<p>I hate Chance Me threads, because for the most part, it’s the dead leading the blind. </p>
<p>People with no knowledge about the process but a fair amount of knowledge about themselves are getting responses from people with little or no knowledge of the college and the briefest of summaries about the posters. Most of the responses come from other high school students; some come from people with limited knowledge about one or two schools. With only a handful of exceptions, they don’t come from admissions officers, who are among the few who really know what’s going on.</p>
<p>That being said, we could make the responses to these posts more valuable if the respondents would do the following:</p>
<p>1) Identify Yourself: High school student, Sophomore at Notre Dame, 2009 USC grad, Stanford alumni interviewer, etc. Without this perspective provided, any response to a Chance Me thread has no value.</p>
<p>2) Provide the Source for Your Information: Specifics are critical. If you got in or your friend got in with a certain profile, say so, and provide as many of the specifics (scores, GPA, extracurriculars) as possible without breaching confidentiality. If an admissions officer told you that students with test scores and GPA at the 25th percentile are highly likely to get in (as one told me and my son), then cite that. If your source is info that is reported on the school’s web site, don’t post. Any student who can get onto a school bus without written instructions can find that data on the web, too.</p>
<p>3) Never Tell Anyone Asking for Their Chances at an Elite School That They’re In, unless they mention that the school has a building named after their father, and they also have a stellar profile. </p>
<p>4) Don’t Post Unless You Have Insider Information About The School in Question. Insider information can be about one student who got in (and if so, say it is only one student), but your info has no value unless it is not broadly available. Information that is hard to find, such as saying that (and I’m making this up for example purposes only), “only 24% of the people who applied to Princeton with 2400 SAT scores were accepted,” can also be helpful.</p>
<p>5) Don’t Respond if You’re A High School Student, Unless You Can Provide Inside Information. The biggest problem with Chance Me threads is that the respondents are also high school students who can at best report what they have read or tell a fable that they’ve heard.</p>
<p>6) Don’t Tell Someone They Have Weak EC’s, or Try To Evaluate Their Extracurricular Record. No one can tell how strong someone’s extracurricular record is from the quick summaries listed. Captain of the softball team could be viewed as simply another activity by admissions, or, of the person is being recruited, could mean that the person can get in with SAT’s 500 points below the median. 250 hours of volunteer work could be meaningless, but 25 hours in a panicked flood recovery that saved lives (and that did happen on my road last year) could be viewed as heroic and significant. Readers lack context, and context is crucial.</p>
<p>7) Be Gentle with Your Response. Temper your response with something that softens it, such as, “I’m really not sure, but …” In this way, you don’t put down someone – no reason to hurt what are mostly fragile egos (teenagers usually come with those). Read your response before you post it so it doesn’t come across as nasty in any way.</p>
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<p>It would be nice if this post and the threads that follow it could be made into a sticky, or if the moderator could rewrite it into a better format – preferably as a single post that can’t be added to - and make it into a sticky.</p>