<p>yatta yatta yatta life sucks & then u die…</p>
<p>i do loathe the whole gpa thing tho :D</p>
<p>^ Vossron: A very valid point.</p>
<p>"Conversely, a very intelligent kid (I’m not implying I am, by the way) has no chance at good schools if they are raised by parents who, for example, graduated with bad grades from state schools and don’t care for academics. “”</p>
<p>Ridiculous. For example, my own husband was the first in his family to graduate from high school. His mom didn’t even graduate from 8th grade. He grew up in the ghetto. He was accepted to Cornell.</p>
<p>I know others – plenty of others – who had uneducated parents – including having parents who were negative about education – and yet those students were self motivated enough to get into college, including good ones. </p>
<p>Similarly, I know plenty of people with highly educated parents who encouraged and enabled their kids to get the best educations possible, yet their kids were indifferent students who either didn’t go to college or flunked out or dropped out.</p>
<p>^I totally agree with this: I know losers whose parents sent them to private school, pushed them in academics, etc, and are now not going anywhere in life. On the flip side, I also know people who didn’t come from the best backgrounds, or who had parents who were totally unsupportive of their educations, and still managed to do fine. </p>
<p>And personally, I think that forgiving all of the screw ups in the world as long as the kid can convince you that they’ve turned a new leaf would be a mistake. That’s awfully unfair to the people who’ve had their work ethic together from the beginning, and as such could potentially discourage people from even bothering with Freshman and Sophomore year of high school. </p>
<p>Also, colleges just plain don’t have room to not be selective. Sorry.</p>
<p>yea i agree with you tha college admissions are unfair. also,GPA is a nonsense,at least in my school.for example:some teachers in my school are really unfair that they may give a higher grades to the students who they LIKE more !? giving a higher grade for no reason!??? some students get a harsh teacher but some dont.i may work harder than the students from other class,but i get a lower grade because my teacher is ‘‘mean’’??
GPA is meaningless,at least in my school.</p>
<p>"And personally, I think that forgiving all of the screw ups in the world as long as the kid can convince you that they’ve turned a new leaf would be a mistake. That’s awfully unfair to the people who’ve had their work ethic together from the beginning, and as such could potentially discourage people from even bothering with Freshman and Sophomore year of high school. "</p>
<p>I agree. In fact, it amuses me that the OP and some other posters think it’s fair to discount some students’ 4 years of excellent grades and work ethic in favor of giving a boost to students who slack off for a year or two or three before finally getting their acts together. There’s nothing fair about not holding students accountable for their behavior.</p>
<p>“I don’t feel like responding to large posts right now, but I will before today’s end.”</p>
<p>That’s a joke, right? Tell me, how are you going to justify stupidity? Blame it on the system I presume? </p>
<p>Again, Don’t hate the player- hate the game. </p>
<p>Noob.</p>
<p>Alright, nevermind. I’m not going to reply for the simple fact that everyone disagrees with me and no one will change their minds (and, don’t forget the main reason, which is that it will take hours of my time).</p>
<p>Woe is me :(</p>
<p>Can I get a cliff’s notes version of this thread please?</p>
<p>^ Sure, I’ll try my best.</p>
<p>This kid is pretty much lamenting about the fact how socioeconomic difference can cause a huge disparity on how an individual views the importance of school and college. He said that schools should overlook bad grades/lack of ecs/ etc if they are able to prove that they can be a success in college. For example, ignore bad underclassmen grades if the junior/senior grades were much higher. He thinks that it is near impossible to care about school or your future if you come from a lower socioeconomic background more than a kid a who is upper -income and whose parents “value education” more. Hope that helps.</p>
<p>Wow, what a bad argument. If you don’t have the mental strength to motivate yourself and work beyond whatever “socioeconomic obstacles” may exist in your life, you aren’t going to be successful in college. College is all about self-motivation, and if you don’t have the willpower to drive yourself to be successful, you deserve to be rejected. Don’t cry about not getting a fair shot in life though. That’s a coward’s way out.</p>
<p>And there is funny twist to this… the OP who suffered so under his/her parents’ slacker values, has a brother at Williams College. Didn’t he have the same slacker parents? Life is such a mystery! It’s impossible not to love it. :)</p>
<p>^^^^^^^^^^</p>
<p>Fatality.</p>
<p>Exuses! Exuses!
I long for the self-motivated kid who rises from the the unfairness and make a name for themselves.
Complaining gets us nowhere and does not change anything.
I would see this as an opprotunity and a story to show the colleges of the true meaning of self-determination and self-discipline.
Also it should be stated that the privileged are held to a higher pedestal in academic performance than a public or middle-class/low-class kid.</p>
<p>This thread is too long for me to go through everything but I figured I’d still give my two cents (whether or not the point has been made). To me, it makes no sense to say that the average person is intelligent enough to easily get into top schools etc but because they are not motivated by parents they don’t. Well, in my opinion, part of that intelligence is realising that your life and your future depend on your actions. No one should need anyone else to tell them that they should strive to do well. My parents never did that for me (they didn’t berate me or anything but they never breathed down my neck all the time to get me to work hard). I chose to strive to perform well.</p>
<p>Isn’t self-motivation a quality that colleges want to see anyway? (btw, I’m also anything but rich…)</p>
<p>And there is funny twist to this… the OP who suffered so under his/her parents’ slacker values, has a brother at Williams College. Didn’t he have the same slacker parents? Life is such a mystery! It’s impossible not to love it.</p>
<hr>
<p>My argument is preserved because that point is actually irrelevant. Some kids are self-motivated. That doesn’t mean most aren’t. There are exceptions to nearly every rule.</p>
<p>“My argument is preserved”</p>
<p>roflcopter. </p>
<p>You just got knocked the **** out! Ya can’t get up! stop tryin!</p>
<p>So… following your logic… a student like your brother can do well without involved parents, but another student like yourself will not do as well with the same parents. So, college admissions isn’t fair because it doesn’t make special allowances for a student with parents whose lack of involvement may or may not disadvantage them.</p>
<p>Anyway, I think we can all appreciate you’re caught in a situation with fewer options than you’d like. That happens. When you have made some decisions about where you’re going to college, or if you’re going to college, things will settle down and you’ll move forward from there. Life has a way of adapting us to necessity.</p>
<p>llkll, I know exactly what you mean! I’m a first-generation American college appicant (both of my parents attendend college in the mid-east, where al you had to do was get good grades to get into college), I never what the SAT was or when I had to take it, until I did miserably on my PSAT’s. Plus, I didnt start any real EC’s until sophmore-junior year.</p>