Family Gets Lesson in Admissions

Parents Forum
661

<p>All this talk about the value of being a val makes me very glad that my local district does not name ANY vals. There is NO ranking. We have a LOT of academically talented kids in the district -- 20+ National Merit Semi-Finalists and 20+ Commended students each year in the graduating class, and send a bunch of kids annually to Ivies -- none of whom are vals.</p>

<p>The student graduation speakers are chosen by audition by a panel. While they are generally excellent students, they are not necessarily the top of the class grade-wise. </p>

<p>For college admissions, the transcript shows the GPA, both weighted and unweighted, and is accompanied by a very detailed school profile. The colleges can approximate a student's standing by the GPA and course info.</p>

<p>This avoids the whole "gaming" of the val contest -- which may not go on all of the time, but certainly does go on some of the time. </p>

<p>Nobody is saying that any particular val (other than perhaps Blair) was a grade-grubbing gamer.</p>

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<p>
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Nobody is saying that any particular val (other than perhaps Blair) was a grade-grubbing gamer.

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</p>

<p>I appreciate that, jyber. I just want you to know that those of us who don't think intel and the like patents or publishing (Harvard anyone?) are required for admission, well.... Nobody is saying that every kid with those type of extra special ec's are lying scam artists thieves either, but just like you said - it happens some of the time. ;)</p>

<p>p.s. I know you are glad for no val race, but I'm equally glad my kid wasn't exposed to the intel gaming that goes on in some high schools with connections to researchers and a track record of spoon-feeding projects to robotic kids .</p>

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<p>I'm going to make a guess about val/sal status here. There is not always a correlation between val/sal & most impressive/accomplished student. The ivies & other elite schools are not shy about announcing the hundreds of vals they reject each year. Could it be that those rejected vals are more likely to be grade grubbing gamers than the ones who do gain admittance?</p>

<p>Does everyone know a brilliant, accomplished kid (like Marite's son) who didn't really give a hoot about whether his GPA was 4.89 or 4.29? Who challenged himself because he loved to and wound up being just the kid of kid the elites were looking for?</p>

<p>Does everyone know a brilliant, accomplished kid who was acutely aware of the val/sal race & jumped right in? Maybe he didn't make EVERY choice of course with an eye toward winning that prize, but he did factor the val/sal likelihood in as he moved along in his h.s. years. Not a phoney or a cheater, just the kind of kid who is competitive accademically. Not any brighter than the kid who is ranked 11th. Just a kid who was savy enough to care about the honor.</p>

<p>Either type of kid can be the real deal. I tend to agree with posters who want to see what ELSE about the val/sal ivy admits got the attention of the admissions department.</p>

<p>I was involved in a val/sal race myself years ago. I had gone back to school when my first child was born to seek a nursing degree. I had a BA in English from my 1st careeer, so I needed lots of sciene courses, all taken at night when hubby got home from work. As graduation neared, a prof told me I was likely to be sal. Believe me, when I heard that, I made sure I aced every course that semester. Despite the chaos of moving to a new home, selling our old one, and caring for my d, I buckled down. Getting As didn't mean I was brighter or a more competent nurse than my classmates. It was an honor within my grasp & I said, "What the heck? Might as well go for it." The sal honor has meant absolutely nothing in my life since then (not even on job applications.) I'm just making the point that once kids know they are in the running, their studying habits can change & the kids study to ace the tests, not truly embrace the subject. Plus, one tough grader in a single subject can knock out the truly deserving kid. So personally, val/sal means not a heck of a lot to me. I really don't think there is much difference between the top 5 or 10% of kids in most schools.</p>

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<p>Cur:</p>

<p>Let me try again.</p>

<p>Before I start, let me make it clear that my S did not enter the Intel contest or win any extraordinary award, or publish anything but Internet fiction.:(</p>

<p>It's probably a case that we look at the same stats but from different directions based on our different experiences. </p>

<p>I looked at Brown's stats because they're easy to find.
Brown offered admission to 321 vals out of 1,217 applicants (26%) and to 143 out of 554 sals (26%). There is a definite drop thereafter, as you showed with Penn stats. So far, Brown's stats bear out your point about the value of being val or sal. </p>

<p>But whereas you look at the percentage of students who were offered admission, I looked at the percentage of students who were not offered admission. So 74% of vals and sals who applied to Brown did not get admitted. Brown also published SAT scores, but does not correlate them with class rank. So we do not know why Brown chose to admit non-vals and non-sals over vals and sals. It is possible that ECs, hooks and tips might account for this, or it maybe that the val status was not that impressive.<br>
In the case that launched this thread, the val status was to some extent undermined by the SAT score. I have no idea how being one of 41 vals is viewed by adcoms. I have no idea how much being an Intel semi-finalist played in the admission decisions as opposed to the val status and SAT score. I understand that ranking is pretty much projected in the fall and that barring a bad second semester, it does not change during the course of the year (in our high school, ranking is done at the end of junior year and redone against in senior year.) Princeton and Yale, at least, were not impressed by the student's prospective val status.</p>

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<p>This debate makes me uncomfortable, because it seems that there is an effort to say that only one particular path leads to a selective college. </p>

<p>Cur and Calmom, I think you are trying to say that the high achieving "normal" high school kid, who just takes the hardest classes and gets excellent grades, with some wonderful but typical ECs can succeed. I agree.</p>

<p>Marite (I agree with you most of all), you seem to be saying that admission to a selective college doesn't require a perfect HS transcript -- that exceptional qualities outside of the typical HS experience can lead to success. I agree, especially since I can add another data point.</p>

<p>S got off to a little bit of a rocky start in HS (we moved here from out of state a few weeks before school started) and didn't take the very hardest level available. Sophomore year was a little better, but the bottom line is that because of some class choices and adjustment to a new state/school, he was never going to be in the running for Val/Sal. But in Junior and Senior year, he just caught fire. He needed special permission to take the number of AP classes he wanted to -- not for GPA reasons, since that battle wasn't even a possibility. He just discovered he really liked doing well in hard classes. He developed an interest in a particular area of physics and pursued a research opportunity. I'm not saying he's the prodigy that Marite's son is, but he really is pretty outstanding.</p>

<p>Finally, Calmom expresses the concern that some kids are operating at "full capacity" with no room left for the challenges of a selective school. This is a reasonable concern, but I don't know what the answer is. I do think that a student who hasn't take the most challenging courses in HS is at a disadvantage at a selective school. They need a strong ego to survive the competition.</p>

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<p>Just to throw this out: correlation vs. causation.</p>

<p>I don't think after Cur's posts, anyone doubts that val/sal status makes a student more likely to get admitted to a highly selective school, but can we be sure it's the status alone that's doing it? Or could it be that the kids who eventually end up val/sal are more likely than the general applicant pool to have other qualities that adcoms want, such as awards, outstanding recommendations, a rigorous curriculum, high GPA/SAT, well-written essays, varsity sports etc.?</p>

<p>I suspect it's a mixture of both. I think that when the colleges take a cursory glance through the file and make the initial cut (kids who might be considered vs. kids who are positively ruled out), val/sal almost automatically gets a student in the first pile. It could probably get them through a subsequent early cut (like kids to strongly consider vs. kids to consider only if there's some spots left). This alone could account for some, but not all, of the over-representation of vals and sals. </p>

<p>How much of a role the status plays after that, I don't think we'd know without some kind of fancy statistical analysis that can't be done with the published data. (I don't think there's any way to separate out vals who play sports from vals who don't to see if there's a difference in admit rates, or vals in student government from vals who aren't, or to see how much effect a 20 point difference in SAT has for vals vs non-vals, etc.).</p>

<p>Because our district shifted from no weighting to mild weighting during my daughter's attendance, I got to see a lot of GPA gaming under both systems, but I like to think that it was only a handful of people doing it, and I've often wondered if it didn't end up hurting them in other areas (lower SAT/ACT, a counselor who checked "No" when asked if they took the hardest courses).</p>

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<p>Re the Val and Sal debate.... I think many of you are missing the point. Correlation is not causation.... the fact that many Val's and Sals get admitted to top schools (in larger numbers than kids ranked lower in the class) doesn't mean that the top schools go out of their way to admit Vals and Sals. </p>

<p>In SOME HS's, the top ranked kids are the academic superstars.... that's the way the system works. They're taking AP Physics and BC Calc and getting 5's on the World History AP in junior year....they're the top ranked kids for a reason. They are often (not always, but often) extremely talented outside the classroom as well-- Eagle Scout, Intel, first violin in a local symphony, you name it. So-- no surprise... these kids get admitted to top schools, the colleges get to boast that X% of the Freshman class was number 1, we all get it. This doesn't change the fact that in a large number of HS's, the Val has a 4.0 average because he or she never took a class harder than Earth Science (which is what the less academic kids took in lieu of physics at my kids HS); got academic credit for being the yearbook photographer, and gamed the system by taking math at summer school so it wouldn't end up on the transcript.</p>

<p>These kids are not getting into top schools, and their Val status doesn't impact the equation one way or another- it doesn't mean that Val doesn't count for anything, it just means that in the context of the kid, their GPA and rank isn't a significant factor for anything but the local rotary scholarship of $500 which always goes to the town Val, barring a recent arrest or other scandal.</p>

<p>Why are we debating this? All things being equal, top schools like to see kids who are ranked at the top. However, all things are usually not equal, and when an outstanding scholar/athlete, or scholar/musician, or strong student who composed a concerto which was performed at Tangelwood, or whatever, hits the admissions process, competitive schools are happy to overlook class rank in favor of something which is a significantly better predictor of how that kid will contribute to and learn from the college community.</p>

668

<p>Happy Labor Day everyone!!!! Y'all hash continue to hash this out, and I am off to set up a spreadsheet of application deadlines / essays/ etc. so that DS can apply to his Big State - automatic admit - Public Universities. (I wonder why I'm still hanging around here - but I guess I just like the company!) Now, you all discuss your issues nicely, and have a LOVELY labor day. Ain't life grand?
;)</p>

669

<p>All good points about correlation & causation.</p>

<p>Another point I'd make about val/sal takes a page from Blaire Hornstein(sp?)</p>

<p>Dad was an obnoxious, aggressive attorney not at all shy about filing lawsuits. Can you imagine having to deal with that type of parent? Often the squeaky wheel gets the oil & favorable grading helps the kid of these pain-in-the-butt parents climb in the rankings. In my town, Board of Ed members have had their kids' grades changed. Politicians' kids are awarded choice roles in plays, choirs, and faculty-appointed honors. So sometimes the kids at the top are standing on the shoulders of their parents & college counselors. Hundredths of a point can seperate the val & sal from the rest of the pack anyway. So I'd have a tough time buying that colleges put all that much weight on the title if the rest of the package doesn't support it.</p>

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I am off to set up a spreadsheet of application deadlines / essays/ etc. so that DS can apply to his Big State - automatic admit - Public Universities

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</p>

<p>:)</p>

<p>I think parents who do this for real do it in part because it eases their anxieties by letting them feel like they have some control over what's ultimately out of their hands. I'm not sure in the long run, it makes that much difference or gives their kids an advantage. </p>

<p>I tried to mathematically project one time from published financial aid stats where we could afford for D. to go if she were admitted. I was looking for that magic out-of-state financial safety/academic match. In the end, she didn't apply to any school that I thought fell into that category, and I discovered you can't really predict from published stats what's likely to happen to your child anyway. But for those couple of hours while I was doing it, I felt a little better about all the long months of uncertainty that lay ahead.</p>

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<p>Blair didn’t just game the Val status. Her father managed a service project on her behalf that she got the credit for. I’m convinced that charity fundraising is going to be the next paradise for college applicants who want to bump up their credentials. In my neck of the woods, parents can write a big check and their kids get credit for raising funds, even equivalent hours. A mother I know recently called collecting books for a drive her son was doing for his scouting project. I told her to bring Jr with her when she came to pick them up since it was his project. Otherwise if anyone asked I’d have to say she was the one making the requests and doing the pickups. It didn’t sit well, to say the least.</p>

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<p>doubleplay: You were smart. I fell for the EagleScout book drive request (from the parent, also) where he requested that books be dropped off on their front porch. I was in a rare cleaning/organizing mood when the e-mail came, so I ran over with a shopping bag full. I have since met the kid. He has absolutely no personality or initiative. Mom is driving around with a "I'm proud of my EagleScout bumpersticker." It should read "I'm proud of my 45 year old husband's book drive."</p>

<p>Another Eagle Scout in my neighborhood ran a blood drive that was the most successful one the blood bank had ever been involved in. They have since asked that boy to organize additional drives, which he has done when he is home from college. He's a great kid. What impressed me over the years about him was his teflon skin. In our town EagleScouts are mocked. He never let that (or the abuse he took for his madrigal choir roles) bother him.</p>

<p>Re Blair: Not only did dad organize & run the prom gown collection service project, he nominated her for national service awards which she won! Big money, too, as I recall. She also got excused from gym for four years but was awarded some national Congressional award that included substantial physical fitness requirements. I can't recall the details of her plagarism, but I'm pretty sure she was lifting entire paragraphs from the Federalist Papers (or another such esteemed source) and presenting them as her own opinion! Her case was probably the most egregious example of gaming the system ever.</p>

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<p>that the Ivys must make room for their legacies and athletes, no matter what their qualifications are. It is well known that some of the best students in the country are not Ivy league students. Professional schools know that too. </p>

<p>As for Duke, I know of many cases where Duke recruited vigorously, flying the prospective student to Duke, putting them up in a hotel for 3 days and taking them to first class restaurants. A real professional public relations job was done whetting the student's appetite for Duke beyond belief. At the end, some students could not afford to go, were denied any aid, and were completely heartbroken. The parents of the student in the article should be thrilled that their son received a full scholarship to Duke-one of the most expensive colleges on the planet.</p>

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<p>
[quote]
Does everyone know a brilliant, accomplished kid (like Marite's son) who didn't really give a hoot about whether his GPA was 4.89 or 4.29? Who challenged himself because he loved to and wound up being just the kid of kid the elites were looking for?

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</p>

<p>I sure hope so. Just found out ds is number 8 (out of 750 or so)- I knew he'd never be one or two because of his habit of blowing off English. He's definitely not as brilliant as Marite's kid either!</p>

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<p>Mathmom:
Number 8 out of 750 is VERY impressive! S also blew off some subjects he did not particularly care for or classes that were too easy. It's just as well his GPA could not be calculated; it would not have been very impressive!</p>

<p>But there are ways to impress adcoms beyond the purely school-based performance, such as competitions (both academic and non-academic), performances, community service. I've been reading some college application essays that were PMed to me, and some of them make me feel that I would love to admit the author if I were an adcom.</p>

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<p>There absolutely are schools who put more weight on the val/sal designation than others. Wash U lost an incredible candidate from d's school last year due to the fact he was not val/sal (close, but no cigar). Because I know the situation first-hand, I know that he was a much better candidate than the 2 students in his class who received Wash U scholarship offers due to val/sal status --- particularly considering that those 2 students didn't really WANT to go to Wash U. AND this high school has so many incredible students --- better #5 or #10 at this school than #1 at any other school in area. </p>

<p>That said, though, the admissions committees at the most selective schools have to try to figure out some way to pick kids out of the MANY, MANY qualified candidates who apply & "should be" selected. It's an art, not a science, and it's not perfect. However, they just have to do the best they can. Are great kids passed over? Of course. They have stacks of paper from which they are supposed to pick the best. It's not easy. But the admit rate is low. Candidates know that going in. And that is exactly why students applying to such schools need to also apply to other schools (ones they would enjoy attending). NO ONE should expect to get into a highly selective school. By the same token, no one is going to lead a miserable, sad existence if he/she is not admitted to that highly selective school. Deal with it, find another good option, and make it work. (Plus, there's always grad school!)</p>

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<p>kelsmom, I couldn't agree with you more. I want to agree that very often the #3 or #4 student does not get adequately looked at by a very competitive college in a very competitive field. It means, though, that such a capable student needs to work harder at articulating what he or she brings to a college. This tends to be done better when the college list is manageable in size, allowing the student time for care. The unusual student is valuable to a college: it can be a challenge distinguishing oneself. I have heard of some excellent results; many of these can be read on CC; in all such cases of which I have read & heard, the student put a great deal of time into individualizing the app so that he or she could be identified & characterized by a committee.</p>

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<p>Marite, I'm pretty impressed. I was very curious as to how it would all fall out. I knew he'd be up there, but we've had no indication up till now just how it would pan out - though the top kid is no surprise. He's a very smart kid taking hard courses who also happens to care very much about his grades. He deserves to be number one. Actually the thing that makes me happiest, is that I think he finally has an essay that won't put an adcom to sleep!</p>

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<p>Started to read this thread--- and it's obviously changed alot since page 12 or so when I threw in the towel. At that point, around post 170, a number of posters were commenting on the USA Today Scholars and on "coincidences"... one scholar doing fuel cell research when his father was in the same field, and on "college packager" Elizabeth Wisner-Gross' two kids being named Scholars. The implication in the case of Wisner-Gross was that her children were no doubt recognized due to her profession as college consultant in a wealthy area of Long Island. </p>

<p>Anyway, for those who were following the discussion back then, I am posting something I found online about one of the Wisner-Gross kids, who attends MIT. It appears to me the kid seems to have gotten to where he is on his own abilities and extraordinary intelligence, independent of his mother and her profession. It reiterates to me that one must be careful of jumping to conclusions no matter where the "evidence" may point. </p>

<p>From MIT's Spectrum Magazine</p>

<p>Big Ideas
Student's insights could advance nanotech field
Alexander Wissner-Gross is fascinated by things miniscule. As a 16-year-old in Long Island in 1998, the high school whiz kid shook a box of sand and envisioned the infinitesimal. Where others would see a mass of moving granular particles, he perceived nanowaves — waves on a scale of a billionth of a meter — that could carry billions of carbon molecules and deliver them to specific locations.</p>

<p>His insight caught the attention of leading nanoresearchers because it could lead to the fabrication of pinhead-sized computer circuits that would make the power of today's supercomputers pale by comparison.</p>

<p>Today a junior at MIT with a triple major — physics, mathematics, and electrical engineering, with a possible minor in biology — Wissner-Gross has since worked on his sandbox insights and developed plausibility arguments and computer simulations that may lead to new frontiers in nanotachnology — a nascent field that focuses on engineering machines, electronic devices, and chemical and biological sensors whose dimensions approach the size of a molecule. With his computer simulations, he has designed, written and successfully tested a novel nanotechnology that applies the physics phenomenon known as patterned granular motion, an area that has created intense scientific excitement in the past 10 years.</p>

<p>For his high school work in the field, Wissner-Gross was awarded 10th place in the prestigious 1999 Intel Science Talent Search, as well as a nanotechnology patent in his name. Such honors were nothing new for Wissner-Gross, who, during high school, had garnered more than 40 major national awards, including first place in the USA Computer Olympiad for student programmers, double wins in the USA Math Talent Search competition in consecutive years, selection as the Lucent Global Science Scholar, and induction into the National Young Inventors Hall of Fame. He also was selected to participate in Mitre Corporation's elite summer camp for junior scientists, where he hatched his sandbox concepts; more recently, he won the 2001 Intel Research Award for undergraduate students and the National Nanofabrication Users Network 2001 summer research fellowship.</p>

<p>Nanotechnology Center</p>

<p>These days, Wissner-Gross's passion for nanotechnology includes his involvement in the effort, spearheaded by some MIT engineering faculty, to get the Institute to create an interdisciplinary center of nanotechnology. Such a site "would give students a better opportunity to draw from the interfaces of various fields, which is a hugely promising area.</p>

<p>MIT is tops in every science and engineering field," he says, "but it would be great if the infrastructure were in place to collaborate on nanotechnology research." To further this goal, he has helped to devise a sample curriculum and been in discussion with Henry Smith, professor of electrical engineering, Rafael Reif, associate head of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and Dick Yue, associate dean of the School of Engineering.</p>

<p>Wishing he could major in more than three disciplines, Wissner-Gross sees nanotechnology as the most promising field for his talents and his desire to leave the world a better place. "One of the wonderful things about science is that it might help us discover the cosmic purpose for being alive. Since no one comes to you when you're born with a manual of what to do, the next best thing is to try to figure out how everything works and how to make life as good as possible."</p>

<p>Wissner-Gross's interest in things miniscule date to his early childhood. "As my parents have pointed out, I had an interest in small things having a large effect since I was small." He also credits his parents — his mother is a journalist, his father, a corporate lawyer — with sparking his scientific interests: "It's the exclusion principle," he explains. "If parents excel in a certain field and gain recognition in it, their children generally want to have nothing to do with it. My chief advantage was having parents who were not famous scientists."</p>

<p>Opera Star</p>

<p>The same operational principle seems to have held sway with his singing talents, which took a protracted public spotlight at the New York City Opera during Wissner-Gross's elementary school years. Performing child roles in Carmen and La Boheme until his voice deepened at age 12, Wissner-Gross says the experience was a "blast" and taught him a few lessons. "It was enormously helpful in getting rid of a fear of public speaking" and it primed him for expecting the unexpected. "Everything before was humdrum. The New York City Opera was the first unique and distinguishing thing I had done. Once you get the hang of doing the unexpected, it comes naturally."</p>

<p>His natural talents and his penchant for the unexpected also led him to fencing, which he took up early in high school. Finding it "exotic and fascinating," Wissner-Gross was hooked by the sport's demand for mental acuity. Both fencing and the world of science competitions are a thing of the past for him, however.</p>

<p>Now more focused on nanotechnology, he says, he finds less time to pursue these activities because, "at this point, I'm concentrating on learning enough to hopefully contribute to the next generation of molecular science and engineering."</p>

<p>–– Orna Feldman</p>

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<p>Right you are. I didn't see the connection. Kind of unfair if you think about it.</p>