That is the most disturbing part of holistic admissions, the myth that those admitted were better people or of greater moral character those rejected.
Utter nonsense .
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Giant caveat. Thatâs IF they give a rip about schools that care about that stuff. My son did not, very much by intent, with support and guidance from us. He had the stats and special little things, for example heâd been invited to concertize out of state on a classical instrument, from the time he was 8, to be competitive. He didnât see any there, there at the T20 schools. Heâs absolutely no worse for the wear having eschewed the increasingly silly game.
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The MIT quote mentioned above lists 8 desired character/personal qualities. It doesnât really sound like moral character or being a âbetter personâ⊠more displaying evidence of character qualities that MIT desires, which include things like âcollaborative and cooperative spiritâ and âinitiative.â
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Our schoolâs drug dealer showed both those qualities, so perhaps that explains the admit to MIT. Definitely collaborative and lots of initiative in sales.
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How do they decide who is a âbetter personâ, by the ECs or the essays? It could be written by the agent, his dad or mom, or his dog. Who knows?
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Colleges that practice holistic admissions like to retain as much discretion as possible so they tend (or pretend?) to deemphasize the importance of quantifiable attributes in their official communications to the public. However, not all these quantifiable attributes carry the same weight. While test scores and grades may be practically undistinquishable among many of their applicants to the most elite colleges, higher-level achievements in some of the highly regarded competitions are looked upon differently.
The post you referenced implied they donât for the most partâŠ
Donât pay attention to what colleges say. Pay attention to what they do.
I know you understand statistics, and there is no way that you can tell me that all of these students just randomly got in.
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The list includes 6 or fewer MIT admits per year. ECs being influential for 6 students who represent the United States in an international âOlympiadâ competition is not inconsistent with character/personality qualities generally being more influential than ECs. It also does not imply that an applicant cannot be the equivalent of a national level in character/personal qualities. Rather that focus on a list of 6 extreme outlier students, itâs more relevant for typical applicants to focus on the criteria used in typical admission.
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This category is not about competitions, I agree. But it does not mean that AOs donât use quantitative data to evaluate your accomplishments. Say, that your kid founded a non-profit. This is a popular activity, so I assume there many kids that put it on their resumes. To differentiate one non-profit from another, the AO would like to know things like how much money you raised, how many people you helped, in how many communities you operate, and other quantitative data to assess your contribution. Similarly, I assume if you published research, they would like to know how prestigious is the journal, was your work cited or given an award, were you the first author or the only author, etc.
Regarding the LORs, they not only want to know that you are wonderful but also how do you compare to your peers - were you the best student in the class, in the school, or in the teacherâs lifetime.
The one category where character is not quantifiable is if you overcame some hardship. Kids that are homeless, lost a parent or have a chronic disease deserve this boost. Fortunately, my kids are not in this category. Their biggest hardship is to get out the trash.
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I did not say AOs donât use quantitative data. The quote said, âpeople tend to overrestimate the importance of admission criteria that they can easily quantify and measure, and underestimate the importance of admission criteria that they cannot easily quantify or compare how well they stack up against other applicants.â
By âpeopleâ, I meant forum members or applicants in general. For example, itâs easy for an applicant to see how their 1500 SAT compares to students at a particular college or other applicants from their high school. And we see many persons think that relatively small differences in score are highly influential in admissions decisions. Itâs not as easy for an applicant to see how their LORs compare to other LORs in a highly selective collegeâs applicant pool or how their LORs compares to other applicants from their high school. For example, to know whether their LORs sound relatively generic, while others in applicant pool have comments like the ones you listed â âbest student in the class, in the school, or in the teacherâs lifetime.â This effect can lead to some assuming that LORs generally donât distinguish students well and carry little weight compared to small differences in scores, and some being surprised when admission decisions donât follow the areas that are easier for applicants to quantify or compare, like stats + competition/award related ECs.
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As it is is becoming increasingly difficult to differentiate kids by academic stats, more and more school practice âholisticâ admission. (and some academic stats such as the SATs/ACT have been dropped altogether). In CA, these are all the UCs, since they ask for pages and pages of essays and other EC information, and all the privates. So, it is not possible to ignore those schools unless our kids all apply to Cal States.
Even Cal Poly practices some kind of holistic admission. Otherwise it would not have waitlisted initially my kid who does not have a single chink in his academic armor - one of two kids in our uber competitive large public school to take Calc BC in 10th grade, the most difficult STEM APs all with 5s before starting senior year, National Merit Finalist, 4.0 UW and school awards in Chemistry and Physics C (one award per class of 32 extremely motivated students).
I guess when your kid applied 4-5 yrs ago, things might have been different.
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The most likely reason is that (a) the student did not list all math courses taken before high school on the application, and (b) the student applied to one of the most competitive majors.
CPSLO counts the number of semesters of math beyond the CSU minimum requirements for a fairly large number of bonus points. However, for this purpose, it does not use the typical CSU / UC validation policy to assume completion of lower level courses if a higher level course is in the record. So a student who took precalculus in 9th grade is assumed to have completed algebra 1, geometry, and algebra 2 for CSU minimum requirement purposes, but if the latter three courses completed in middle school or earlier are not listed on the application, the student does not get the CPSLO bonus points. (It is a strange policy, but that is what they apparently decided.)
This is not holistic.
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This is a very timely topic. I am parent of D22. We got a bunch of marketing material as well. wondering if there is a needle in that haystack to sift through and get at. thought provoking thread. thanks
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CP does not use any form of holistic admissions. That doesnât mean their algorithm is purely academic. It isnât. There are non-academic ways to get a boost at CP, Hayden Partner school, one or both parents without a HS diploma, service area, etc. By far and away the most likely reason for your sonâs waitlist status at CP assuming a non-test year, or a test year and high scores, is that he didnât fill out his application properly. High school level classes in math and foreign language taken in middle school are required on the app. Overlooking that requirement dramatically reduces the rigor score on the algorithm. It happens every year.
Oops: @ucbalumnus beat me to it.
Itâs possible he messed up the application. Was eventually admitted with scholarship. And, yes, applied CS and class of 2021.
My kid was the Rensselaer Medalist in his class (best science and math student chosen by the faculty) at an extremely competitive private prep school. He not only took Physics C, but DE inorganic chemistry, organic chemistry and biochemistry. He had $440k in scholarship offers from 7 schools and that included just $8k from CP the max they gave students from OOS. He was a concert level classical musician who could have gone to conservatory, raced FIS and was the captain of the state runner up soccer team. He graduated Magna Cum Laude, missing Summa by less than a 10th of a percent, in one of the hardest graded majors at Cal Poly, ME (last publication I saw had ME at 36% As, CS 50% and BME 70%), while working 12-20 hours a week no less. He passed on Stanford to stay at Cal Poly and finished a funded, thesis based MS (which you canât do at Stanford), with distinction in under a year. He wasnât exactly a slacker and hasnât missed a beat in the workforce either. 
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You will continue to be inundated by marketing material. Ignore it!!! (does Harvard really need to attract more applications? The answer seems to be yes). If you enjoy the technical art of paper engineering you will find some hidden gems in various collegesâ marketing mailers. My recently graduated high schooler and I enjoyed these rare gems of innovative graphic design and paper engineering in the marketing mailers while bemoaning the fact that even some of our cash strapped UCs have the money for an elaborate marketing department.
Commenters upstream are talking about students competing for spots at different universities but something that is not mentioned as much is that the universities themselves are competing for these applicants. And looking at the criteria that determines the top 10-20-100 list, and that shapes many studentsâ application behavior one can see that they are every bit as obscure and âholisticâ as the admissions these universities practice.
BTW my kid was completely put off applying to schools with aggressive marketing and a kind of private club feel to their communications. (Youâll see it upstream here too; college viewed as an elite club of networking opportunity seekers). Good luck to your kid and as long as they look towards college to continue their education they will be fine. Easier said than done, I knowâŠ
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My kid was the same. He started getting spammed by Vandy in 9th grade. It was a real turn off. We were largely counter culture on the whole rankings thing based on pretty strong opinions from family members whoâd attended MIT and Stanford and several Caltech professors to begin with though.
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As we know from the MIT Class of 2023 thread, itâs not 6, but closer to 6 dozen who had very high odds of admission, and that was ânot an exhaustive listâ compiled by one person.
Here is another thread, again from @agapetos, which shows award winners for the MIT class of 2022. Note that the first person responding works for MIT admissions, and is happy that someone put together the list of strong students they enrolled.
Letâs get back to why this is relevant. Itâs because when a college has say a X% admit rate, almost no students actually have an X% chance of being admitted. They tend to be either far above or far below.
Letâs suppose a college has 20k applicants, an admit rate around 7.5%, and an overall yield of about 67% to fill their class size of 1000.
The very best academic applicants obviously have higher admit rates. In fact, for the top 1% of applicants, admission can be close to a sure thing, and letâs call that 80%. So, these are 200 applicants, 160 admitted. Letâs assume that these students have a lot of options and only 50% enroll. Thatâs 80 students, or 8% of the class.
The next 5% of applicants are quite strong, and get in at a rate of 40%. In addition to having excellent grades, test scores, and recommendations, these are the kids that have national level recognition in a non-recruited activity, such as winning a national photography award, or making USAMO, or doing research multiple years and getting a paper published in a minor journal. Thatâs 1000 applicants, 400 admits. If 60% of these students enroll, thatâs another 240 students. We have now filled 32% of the class from just 6% of the applicant pool.
We now move onto the hooked categories which we define here as being athletes, URM and legacy. Suppose 10% of the applicants belong to this category, and as a group they are admitted at a 20% rate (we wonât double count the ones that were strong enough to get in purely on academics). Thatâs 2000 applicants and 400 admits. If they enroll at a 70% rate, thatâs 280 students. We have now filled 60% of the class with 16% of the applicant pool
We now have 84% (16800 students) of the applicant pool remaining and competing for 400 remaining spots. If the yield in this group is 80%, then the college only needs to admit 500 students. Most of the kids in this group have fine grades, test scores, and recommendations. Perhaps they were even a three sport athlete, or won several regional awards. In other words, accomplished kids who will absolutely succeed in college.
And some of them will be admitted. But the real admit rate is 500/16800, or just about 3%. Nowhere close to 7.5%.
So in a way, @mtmind is right. There is a lot of randomness in that last group of admitted students. But thatâs because there isnât nearly as much randomness for a large chunk of the admitted students.
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