<p>I think some PhD candidate in education should seek the cooperation of his/her university's undergrad. admissions and financial aid offices to determine the extent to which admission rates for statistically similar candidates vary by income, holding other factors constant.</p>
<p>Better that that be a Ph.D. candidate in statistics who can do the figuring correctly.</p>
<p>Curious:</p>
<p>Some time ago, posters from CA posted links to the list used by UC-Davis and perhaps other UC campuses. Perhaps a search through CC archives might yield the relevant thread.</p>
<p>It would be rather difficult to hold other factors constant. besides income and ethnicity, there would be gender, ECs, geography, academic interests to take into account. The resultant cohort of similar students would be quite small at the most selective schools.</p>
<p>Found somthing:</p>
<p>It is a place called The Century Fund. They did a study with 1992-2000 data.
One of the researchers was with ETS. They claimed that on average colleges were not tilting admissions for econmically disadvantaged students. </p>
<p>On another note, they indicated that in their survey from 1992 - 2000 the number of institutions granting financial aid to international students went from 0 to 25%.</p>
<p>Marite,</p>
<p>Folks do that kind of thing all the time. There are lots of different techniques, the most common of which is Multiple Regression Analysis. Amazingly, this stuff is now easy to use. All you need is Microsoft Excel.</p>
<p>well i guess i'm still in the midst of college acceptances, but it seems to me that there aren't as many options out there for "normal" kids as there are for kids that are incredibly smart or incredibly poor. PLEASE correct me if i'm wrong.</p>
<p>i feel like i'm at a significant disadvantage in the financial aid ring because i'm <em>just</em> another girl from the midwest with a private school background.</p>
<p>if i were in charge of the adcoms, i'd place way more emphasis on essays and less on GPA and class rank. i would make it easier for everday kids to access great financial aid, merit-based or need-based. i also don't understand why interviews are rarely if ever taken into consideration for admission; i've done a few and always walk away feeling like i know more about the school and the school knows more about me.</p>
<p>Curious:</p>
<p>Most of the new policies seem to have been put in place AFTER 2000. </p>
<p>The point about the cohort size is that a very small cohort won't tell you very much, the chances of getting two students with exactly the same profiles save for income being exceedingly small.</p>
<p>kristin,</p>
<p>I gather from your previous posts that you were admitted OOS to UVA and were a finalist in the Jefferson Scholar competition or something like that. With all due respect and congratulations I don't think you quaify as "normal" or "average."</p>
<p>It's difficult to name just one thing, but if I'm limited, here goes.</p>
<p>I'm disgusted with the varying difficulties, school to school, of earning an impressive GPA. And please don't start in with, Well, that's why there are SAT's. Folks, standardized testing and classroom work are two different things. One does not compensate for the other. They are merely different measures. Yes, U's do generally evaluate one measure against the other measure, but I'm talking about when SAT's may be equal. There are student posters from the NE who have merely stated, without whining, that it is extremely difficult to get a 4.0 UW from their private schools, and I believe them, because the same is true at my D's school. One factor is the demands, rigor, curriculum, grading standards of the school itself & its teachers. A separate but equally important factor are the peers that student is studying with & competing against. </p>
<p>So those students may not be whining, but I am! As some other parents have pointed out (& I think xiggi), when a huge proportion of a senior class has a 4.0 UW GPA, something's wrong. Now, in an individual advanced classroom, perhaps 50% of the students have genuinely earned that A in some particular class where the students are so capable. But an entire LARGE senior class? Please. </p>
<p>Yet these dime-a-dozen 4.0's are mixed in with all the other 3.8 and 3.7's from real bears of schools, many of which are requiring more of their students than an Elite U does in freshman & soph years. Sure, some <em>private</em> colleges know the private high schools well -- those schools that don't hand out A's like candy. But the public U's, first of all, do not differentiate. Secondly, even many privates are less discriminating than other privates are, when comparing GPA's. </p>
<p>So, what would I want? An external measure supplied by the college in question. Student could opt to submit as a supplement a proctored test that would be impossible to prepare for. It would consist of a text in any subject of the student's choosing: literature, history, physics, biology, etc. Let's see how that student does analyzing that text, summarizing it, possibly probing it for further areas he or she would suggest for analysis. ("What does this text imply about this topic or field"?) An actual live paper, OR the student may opt for an oral exam on the same text. That's your 2-3 hours. An hour for review of the material, an hour to be orally examined, or longer for written response. It would be up to the student to travel to the U for such a proctored test. That would also show a commitment to the application process, & would probably limit the number of institutions at which this option could be done. But at least it would slightly even the playing field for those students who are actually required to meet high standards of analysis in ther high school work, but whose GPA will not reflect that. </p>
<p>If this testing thing takes a lot of time, then the student may have to take a gap year, but in may be worth it.</p>
<p>Alternatively, I'll say what I've said in the past: Every high school, public or private, has teachers submit representative, graded, unaltered student work to every institution applied to, public or private. Sent only from the high school. This is the only way to evaluate these meaningless GPA's.</p>
<p>epiphiny,</p>
<p>You have point. I am always amazed when I see students posting a pefect UW 4.0 and SAT scores in the 600's. But adcoms have a lot more data to work with than we see. I think most schools submit profiles that show the pattern of grades in various kinds of courses and standardized test scores that allow the adcoms to put the grades for that student in perspective. In addition there are SAT II's and AP exams that put those grades in context. IMO the system is not that broken.</p>
<p>Marite, </p>
<p>I’m sort of rusty on this and for all I know you know more about this than I do. But I think the sample size offered by a mid sized university would be more than adequate especially since you can pool the data over a few years. I think you could just regress admissions (1 for yes, 0 for no) on Income, Race (1 for URM, 0 for not), and SAT scores. If the coefficient for income is statistically significant and negative you could conclude that the school was providing a preference for low income. I’m sure there are more sophisticated things that could be done, but I think this would work for a first pass.</p>
<p>Curious:</p>
<p>My point is that hyperselective schools look at more than income and race. Gender, academic interests, extracurricular activities, geographic background, etc... If your question is: should income count more than all of these extra-academic factors combined, than perhaps it would be easier to do the kind of analysis you seek. But if income should count more than some and less than others, it would be difficult to assemble a cohort. This is particularly true since admissions policies keep changing. The data 1992-2000 is way out of date in this context.</p>
<p>I accept the point on the 2000 data, thinking about the other.</p>
<p>Gender is easy to add to the analysis. EC's are a problem. They are hard to quantify and they might matter, since it's possible that richer kids have systematically better EC's than poorer kids for a bunch of reasons. But this is sort of a second order effect and I would not be surprised if there was a school out there somewhere that actually places a numerical value on EC's.</p>
<p>If I could change one thing, I would make all recommendation forms for counselors and teachers uniform. We have one college counselor for over 3,000 students and I know she gets backlogged on filling out forms and sending them to colleges. If she did one form and could xerox it for each school the student is applying to, rather than each school having a form that is slightly different, it would make a huge difference. The same goes for the teacher rec forms. I'd also like to see recommendations allowed from someone who is not a teacher. Sometimes, in public schools, teachers are gone before the student is a senior or a counselor suddenly leaves and the new one doesn't know the student. </p>
<p>The president of Yale has also announced a desire to have a more international school, by the way.</p>
<p>I do not agree that the suggestions in post 131 are sufficient to differentiate between grading systems & grading standards. Not at all. That was the point of my post. Tired of the same old generalizations & rationalizations being dragged out. I can guarantee you that the highrent public near me has a school profile that probably looks identical to my D's high school, but these schools are nowhere close to each other in course rigor.</p>
<p>Epiphany,</p>
<p>Then, I would guess that your D's AP scores and SAT II scores are higher than those for comparably graded students at the "high rent public." If not, perhaps, you should conisider another hypothesis.</p>
<p>Curious:
The UC-Davis selection criteria are published on the homepage of the UC-Davis website.</p>
<p>As I said in my earlier post, not necessarily. I said that when scores are comparable or identical to another student or to many students, yet the GPA's differ, it does not demonstrate the capability of the student to set GPA against GPA. And this is not a "hypothesis." I'm talking about students I know, as a teacher, students who have attended a variety of schools. Unless you know something more about the course than a superficial label, and more about how the student performed to the standard expected there, the GPA as a "number" is meaningless. I can give you example after example. One recent one is a student from a low-expectation parochial, a student who managed a 4.0 by taking easy courses. She's now at a flagship public as an athlete (& not URM), struggling & being tutored in every subject.</p>
<p>My experience & perceptions are confirmed by many students on CC who know students from both publics & privates. They post often.</p>
<p>Course content should be made available to both private and public U's, which is not as it is now. People applying from public high schools to high-profile public U's have a significant advantage over private school grads applying to those same U's.</p>