<p>“I am happy when friends and relatives tell me that their kids made it into Princeton, MIT, Harvard, State U or the local community college.”</p>
<p>Exactly. Sally, the Monday morning quarterbacking and gossip you describe is that of a total loser. I don’t know why you even pose the question.</p>
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<p>Do you mean that the school makes the whole ranking list public? I’d have been furious if my school did that.</p>
<p>True story: a good friend of mine in high school probably graduated first in our class. She doesn’t know for sure because she didn’t want to and she didn’t ask. Our graduation speeches were done by the class officers so there was no public val recognition and she went to a HYPSM school anyway.</p>
<p>Sometimes I see the opposite–why didn’t he apply? D has a friend, URM, male, top grades and test scores for anyone–3.9ish and a 35 ACT as well as fairly low income family–probably a shoe-in for Ivy’s and similar–and would have gone for free-with no loans. Wish we had chatted with him earlier. He is going to a very good school, but will end up with loans and out of pocket costs. I am guessing parents saw the price tag and said no way not knowing how aid works there.</p>
<p>I suspect my kid is that kid at his HS. But that’s because we’ve taught him since elementary school that you don’t run around telling people how smart you are or what your grades are. (This apparently is not the cultural norm in our neighborhood.) He refused to tell his friends what he got on the SAT even when they asked, although the NMSF list finally gave them at least a hint. </p>
<p>As for the other kids, I hope they all get into a top choice. God knows they are living under enough pressure to do so.</p>
<p>eireann-ranks are on every report card, top 10% of the class is announced at the end of the year awards banquet. AP scholars, etc. are announced annually, obviously the NMSF and finalists are announced. The top 10 is also announced at the end of the year awards. Then, the kids talk. There isn’t any hard feelings for some kids getting better grades/test scores, etc. for the most part. At this same ceremony all of the awards/scholarships, etc. and colleges applied to are listed in a program–unless a student opts not to submit the information. Those not wanting the info public have that option. Honor rolls are also published each marking period.</p>
<p>Ah, thanks for explaining. My school did put honor roll in the paper, but that was the only public recognition of anything and I don’t know how many people read that in the paper. So people knew who the good students were but not the point of differentiating the top few that specifically. And I don’t think it was something our school gossiped about as much. My best friend knew my SAT score but I don’t know if my other best friends did (I find test taking really easy and had a friend who struggled irrationally with it, so I wasn’t going to go around telling everyone my scores. It wasn’t secret but it wasn’t something we were all talking about). Anyway, different schools, different atmospheres.</p>
<p>I think class ranks were on official transcripts but not report cards. So if you were being like my friend, you could just choose not to look at the official transcript.</p>
<p>Out HS has a FB page where kids can post their acceptances. It’s open, so nosy parents can get news that way. I’ve looked at it and don’t remember thinking any acceptances were shocking, one way or the other. I’m happy for all of them. And I try not to ask the kids, though I’ll ask the parents how it’s going. Not in a competitive way, just idle chit-chat. I think it helps to be at a school where people are really open-minded about schools – big, small, in-state, OOS, LACs, unis. There’s not a feeling of there only being one great school out there.</p>
<p>I’m not up at school much these days, but I was there last week, and this acquaintance of ds’s runs up to me to tell me about his latest acceptance. He talked about how he and ds would be pretty close to each other if he went to that school. I thought it was cute to see how excited he was. I know of at least six kids applying to the same reach school ds is, and I wouldn’t be shocked if all got in. Or none got in. They’re pretty different, and each has attractive qualities. It’s all good, and I’d be happy for any of them.</p>
<p>My kids didn’t talk about things like their GPA and SAT scores in high school. We parents didn’t discuss these either with friends, relatives, or neighbors. Our kids didn’t discuss college acceptances until they made their matriculation decision. Even then, we did not entertain discussions comparing acceptances/rejections of their classmates. It just wasn’t a source of conversation outside of our home family.</p>
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You make it sound like one group is so vastly inferior to the other…</p>
<p>I enjoy the schools/students who can make light of it and post a “wall of shame” filled with rejection letters.</p>
<p>^I like it too. Even my kid who got into Harvard got rejected by Stanford, MIT and Caltech.</p>
<p>I knew where kids ended up and sometimes, if they were close friends of my kids I also knew where they had hope to go. Neither of my kids talked grades or scores much with their friends, though I was interested when S2 remarked that he thought he had a bad PSAT score until his friends started telling him what they’d gotten and his was higher than all of them. It’s hard to follow his big brother, who never saw a standardized test he couldn’t ace. (I knew in 3rd grade he’d figured it out when he got the answer to some question on a sample quicker than I did. I asked him what he’d done and he said, “oh I could see that was the only answer with a last digit that was correct.”)</p>
<p>“10% of the class is announced at the end of the year awards banquet. AP scholars, etc. are announced annually, obviously the NMSF and finalists are announced. The top 10 is also announced at the end of the year”</p>
<p>Yes. But that doesn’t mean you have to pay attention and memorize it all, any more that you’d memorize who the quarterback or senior class president was. These names are just names to me – why would I retain that info? </p>
<p>I agree with post 24 and 28. Anyway, don’t kid yourself that anyone really cares outside of your own family. Lots of gossipers out there - no need to join them. </p>
<p>And I think it’s more thn a little disconcerting that Sally, one of the site hosts, started this thread.</p>
<p>Almost the entire top ventile my D’s class at our highly-regarded public HS applied to Stanford. One got in, all the rest were rejected. I’d heard a rumor about the one being a double-legacy, and decided to see if Google could verify. Amazing what you can learn about folks on Google. Things that might make an Admissions Officer perk right up. So now I know why that one particular applicant was accepted, but I still have no idea why every other seemingly-well-qualified applicant was rejected.</p>
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<p>It doesn’t necessarily take effort to memorize things. And it doesn’t mean anything about someone’s value system that they remember such things. I remember some inane conversations from 30 years ago, conversations which hold no importance to me now or even then. Certainly if someone wins a major national award junior year, I don’t think it’s weird to remember it a year later, something which you’ve also said in the past is indicative a person who expended effort to memorize such details. And one may remember some people’s scores as well. </p>
<p>On the other hand, I would never engage in real-life conversations about why so-and-so got in or didn’t get in. I consider this forum an exception since the point is to discuss admissions, and it is anonymous.</p>
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<p>Top ventile? Wow, here is a great term for CC next decade. And, I thought that it referred to that group of HYPS grads who did not get into IB or TFA and had to learn the ins and outs of the Verismo at Howard’s Emporium. </p>
<p>I have to admit to be more impressed with the top duo-decile. It is nice to see how people grab their smartphones to decipher the new admission term during those cocktail chitchats in April and May! </p>
<p>On a serious note, has anything changed in the conclusion that if we do not know why XYZ got rejected we surely do not know why ABC got accepted. That is that WE do not know. But that does not mean the adcoms do not know. They do, and very well. </p>
<p>All in all, it is pretty simple. The accepted thinks --no, he knows-- that the adcoms knew what they were doing. The rejected, in turn, alleges that the process is random and lottery-like. </p>
<p>It is all about ego and self-esteem aka as the foundation of our K12 education.</p>
<p>For us, it was the other way around. Last year, DD applied SCEA to Yale along with 3 other classmates. Of the other 3, 1 was an amazing leader and organizer, 1 was a double legacy, and 1 seemed similar to D in terms of ECs, NMF status, but hard to know for sure since the kids at school don’t talk about GPA or SAT scores. Completely shocked to find DD accepted and the other 3 deferred. It does not make any sense at all. So who knows. Maybe it was submitting a film art supplement. Maybe it was submitting a 3rd LOR. I think that your app combo just has to hit a spark in the person who happens to be reading it. The reader happened to have similar interests as DD so the reader probably liked her.</p>
<p>“Completely shocked to find DD accepted and the other 3 deferred. It does not make any sense at all. So who knows.”</p>
<p>This drives me crazy. There are 30,000 hs in the country, not even counting homeschoolers and international applicants. Why would you ever think or assume Yale would take 4 kids from your hs in the first place? Doesn’t that feel awfully entitled to think that way, as if your hs were so uniquely important that they had to recognize multiple people from it, out of all their applicants?</p>
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<p>On a serious note, has anything changed in the conclusion that if we do not know why XYZ got rejected we surely do not know why ABC got accepted. That is that WE do not know. But that does not mean the adcoms do not know. They do, and very well. "</p>
<p>Which is precisely why I find it disturbing that Sally started this thread. You’d think of anybody, she would be most in the camp of - hey, cut the gossip out, you don’t know why anyone was accepted or rejected unless you were in the room -and everyone will ultimately land in a good spot. But now she’s actively encouraging the Monday morning quarterbacking and speculation.</p>
<p>D1 went to a very small school, about 120 kids in the graduating class. I knew most of those kids/parents because of birthday parties, school events and we also socialized outside of school sometimes. We all knew what tracks kids were on, no big secret. When it came to college admission, everyone knew who got in where and why (academic, legacy, athlete, URM), to the extent it was apparent. I think everyone was very supportive of each other. Seniors didn’t wear their college T-shirt until after May 1. In general when people heard of exceptional admit, they were happy for the student without a lot of whisper, “I can’t believe he/she got in.” But when there was a big disappointment, like D1, they were very supportive. A lot of parents congratulated D1 when it worked out at the end. The GCs worked very hard to get their students in, especially wait listed students. I</p>
<p>I didn’t view us wanting to know where most of the graduates got in as gossipy or nosy. Many of us genuinely cared about the students whom we have known since they were 5 or 6. I knew what most of those kids were doing after college graduation too.</p>
<p>Everyone in our school knows who applied to what school and who got in where – because the students talk to each other and they come home and tell their parents. Many parents know which students are at the top of the class – because we see them at the Honors recognition events. That is, however, the extent of it.</p>
<p>My children are in a public school that is racially and economically diverse. Some students live in run-down trailers and some live in 4,000 sq. ft. houses, and there’s everything in between. We have students who go into the military, go straight to work, and go to community college, as well as those who go to small religiously-affiliated colleges and well-regarded public and private universities. The longer I am on CC, the more I appreciate this diversity – and the more I appreciate that we don’t live in the “Ivy bubble”. In our area of the country, students are a lot less concerned about competing to get in the “right” school. There really isn’t any talk about why “he/she got in and I didn’t”. Students are just generally supportive of whatever. In fact, the students who get the most applause from their fellow classmates at senior recognition night are those who are joining the military.</p>