Colleges changing their criteria for admissions decisions

<p>I agree that we parents really can’t say if or how adcoms are changing their criteria. However, what I do think has changed a bit is the popular wisdom about what it takes to gain admission to a top college. When my S started high school 8 years ago, everyone seemd to think that in addition to strong academics, being well-rounded and very involved in many EC’s was the ticket. (It may not have been, but that’s what I think the common person believed.) By the time my D was a high school junior 6 years later, I noticed parents started to shift their thinking to a belief that more focus was a better plan, with the aim of excelling to a very high level in one or two activities–and the more unusual the activity, the better. Again, I’m not sure if there was a true shift in how adcoms looked at applications, but people seemed to think there was one.</p>

<p>As others have said, there’s no way to know what got my sons accepted or rejected at the colleges they applied to.
S1: rank 8/640, WGPA102+, 9+ APs (first one as a freshman - all 5s), post AP math course, adult level experience in comp sci. Applied to colleges in 2007.
Accepted: Harvard (legacy), Carnegie Mellon, RPI, WPI
Waitlisted: Harvey Mudd
Rejected: MIT, Caltech, Stanford</p>

<p>S2: rank 37/730, WGPA 97 (according to the school - helped enormously by 2 stellar orchestra grades every semester), 7+ APs (all 5s when applying), some unusual activities and interesting essays
Accepted: Tufts, U of Chicago, Vassar, American
Rejected: Brown, Harvard, Georgetown</p>

<p>As far as I could tell rank and GPA both played into the results. No one from our school (legacy or not) gets into Harvard with less than a 3% rank for example. The lowest rank I know of that got into Brown from 2007 class was top 4% and Class president.</p>

<p>You can’t have a top ranking without taking a fair number of AP classes, though every once in a while someone sneaks into the top getting perfect grades with a somewhat easier courseload. They usually end up at somewhat lower ranked colleges than the ones with rigorous schedules. It’s been that way as long as I can remember.</p>

<p>I agree with the poster who noted that we, as parents, cannot tell you what college adcom’s are thinking about curriculum rigor - it’s best to ask them, and it will be quite interesting to read this article when published.</p>

<p>My two son’s interests and talents were unique, and they applied to quite different schools (engineering vs. liberal arts), so I cannot compare their experiences. I do believe curriculm rigor was an important criteria in both their application processes, 3 years apart.</p>

<p>Also, I was MUCH better prepared the second time around, and helped guide S2 to build a better balanced list of colleges (reaches / matches / safeties). What we DID do was pay very close attention to the admissions presentations for what was important to each school. I would say that they tell the truth - some ARE more numbers oriented than others. S2 had significantly better admission success than S1, but both are really happy with the school they are at.</p>

<p>I learned three important lessons regarding curriculum and GPA with S1 that we applied during S2’s search and application process:</p>

<p>1) Select colleges will always prefer AP and other advanced classes over regular classes. The more advanced classes your school offers, the more your student should take advantage of them. This is especially true for the subjects they excel at and want to pursue in college. (For example, if you are applying as an engineering major, and your school offers AP Physics, it’s a good idea to take it.) As expected, S1’s AP curriculum focused on math, science, and comp sci, with only one humanities, while for S2 it was more History and English, and only one AP in each of math & science.) At least in our school district, I am a huge fan of the AP curriculum because they have the best teachers, motivated students, and a rigorous syllabus. They truly did help my sons prepare for college, even though they received minimal credits at the schools they attended.</p>

<p>2) Most selective schools DO NOT use school calculated GPA, but have their own method of normalizing GPA’s. The numerous threads on CC about calculating GPA with answers than only get more diverse tells us that GPA, by itself, is a terrible selection criteria. Many schools will tell you exactly how they calculate, and use, GPA if you ask. So, with S2, I started an excel spreadsheet his freshman year where I entered all his grades (100 pt scale at our school), the equivalent letter grade, and the class level (Academic / Honors / AP). This way, I could copy the spreadsheet into a new tab for each college, use the appropriate conversions and weighting, and then recalculate GPA based on the information from the college. This did help S2 “target” the right schools.</p>

<p>3) GPA’s are also important for Merit Aid, and the methodology for that might be quite different than for admissions, especially for private scholarships. Scholarship criteria are often the most numerically-driven. This is one area where lower grades in AP classes may not work in your student’s favor. If merit aid is important to your family, find out early in HS career what is used for scholarship criteria, and your student can adjust their HS curriculum appropriately. ASK!</p>

<p>And remember, that recruited athletes are exempt from all this! From our HS, these students are chosen for the most selective schools over those with the more rigorous courseloads as shown by the differential between UW and W grades! Naviance may be anonymous, but we can tell who’s who when so few are selected…</p>

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<p>I’m confused. Does this mean that AP classes don’t prepare kids for college?</p>

<p>“I’m confused. Does this mean that AP classes don’t prepare kids for college?”</p>

<p>In a sense yes as they are not college courses and quite often kids who place out of the course and into the next level aren’t prepared as there is often a huge difference between the AP course and the real college course. </p>

<p>It’s also a racket - a way for College Board to make money and parents to spend money and for high schools to appear more rigorous and rank high on the 100 Best High School list because they let everyone and their brother can take AP classes (and some schools don’t eve require the student take the exam.) </p>

<p>Imo, they are totally unnecessary except for the fact that everyone thinks they now have to take them to get into a good school. </p>

<p>Some of the best public school districts in the country (Scarsdale, NY for example) have decided to not offer them anymore.</p>

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<p>Charlie…if the school is need blind (doesn’t consider financial need when considering admissions…most schools are need blind)…then they don’t LOOK at your financial aid application until AFTER you have been accepted.</p>

<p>Emilybee, Scarsdale may not call those classes AP but all Scarsdale kids take AP Exams so it amounts to the same thing. Those teachers know the classes have to prepare the kids for that subject AP. Our school also offivcially doesn’t have AP Classes but that is only a difference in name. Everyone knows those classes lead to AP exam in the subject.</p>

<p>It does not surprise me that colleges are looking at strength of curriculum. There is so much inflation of GPA with added points for this class or that class…to me it would be much easier for colleges to simply look at the classes relative to what is offered at the school and look at the grade and forget about the reported GPA. It doesn’t take a whole lot to look at a transcript and visually ascertain how many As, Bs, Cs and what classes were taken and read the list of a schools reported “rigorous” classes to get the gist of the academic transcript. I highly doubt colleges care all that much about the differences in nuance between school X Algebra II and school Y Algebra II. Trying to figure out what that particular school’s GPA means is much more confusing and complex. They might misread a stellar student or two but in the grand scheme of things it’s not critical and probably no different than 4 decades ago.</p>

<p>Yes and like Aniger our district has classes that are not AP branded but the preparation for those classes would give the students a basis for taking an AP branded test. Those classes are labeled rigorous and are indicated on the school profile.</p>

<p>Yes, they take AP exams but they study for them on their own. They do not teach to the test which was one of the reasons they got rid of them. The courses they do take go into much greater dept and often don’t cover nearly as much material as AP courses which tend to cover breath of a subject but not depth. </p>

<p>I’m not going to argue with you, we will just have to agree to disagree. I think AP classes are ******** and completely unnecessary.</p>

<p>The two public high schools in our district (VERY competitive schools) don’t do class rankings - I was always told it was because parents would sue. Students here get into great universities however the high achievers (who would be top almost anywhere else) but not tippy top achievers are hurt by the peer competition.</p>

<p>Although impressing colleges might be one reason why capable students take AP courses, it may not be the primary reason. It may be the only level taught at a school where students can find the academic rigor that challenges them and pushes them to think critically. I would like to think that most who take AP classes want to be intellectually fulfilled and know what level of classes will do that for them.</p>

<p>Kim,
I found in our family’s college search (HS class of '08 and '10) that many, many high schools did not report rank. At some schools my kids considered, only 30-40% of students had ranking info. </p>

<p>Both my kids attended nationally known selective admit programs (accepting 1 of 7 applicants) that pull from across the entire school system. These programs function within a regular HS. While our school system doesn’t rank, it does provide a table of % of kids with GPA 3.75-4.0, 3.50-3.74, etc., which includes all seniors in the school. </p>

<p>For our kids, clearly the GPA in context of the courses they took played a role.</p>

<p>S1 – 3.76 UW/4.56 W, 9 APs (all 5s), 13 post-AP courses, eight classes per semester, top scores, by the chart he was at 11%. Multiple national awards in comp sci, math and journalism. Taught college-level CS. Super essays.
Accepted – MIT EA, UChicago EA w/merit, Harvey Mudd RD, UMD full ride
Deferred/Waitlisted – Caltech
Rejected – Cornell, Harvard</p>

<p>S2 – 3.49 UW/4.24W, full IB Diploma plus an extra IB course, 11 APs (all 4s and 5s), stellar essays, 7 academic classes per semester, top scores. Captain of debate team, four year football player (not recruited, not playing in college), unusual combination of hobbies and interests. By the chart, he was top 25%.<br>
Accepted – UChicago EA, Tufts RD, UMD w/merit, URoch w/merit
Waitlisted – Carleton, Bowdoin
Rejected – Swarthmore, Georgetown</p>

<p>thumper1. Most schools are not need blind. The truth is that the most selective schools are frequently the most generous if one can get admitted(Stanford,Harvard). Sometimes it’s easy to forget that all this stress about college admissions really only applies to the top 20-30 or so schools. Keep in mind that the admissions rate at a great school like U of Mich is 55%. At the very top schools grades and scores are overshadowed by various hooks(URM,athlete,legacy,famous parents,powerful parents,big money). Haven’t you ever noticed that the children of famous or powerful people disproportionally attend very elite schools? The schools actually go out and actively recruit these children. The best known example was JFK Jr. at Brown. But go look at the children of singers, actors, or politicians and they all seem to have children at ivy league schools.</p>

<p>Your question is an intriguing one: have you noticed differences over the years of admissions? </p>

<p>My kids have all attended peer T12 colleges, and the oldest kid got merit aide, all went to same HS, were in NHS. All SATs are one-sitting.</p>

<p>DS1: no APs, gpa 3.6, SAT I: 2170 (780M/710/680W), in special ed from age 3, very few ECs.
DS2: 3 APs, gpa 4.25, SAT I: 2170, (750M/730/690W), had very specific passions in certain unweighted elective courses
DS3: 8 APs all 5s, gpa 4.55, SAT I: 2280, (800M/760/720W), lots of nat’l awards in science and debate, eagle, EIC, lots of ECs.</p>

<p>So, for our family, how has admissions changed? It’s gotten much more competitive.</p>

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<p>So you think that kids should be taking college courses instead? I’m not really sure what other options there are for rigorous high-school level classes. The reality is that the vast majority of high schools are nowhere near the level of Scarsdale and AP classes have helped improve their curriculum. I can guarantee that if it weren’t for AP classes I would not be doing anywhere near as well as I’m doing now in college; I highly doubt that my high school, and most others, would have the ability the offer college-level classes without the incentive of the AP program. Maybe if a school is in the top 100 according to Newsweek, they might have the resources to do without AP classes. But most schools are not in the top 100 and I don’t think most schools care, or are even aware that this list exists.</p>

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<p>Or, in other words, colleges shouldn’t accept any students from rural or inner city high schools because they don’t offer dozens of APs?</p>

<p>If a student goes to a high school that offers 20 APs and has taken none or a couple, your point is valid. But I think college admissions should have different standards for students who go to high schools that don’t offer a lot of APs – and I believe that they do. Many families of gifted kids can’t send their kids to another school just so they can take AP classes. And that’s why the transcript should be viewed in context of the high school.</p>

<p>^^and that analysis doesnt even take into account the high schools that have ridiculously high standards for allowing kids to even step foot inside any AP class vs the schools that let anyone take them…</p>

<p>It doesn’t matter how many classes are offered if only 25 students are permitted to take them each year…</p>

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<p>This to me suggests that adcoms are looking more closely at the student’s work in the context of a particular school.</p>

<p>Our high school doesn’t rank and only offers four APs (US History, Physics, Calculus AB or BC). However the school is highly regarded and some students matriculate at the most selective institutions each year.</p>

<p>GPAs are not weighted and are calculated based on major subjects only.</p>

<p>The philosophy of the high school is to teach students to think critically, write well, etc. For example, my daughter took a introduction to philosophy course in which she read Plato, Aristotle, Rousseau and others. This was not an “AP course,” but I would argue was better college preparation than many courses designated as AP.</p>

<p>It is quite possible that adcoms have noticed that students are following a connect-the-dot approach to college admissions, and feel that focusing on things other than rank and GPA better helps them ferret out the intellectually curious and capable.</p>