<p>Trying to figure out if it is just the new norm or if DS has actually impressed someone somewhere. He took the PSAT in Fall w his class. He is now hearing from several dozen colleges a week, mostly by email, some by mail, soliciting his attention. GPA 4.0/4.0 UW, class pres 2 yrs, math club, model un, track, cross county, swim team. PSAT decent not outrageous: 76 math but in the 6xs verbal and writing.</p>
<p>Should we feel honored he is hearing from so many or is it just the new norm?</p>
<p>I’m getting emails from so many colleges, and I got around the same score as your son…? (Sorry, don’t know DD and DS, I think the D is daughter and the S is son?) Some of them even send multiple emails. </p>
<p>If he ticked the box allowing colleges to contact him, get used to A LOT of mail. It happens. Some colleges may have gotten his contact info elsewhere (I had a pile of mail about eight inches high before I even took a standardized test), but I’m guessing that the majority of them got his info from the college board student search.</p>
<p>If he checked the contact box on the test, then yeah, it’s just colleges putting him on their mailing list because they received his address. It has nothing to do with the scores. I got an average score sophomore year and received so much mail, e-mail, etc. It was ridiculous. A year later, I’m still getting it (it’s slightly starting to slow down though). The stuff from college I’m interested in, I’ve kept, and that pile is almost a foot high by itself.</p>
<p>Can’t tell you how bad I felt about encouraging son to “check the box” after seeing how many trees were killed in vain. He never read any of it, preferred to do his research online, and I stopped after the first couple of months. I’m sure if we kept every piece of mail over that 18 month period it would have stood 8 feet tall. I hated it.</p>
<p>I think I checked the same box on the PSAT’s because the same 10 colleges email me on a daily or weekly basis. Some have began to send me mail. It’s actually quite annoying considering that they’re going to continue to do this.</p>
<p>I don’t think it means your son “impressed” someone (don’t get me wrong, I’m sure he’s impressive! He seems impressive to me.) – I did lousy on the PSAT my Sophomore year (I think I got a 151 or along those lines) and I was bombarded with college mail – even UChicago and Stanford starting sending in postcards and view books. It didn’t mean anything - colleges don’t mind under qualified applicants, it just means they get to lower their acceptance rates.</p>
<p>The mail is a relatively smart investment – say a college spends X hundred thousand dollars producing all that mail to be sent out. If it convinces 10 people to apply and end up attending - they’ve already made a profit. They’ll send it to anyone with a pulse, essentially. </p>
<p>Sorry, everyone gets it- my sister got a respectable but not outstanding score on her soph year PSAT and is now flooded with both snail mail and email from colleges we didn’t even know existed. It’s kind of awesome, actually, kind of like passing the torch- I’m just now, as a senior, getting the last of my spam about how “we’re extending the application deadline for exceptional students!”
Still, if you like getting mail, it’s awesome.
Now after ELEVENTH grade, you get the huge packet from Harvard and realize that you never realized before how much you wanted to go there. Also Yale, IIRC. And you’re tossing UChicago postcards in the trash at a rate of about one per millisecond. </p>
<p>I’ve gotten over 500 emails and have received hundreds of letters and postcards since last year. If you checked the box on the PSAT, you should as well. It’s normal to get bombarded with college mail, but it’s all just spam/junk mail. </p>