<p>ppangan on the princeton board posted this CS monitor article. One of their reporter was granted permission to sit in their 'discussion'. Very interesting.</p>
<br>
<blockquote> <p>Acceptance rates at highly selective schools range from 13 percent at Harvard - the lowest - to about 29 percent at Penn. <<</p> </blockquote>
<br>
<p>This article and the info are outdated by six years. The Ivies have become much more competitive and selective since. Harvard's accept rate is at 10% and UPenn's accept rate is at 21%.</p>
<p>I wish that someone would write an article about a more typical college admissions office. Not a community college...but maybe a few schools in the lower part of the top 50, say a Boston U and a Dickinson or Kenyon. I would like to know more about how they make decisions and how it compares to the Ivy's and most selective schools.</p>
<p>This article is pretty old......the students discussed in the article have graduate from college by now.</p>
<p>Carolyn: You, Northstarmom, Marite and Ekitty can team up as free lancers and gain access. You know this side of the fence and have pretty good idea of the other 'dark' side !!</p>
<p>There's a chart on the USC website that lists average stats for all applicants, admitted and denied. Not surprisingly, the top 25% for applicants more or less maps to the midrange of the accepted.</p>
<p>Simba, thanks for posting.</p>
<p>Carolyn:</p>
<p>Before Jacques Steinberg wrote the Gatekeepers, I believe he did an article for the Sunday New York Times magazine comparing the admission process at Wesleyan and UCSD. The one thing I remember about it is that the UCSD process was far more numbers-driven than the more holistic Wesleyan process because the UCSD adcom had to deal with a far greater volume of applications ( more than 30k). In a numbers-driven process, board scores, GPA and class rank count for far more, GPAs are less likely to be recalculated by the adcom, essays and recs count for far less (or they are not even required). </p>
<p>My hunch is that if Kenyon and BU were to be compared, they would probably replicate the differences between Wesleyan and UCSD just because of the disparity in their size.</p>
<p>"She ended up getting a 120 point increase on her SATs. But it just proves even more that she's not using her ability."</p>
<p>This is the most interesting and revealing line in that story. Although the student in question had a merely good academic record (GPA), this quotation also implies that the adcom's do not simply look at the highest scores. In this applicant's case, her improved scores were used against her.</p>
<p>I think there are some schools that would look more at the potential suggested by the high SAT scores rather than using them as the mark of an underachiever.</p>
<p>mackinaw, when I read that line in the article I thought it was ridiculous. How can one say that a student who increases their SAT score wasn;t using their ability the first time? Is there an assumption that the student just blew off the test the first time? I can see saying this about a student with a high SAT score and low GPA....but not a change in SAT from one sitting to the next. </p>
<p>My son increased his score 240 points from the first to the third and final try. Does that mean he wasn't using his potential? I thnk it means that he's a kid who knows the material on the test, but isn't used to taking standardized tests. Once he was shown "how" to take the SAT ......zooooom......an extra 230 points on the next try. Did he learn that much new academic material in the 2 months span between tests? No! Sorry, I just think the test is BS. He was no smarter in May than he was in March....the only difference was that I was $1300 poorer because someone sat with him and showed him what sections to skip. (I'm trivializing the tutoring - but you get my point).</p>
<p>I agree with you, momsdream. Some kids need to learn now to do their best on the test. And then there's a risk this will be used against them! (My son had taken the SAT enough in talent search and then the PSAT and understood the test well, and so really did about as well as anyone could the first time he took it for "real" in 11th grade.)</p>
<p>I think that at schools like Penn, the adcoms are looking for reasons NOT to accept some applicants with reasonable but less than perfect academic records (a few B's), and they are looking for reasons TO accept other applicants with more marginal academic records. Maybe that article is at fault, but I don't see much effort to look at the "whole application" beyond a few stats, geography, diversity.</p>
<p>Realistically, even working 10-12 hours a day at the height of the reading season, how can they do anything but just be looking for reasons to reject, or for a few candidates accept? Shoot, when the caffeine gives out, I'll bet they can't remember what they read at the end of the folder!
Some things must be different from this 1998 article, because the applicant numbers have just grown so much, their job is getting more and more impossible.</p>
<p>According to the article - the workload would be 27 folders an hour based on a 10 hour workday. I presume from the article that this is at least the 2nd read, the info has been abstracted into a binder, but still 27 an hour doesn't allow too much discussion.</p>
<p>I could not access the article, so here's just a stab at guessing.</p>
<p>Adcoms look for board scores to correlate with GPAs and validate them. If the board scores are way higher than the GPA, it may signal that the applicant is an underachiever; s/he has potential, sure, but is not using it. The assumption is that such a student will not be capable of the extra effort required to succeed in college. I've actually overheard adcoms commenting of a student with perfect SATs but ho-hum GPA "We don't want her here, do we?"
At the same time, adcoms realize that students can do less well than they should on the SAT for a variety of reasons, such as having an off-day or being unfamiliar with the format. They are likely to be more forgiving of lower SATs than of low GPAs.
My hunch, therefore, is that if a student has a solid GPA and increases his/her SAT scores pretty dramatically, it can only help, not hurt. But a student with mediocre GPA who achieves high SATs may be pegged as an underachiever.</p>
<p>I recall an artice about Univ. of Chicago admissions, published maybe 5 years ago in Newsweek. After two people read each file, they scored the applicants on two dimensions: academics -- number from 1 to 5 -- and nonacademics (fit to Chicago, EC's, etc.) -- a letter from A to F. The 1A's were automatic admits, both in early admission and regular admission. The 5F's were automatic rejects. That took care of roughly 40% of the total. All the committee deliberations focused on the 1B's/C's, the 2's, and a little bit on the 3's. There was a lot of discussion about essays, letters of recommendation, "progress" in the academic program, and backgrond and interests.</p>
<p>So the files were digested well in advance of the committee meetings. Anybody could recall a file from the 3's for consideration if they wished. But they worked from top toward bottom, and if they were reaching their overall quota they stopped at, say the 2C's and looked at the 3A's and B's.</p>
<p>I've been involved in selection committees where a similar system has been used. Each committee member read all the files and gave a rating. Then all the ratings were averaged.</p>
<p>At the full committee meeting, only the files that made the cutoff were discussed unless some committee member felt strongly about resurrecting a specific application. Still, we spent 5 hours discussing 100+ applications. If we'd discussed all of them collectively, we probably would have been at it for a whole week.</p>
<p>What Marite and Mac describe makes more sense, maybe I misinterpreted the article, but it made it sound like they abstracted and rereviewed EACH file - how would they ever get finished?! Especially since you know there are going to be a few files that take the main bulk of the discussion time. A job for the young and eager - not the work I would want.</p>
<p>I enjoyed the article. It sounded like a boardroom scene from the Apprentice.</p>
<p>"Your test scores are very high, I can tell you are extremely bright, but your grades aren't so good... too many B's, and you haven't taken the toughest courses available and you miss deadlines! In the Trump Organization that just won't cut it... Susan..... You're Fired! "</p>
<p>I just found that Newsweek piece on-line but can't link it here because it's a subscription service via my employer. However, if you have access to a library or electronic source, here's the bibliographic info: John McCormick, "Inside the Admissions Game," Newsweek, April 5, 1999, pp. 54ff.</p>
<p>My recollection was roughly accurate but there's a lot of interesting stuff in that piece.</p>
<p>Here's the Newsweek article:</p>