<p>yeah, college, i’d be interested to know what your source is for such specific information…</p>
<p>my friend’s dad is an admission officer for dartmouth -.-</p>
<p>That’s crazy.</p>
<p>^^ That’s awesome. But let’s not assume Dartmouth and Columbia process admissions identically …</p>
<p>collegeftw is wrong. and with knowledge of dartmouth’s process he is even wrong there. Dean Laskaris is not quite autocratic as you make her seem.</p>
<p>i wrote a long message here before that didn’t get posted so the abridged version. source: having worked in the office as a student, asked questions, and taught myself about other things.</p>
<p>1) it is read by your regional admissions officer, who reads the whole file, reads it electronically, as columbia has all your files online.</p>
<p>2) it will be read by at least two people before a decision is made.</p>
<p>3) most candidates are sent to committee, which at columbia is 3-4 people in a room, where a presenter (the regional admissions officer) goes through various students and a conversation is had, one of the other AOs is usually a senior person in the office with experience and knowledge. decisions are made by the committee.</p>
<p>4) most schools, columbia included, do something called sculpting where after everyone is admitted the Dean will look to see at the various parts of the class, see if there are any holes and work with the staff to find new students or to maybe have to pull some students out of the class if they overadmitted in committee.</p>
<p>the process is holistic because your whole file is read and all parts are included in the analysis, not just grades or testing. some admissions officers have told me they like starting with the essay, others start with the school report (grades), one told me that she likes to start by wikipediaing the town of the student to get an idea of relevant demographic data. </p>
<p>no one person can make a decision, and no one person can make a decision even if you are superb and obviously admittable. there are some variations at other schools - some have very clear first read and second reads before committee (dartmouth, harvard, yale, princeton) others have larger committees (at Harvard all AOs together make all decisions - supposedly). deans have a range of powers, some are very hands on, some could decide to admit based on their own whims students that perhaps the admissions officer who read the file did not like, though most, including dean marinaccio at columbia, seem to be wary of having too much control and usually make decisions with the consultation of other senior people in the admissions office.</p>
<p>i feel comfortable saying all of the above because the admission officers told me this and didn’t say it was confidential, heck they often say many of the above verbatim during question and answer sessions at their presentations.</p>
<p>@Adminssiongeek: You live up to your username 
. Thanks for the info.</p>
<p>admissionsgeek: Do you think that the committee reviews groups of students at a time, from one particular area of the country or from one particular school? If so, are they judged against each other to come up with a diverse group?</p>
<p>as far as i know it is done regionally and within regions by schools. regional admissions officers have defined regions, so it usually makes for an easier way to present than going to different parts of the world and zooming back and forth.</p>
<p>i don’t understand the second question very well, so i’ll take a stab at it.</p>
<p>i believe that you are not judged against others, but other students are used to help contextualize. if you see a student who is really pushing him/herself beyond what is available, it helps you figure out what is possible for students based on the specific context. you can see what other classes top students take, and if someone isn’t taking that top class, you can begin to wonder why not and look for new information to support that reading.</p>
<p>admissiongeek, uh…isnt what i posted pretty much what you said, with a few holes here and there -.- ?</p>
<p>but w/e im glad with admissiongeek’s superb knowledge, i guess our eyes are opened a bit more to the admissions process huh? thanks</p>
<p>although i have one question</p>
<p>in ur version, the regional officer obviously has alot of power over students…since you said conversatoin are had on “some” students…so does this mean that the regional officer can just take out the students that he/she feels is too weak or not intersting enough or w/e and not even present it to the committee?? also if a regional officer loves students alot, she can emphasize, u know, but in good words and stuff? </p>
<p>just wondering</p>
<p>it isn’t a version, but the truth.</p>
<p>i said most on purpose because in columbia’s case and most guidance counselors are aware of this so you can speak to them - they don’t send all students to committee, but will instead send some candidates to be read by a second reader to affirm the original reader’s recommendation. hence part 2 - all candidates will be read by at least two readers. as you can infer, this is mostly the case for students who are denied.</p>
<p>Adgeek showed how the process worked. I’d like to take this opportunity to call out Silence for how he feels Columbia values applicants. Columbia doesn’t accept any weak applicants; everyone that they accept has been chosen to be the best of the best in a pool of tens of thousands of applicants. But the “best” applicants are not necessarily those who are “geniuses” or have the highest test scores. You of all people should appreciate that. Columbia strives for intellectual, social, cultural, ethnic, etc. diversity because they want to build a strong, well-rounded class. There’s no compulsion (legal or otherwise) to accept weak applicants, and I’m concerned that you equate “diversity” with “weak applicants”. Columbia will take who they feel is best for the class, end of story.</p>
<p>Just a few practical questions:
1.How many people applied each year?
2. How many admission officers available for reading these files?
The work load could be fairly high, I suppose…</p>
<p>1) Last year about 26000 students applied.
2) Columbia has more than 20 officers dedicated to reading files.
3) The work load is high, it is a real job, but they manage to do it every year, so I think they must know what they’re doing. </p>
<hr>
<p>to add on to pwoods - the hardest part for most students to understand is that there is no single objective measure that can be used to judge all students equally across the board, not even the SAT. this being the case because everything has to be contextualized. a strong SAT score from a student with bad grades tells you something, a lower SAT score from a student from a disadvantaged background tells you something else. </p>
<p>in a sense - objective data unless it is contextualized doesn’t mean anything. you could tell me you got a 2400, and all i could tell you is your percent chance of being admitted. which, mind you, is still lower than 50%. if you tell me the context of your 2400, what you do, how hard you work in and out of class, how teachers perceive you, how you’ve gone above and beyond what is expected of you as a student and your teachers have taken notice - then i could give you a fairer assessment.</p>
<p>the problem being that all the chance forums strip us of the kind of true context necessary for a real assessment to be made (in fact a lot of the information can’t be known, like how your teachers think of you). it is why they are ultimately meaningless exercises.</p>
<p>hey admission geek, I have a quick question (thank you for everything that you have posted.)</p>
<p>When I ED’ed, I scanned my 1st grading cycle report card and sent it along with my application, as my counselor had already sent in her rec before the grading cycle ended. I asked her today and she said she never got a call from columbia, although alot of applicants on this thread seemed to have gotten calls from Columbia requesting grades. Thus,</p>
<p>-was the fact that I scanned my report card and sent it on my own legitimate? Would admission officers find that useful, or would they find it annoying and most probably call guidance counselor to “make sure” anyway?</p>
<p>it should be legit, but doesn’t hurt to ask columbia directly, send them an email.</p>