it was alright, but far from stellar.

I think part of what might make my application to Williams a bit more random than an average applicant with my stats/grades/ECs is that I’m home schooled; maybe that’s the sort of thing that Williams finds interesting and would like as part of their community, or maybe it’s the kind of thing that’ll call my academic credentials into question. Don’t know until I apply, I suppose.

@ManhattanBoro I was thinking about taking the Math II test, but I don’t think I would be able to get higher than about 750. I might take the World History SAT II in December because I think I could do well, and at this point I don’t think my application would be helped by another subject test score that isn’t in the 770-800 range.

9

We agree on one thing - Go ED.

The numbers speak for themselves. I remain firm in my analysis regarding the SAT. Even at 100 points over the average, the average discrepancy between white students and affirmative action groups is very significant and has a very distortive effect on what the “real” average is for those suffering from being a privileged white person. At Harvard, the SAT average for a white student is 140 points higher than Hispanics admitted and nearly 300 points higher for black students. Simple math demonstrates there is a healthy differential between the community average and white average. Williams has not released this type of information but I assume it is similar. Harvard was forced to release it because of a lawsuit.

Nearly 40% of the Williams class is identified as persons of color. In terms of worth it or not on the SAT retake, those 20 points make a huge difference. You have to remember, there are thousands in the roughly the same boat and the difference between students is miniscule at this level.

I would add Colgate to your list, which produces the highest paid graduates and has a very similar feel and ethos to Williams in my opinion.

Injecting affirmative action and politics into the discussion is taking it off topic. It is one thing to cite data, another to start to drag it into opinion. Edited accordingly. - Fallenchemist

10

PS - it is illogical not to retake them with super scoring available. 3 sittings is the norm. If this is the 4th, skip. I also agree spend a good amount of time on your essay. make sure you have others read it for content, and still others for typos and grammatical errors. Finally, if you can afford it, use somebody to review your essay. What you might think is thoughtful and incisive to the average sensible person is not what admissions reviewers are looking for.

11

Actually, the trend is to not over-emphasize board scores at all. Most LACs will look favorably upon someone with a high GPA and rigorous course load over someone with a high board score but less challenging classroom work.

Sorry, but using Harvard statistics to support the idea that all white applicants to elite colleges need a perfect score of 1600 on their verbal and math SATs in order to be admitted, is just crazy. Those numbers speak only for Harvard.

12

@DressingIron

I also agree that you have a great chance at Williams ED, and that A) you should not get hung up about being home schooled and the effect that has; and B) that the 2280 is absolutely outstanding and that @HangemHigh 's analysis and conclusions are not accurate. For one thing, he said that

That is incorrect and is, I can only conclude, a sloppy analysis based on assuming everyone that did not identify as white is a person of color. The 2300 as some kind of magic number is something I have never heard and I think is a fiction of his own making. However, let’s take a look just to be thorough.

In the latest Common Data Set from Williams, there were 546 new freshmen. 286 identified themselves as white, non-Hispanic (52.3%). Another 67 identified as Asian, a group that stereotypically has higher than average test scores and is not normally classified as “persons of color”. That 67 is 12.3%, now we are up to 64.6% not of color. If we stopped there the “nearly 40%” would be more or less correct, but that would not be very thorough. Now it does get less clear, because there are a couple of categories where being “of color” is not inherent in the category label. I am not even counting those self-identifying as Hispanic, which does not automatically mean “brown”. Let’s even assume they are all of color. But there are nonresident aliens (49 or 9.0%) which says nothing about color, and since he uses the phrase “identified as persons of color” they cannot be counted. We are up to 73.6% not identified as persons of color. Finally there is mixed race, which again does not mean a person of color, per se. 40 of these, or 7.3%. So there are actually 80.9% or let’s just say 81% that do not identify as people of color necessarily. But whites and Asians, along with the aliens, mixed race and Hispanics that are not of color belie the claim of “nearly 40%”.

That’s a lot of detail for a silly claim, I know. But just so you have the actual facts, not some flawed and misreported piece of “data”. The numbers do not change more than a whisker if you look at all Williams students and not just the latest incoming class. For example, just whites and Asians add up to 66.5%, more than the latest freshman class.

Best of luck!!

13

Actually, I find it amusing that you go through rather a tortured analysis to dismiss what is plainly obvious and the basis of numerous pending lawsuits over reverse discrimination. Further your analysis is sloppy in that another grouping is athletes, and again there is a different admission standard to attract desired players. Yes, even at D3 schools the standards are lower. I think the king as no clothes.

If you are a white male non-athlete, there are major hurdles to overcome, and the higher you score, the better off you are. Period. To dissuade an applicant from improving his score is incredibly disingenuous .

14

Let’s resist the “reverse discrimination” derail, please.

15

I like your chances. Your U.S. history score is very impressive. Great ECs and a unique but challenging curriculum. The 4.0 being home schooled when backed up by test scores still means something. Good luck