<p>stupidkid: I realize that now… but the point is that if the admissions was anything at all unlike a crapshoot, he would have gotten in everywhere, or at least damn well close to i</p>
<p>Yes. 10char</p>
<p>On Black Tuesday (i.e. today) there were amazing girls (less so for males, but…) who did not get into any of their reach or match schools. They have it all, grades, scores, ec’s, recs, but were either outright rejected or waitlisted. Meanwhile, several losers, without any of the above got into good places, including selective ivies. Yes, it’s a crap shoot. And those who disagree are with the “let them eat cake” party.</p>
<p>My prediction for admission results were almost all correct. So I wouldn’t say they’re crapshoot. (of course, I am only referring to my admission results)</p>
<p>yea ****, “I got into here here and here” i had a 3.8 gpa from a tough school, 1940 sats, and lettered in 4 varsity sports along with some science awards and the best place i got in was UC santa cruz. If it’s not a crap shoot then there must be something wrong with my name that no one liked</p>
<p>Congrats arwen15! (I love your screen name)</p>
<p>Well, you clearly deserved to get into those excellent schools. However, many, perhaps even more qualified than you were, were rejected. That is what “crapshoot” means: sometimes college decisions are arbitrary, and one can’t really predict when it comes to HYPS and other super-selective schools.</p>
<p>Interesting ;)</p>
<p>… do you realize ** if **someone “more qualifed” than you
did not get to School A and you did. …**then **your app was designed
specific to criteria and theirs was not…</p>
<p>…it actually could be used to strongly prove that admittance is not CS…?</p>
<p>of course without proof of the relative quality of the designs it would
remain idle speculation…but just thought it might help some of you
realize that the thesis on this thread originated around the
key that admittance is not influenced by chance as much as it is
by design much like the reasons why you pick
a particular MP3 player up in a shop amongst competing designs
(even though the one you pick up may be inferior) is not due
to * chance *.</p>
<p>:)</p>
<p>I was going to congratulate you at first, but I’m now getting the sense that you are slightly too full of yourself, and I don’t know if I care to anymore.</p>
<p>College admissions is a crapshoot. Even people who work in admissions will admit to that. The difference between one kid getting in and another getting rejected can be as trivial as bad weather influencing the mood of the application reader while reading the second application (I’ve heard this sad truth from an admin counselor).</p>
<p>You did not design an application that was destined for acceptance everywhere. You had a quality application that made you just as qualified as many others for acceptance, and by good fortune, you made it through.</p>
<p>you write your essays and someone in the admissions office is going to have to read them, and LIKE your voice/style. hence, the subjectiveness makes it a crapshoot already. of course, im only referring to truly selective schools.</p>
<p>also, while arwen15 seems real proud of the application he/she “designed”, thats also a crapshoot–who knows what the college is looking for at that exact moment? realize that admissions officers are looking to “sculpt” their incoming classes, meaning they’re going to be looking for people who fit specific criteria. if you dont fit the current criteria when they get to your app, u go in the trash and they move on. dont think for a second that an admissions office will seriously consider each of the 27 thousand apps–they wont lose sleep at night because they might have missed the perfect applicant</p>
<p>hence, college admissions (at selective universities) is a crapshoot</p>
<p>Arwen - I’ll put it this way and I hope you read it. I myself felt the same way you did for a while, since I was accepted everywhere I applied (even though for one tier 2 school I never even sent in the supplement at all, still think they accidentally accepted me). Regardless, it is true that chance plays a large role. The way I look at life is a series of percentages. You can do your best to increase the percentage of success for any one thing, but you can never guarantee 100% success.</p>
<p>To put it another way, why do people get admitted to Harvard and rejected from Princeton? Vice versa? Do you really believe that the qualifications are so different that what is deemed as an immensely qualified candidate at one school can also be deemed as insufficient at an equivalent one? Arbitrary. Even if you disregard the fact that Harvard’s adcom said 90% of its applicants are qualified, due to the fact that you can claim the <10% accepted were the most qualified, you should ponder why a Georgetown reject is Yale 2012.</p>
<p>Your example is also flawed. Not everyone picks up the same mp3 player at first. Case in point - go to a store. Does everyone pick up the iPod nano before the iPod classic? No, they do not.</p>
<p>The core of branding and advertising and inducing customers to purchase is to increase the chance they will pick up your item, try it, enjoy it, and buy it again in the future. Just because you have the best product does not mean everyone would buy it. Does everyone buy gatorade over powerade? The marketing for it is fantastic - powerade doesn’t even have major commercial spots. Everyone knows gatorade’s colored sweat commercials. Yet, powerade is still out there and occupies market share.</p>
<p>What you did was obviously intelligent. You’re supposed to position yourself to maximize your potential and take control of your opportunities. But anything that involves subjective analysis (adcoms) by definition cannot be 100% predictable. Humans are not 100% predictable. Humans are not 100% rational. Sure, you could make your theory work in a contrived economic model of complete rationality, but that simply is not the case in real life.</p>
<p>OMG guys! It’s not like schools go around notifying other schools that they accepteed a certain appplicant. Harvard isn’t going to call everyother school and be like “We accepted Susie so, so will everyone else because we’re better than all of you.” It wouldn’t make sense. Just because Princeton said yes to one applicant doesn’t mean that Notre Dame should too just because they’re ranked lower or have lower avg. stats. Schools admit who they find attractive. I doubt that they throw a pile of applications up in the air and only accept the ones that stick to the ceiling. Get real and get over it.</p>
<p>To the OP, the fact that you got into those prestigious schools by no means shows that the admissions process at these schools is not a crapshoot, merely that either (a) you are qualified, (b) you are lucky, or (c) a combination of these two. </p>
<p>I think you are just an arrogant little bragger that needs some ego-boosting confirmation from the rest of CC. I see little merit in your posts except to brag that you got in under average circumstances, and after that “inferior” comment, I find you to be totally disgusting. </p>
<p>The simple fact is that, like you said, there are so many applicants to these schools and limited spots - the majority of people must be rejected. When it comes down to it, the vast majority of these people are on par or close to you in terms of qualifications. That means it is a crap shoot - you were just lucky enough to come out on top in all your applications.</p>
<p>If time were to play out again, I doubt you would get into all 5 a second time. Either way, there’s no point to this thread; you just want to show off.</p>
<p>Congratulations on your admissions, but you might want to look up humility in Webster. I think it may be a new concept for you.</p>
<p>Interestingly is CS= 100% unpredictable or does it imply a
certain % of predictability…CollectivSynergy brings up
an interesting point about humans and predictability 
which I do
agree with. …But does having 3 officers look at the same app reduce this
“unpredictability” (do they cancel out each others influences thus
leaving some core characteristics the college requires as the criteria?)</p>
<p>So the beginning of a middle ground (albeit akwardly worded) would be
re-looking at the question as: *** Do you still believe admissions is 80%
chance 20% design or 80% design 20 % chance? ***</p>
<p>or easier still " can a less qualified candidate get into a college over
a more qualified candidate based on the design of their app and supplement
content?" Some of you seem to have laready answered this one ;)</p>
<p>On a side note:
Debating a premise is quite all right,however, lets leave it to politicians to
debate the debator on their personal qualities. …and no politicians are not
good role models in my view :p</p>
<p>What people generally mean by crapshoot(or at least my interpretation), is a game of roulette, essentially, where if you’re good you “gain” bets on more of the holes. So of course design and aptitude matter far more than chance - the more holes you cover the better the chance of admission. It’s moronic to blame not getting into Harvard with 1000/1600 SATs, a 2.5GPA and few ECs (extreme example to be clear) on a crapshoot. But that doesn’t mean the element of chance doesn’t exist.</p>
<p>So out of the choices you gave, I’d say 80% design (if design includes accomplishments) and 20% chance. Of course a lesser qualified candidate can get into a college over a better qualified one if the application is better done, there’s plenty of possible anecdotes and nobody denies it. The question I’m guessing you’re asking is whether that’s “fair” or does it validate your assumption. And I’d say that there’s really no way to tell, not having inspected the apps of two people to compare myself, and even then the results would be subject to my subjectivity. So you don’t really know whether the admittance was a result of a better app or just chance, and we are forced to assume either way.</p>
<p>And as for 3 adcoms inspecting each application, I thought it was 2? With a 3rd only involved if there was a dispute? Regardless, let’s assume that the margin of error for the adcoms is 10% (which is reasonable when you consider the absolutely staggering volume of apps at the large schools). </p>
<p>So the chance of a good app falling through the holes is .1<em>.1 + .1</em>.9*.1 = .019, or 1.9%. That doesn’t look like much, until you consider there’s ~3,000,000 graduating seniors, let’s say averaging 10 apps. 30,000,000 applications, multiplied by 1.9% -> 570,000 applicants either got in at a specific college when they didn’t deserve it, or vice versa. That’s a lot of dreams made or broke in a heartbeat.</p>
<p>I’d say you underestimate the % chance, but kudos on your model. Great to bring a little objectivity to a cs.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>what you are talking about in statistical terms is reducing variance. there isn’t a universal amount of variance in college application. lets look at two extremes. one is a school A that looks only at your GPA and SAT scores, couldn’t care about anything else. at a school like this there is very little variance, they could make an equation and the top x% of applicants after the conversion are admitted. it would be extremely predictable unless you are an absolutely borderline case. now lets look at another school B, which doesn’t even look at GPA or SAT scores, only looks at your essay, extra curriculars, etc. this school would be extremely hard to predict because you cannot tell what other people wrote or what a certain admission officer or group there of are looking for, which would make this a very high variance school. all schools fall somewhere in this spectrum, and where they fall dictates their variance. this is what people were talking about in wanting colleges to be more transparent, they never give a straight answer as to exactly what they want and thus makes things on another level of higher variance. we could make this metric of higher dimension but you get the basic idea.</p>
<p>If, for example the ivies, for some reason, went back and reevaluated their results and decided that everyone’s application would be reread by different ad-com members from scratch, there is NO WAY that every decision would be the same.</p>
<p>You forgot to list another advantage: being on CC. I had no idea whatsoever about half of these “common knowledge” things on CC until I joined…after I sent my applications in. You can’t just blame people for not knowing this stuff - the stuff that councilors can’t tell you.</p>
<p>Anywho, it is still somewhat of a craps shoot. Obviously no one is going to say that admissions is completely random - you have to have some level of qualification in some area to even be considered. You have to have a great application, and stand out. And of course you have to be a match for the school - which accounts in part for giving the process a feeling of randomness.</p>
<p>Still, some of it IS impossible to predict, and somewhat random. These schools themselves admit that they reject plenty of candidates that are well suited for their schools - the difference between admission and rejection can be as small as a “feeling” of the adcom.</p>
<p>It’s great that your stats are fantastic enough to get you in everywhere you wanted, but that’s no guarantee (you don’t know if all of the Ivies would have accepted you, and I bet they wouldn’t have). I can see how to you it just looks like you’re better than the other applicants, but that doesn’t always work out. Otherwise, admissions would be far more predictable than they are. There’s no logic to why I got into the Ivy with a lower admit rate than one I got waitlisted at, except perhaps the adcom felt I “fit.” I sure can’t figure out the reason. It just happened that way.</p>
<p>It’s not a total craps shoot, that’s for sure. But that concept is not some total fabrication made up to make the inferior people feel better. There is a great deal of unpredictability in the admissions process, and your amazing luck does not change that. Period.</p>
<p>Yes it is. It is no secret that certain races/ethicities can get into school A over a white person of slightly better qualifications. Reverse discrimination runs rampat in college admissions, and american schools put waaaaaaaay too much weight on ec’s and volunteering, and that athletes who are not qaulified take the spot of a deserving person. Oxford has it right: admissions is based soley on academics and academic potential.
At the end of the day, the most qualified and best do get into the schools becfause they deserve it, but many who are qualified get rejected for silly reasons. Let’s be honest, should person A get in over B because of their race, religion, sex, school or state of residency? The process is becoming more subjective.
This year was a crazy year with record applications and people applying to more schools, so it was harder to get into certain schools. It has hurt many deserving students when people are applying to 15 schools, in some cases more than 20. The bottom line is that is should be based on academic credentials, just like Oxford. Not based on how many clubs your in, ec’s you do or how many hours you spent volunteering,</p>
<p>my colleague’s son was accepted at JHU and not USC</p>