[MIT</a> Admissions | Blog Entry: “Many Ways To Define “The Best””](<a href=“http://www.mitadmissions.org/topics/before/recommended_high_school_preparation/many_ways_to_define_the_best.shtml]MIT”>http://www.mitadmissions.org/topics/before/recommended_high_school_preparation/many_ways_to_define_the_best.shtml)
How is it to be at the center of an article and the very opinionated and pointed comments about it? Awkward or just surreal? What a strange situation.
Meh, it’s not really about me, its about the site, my thread is just the one they chose, it could have been anyone’s. I like hearing people’s opinion on this, and just to be clear, I don’t side with or against the article, I haven’t been here long enough to know the community.
Also on Channel 2 news in California Bay Area tonight.They didn’t say “College confidential”, but showed a page and interviewed an admissions counselor about “chance” threads.
Personally, I think the attitude of many on CC does more harm than good (and I thought the article was quite fair and reflects what I see happening on CC).
It often seems to me like people here derive some twisted pleasure in beating down the hopes and dreams of others who might have a teensy bit lower test score or GPA than CC posters do. I know plenty of people who did not have superhero test scores or grades who were admitted to terrific schools. It happens frequently, but you’d never know it from reading the harsh assessments on CC.
Take the GPA for instance. The GPA from a kid from a large, competitive public school cannot be compared to the GPA from a kid in a rural area in Kansas. Admissions officers will consider that type of thing. Yet the type of high school is not necessarily something people responding to a Chance Me thread will know.
It seems to me that certain stats such as the middle 50% in scores/grades for a particular college are important. It is not always necessary to be at the very tip top of that range, but it seems that CC people believe that anything less than the top of that range or better is impossible absent an outrageous hook.
Rather than clinging to Chance Me threads from a bunch of anonymous and volatile strangers, I think it makes sense to do some basic research, prepare the best application you can, and apply to a range of schools that interest you.
^ Well said. And you are spot on about the median 50%. While many tier 1 adcoms will tell you that reaching that point is all that really matters when it comes to test scores, most here deny that, instead favoring the belief that their 2300+ will get them in HYPS.
Let me weigh in here. I dont think people here on CC beat up the median 50th percentile or kids who are genuinely concerned about getting into college. The problem is kids use “chance me threads” to promote themselves and brag on their gpa/SAT/rank and to brag they are “obsessed” with getting into the top 10 schools. Nobody likes a self promoting braggart.
If there are genuine efforts to “chance me” from kids who are truly on the bubble, then I think the responses are generally very helpful. As well, when someone is deluded and thinks they have the stats to get into a particular school (and not being a URM), they need to be told in a professional and courteous manner to look somewhere else more reasonable.
College admissions are not fair, not always objective and frequently bizarre things happen. Every year there are horror stories of who got in and who didnt. If you are looking for a feel good experience, college admissions is a poor place to start. But it is what it is and its helpful to get some professional guidance and friendly curb advice from strangers.
We are much too obsessed as a nation with status. We should be more obsessed with helping individuals achieve their own level of success and then encouraging people to pursue academic and professional careers which will benefit both them and society.
Hahaha I love this article. It’s soooo true about ego’s getting bruised. They should have mentioned though that most people who chance others have less than 100 posts…
“My guess is many of these “woe-is-me” stories are reporting “weighted” GPA’s. In our school system, when the high-schools publish their top-10 seniors, the Valedictorian usually has a 4.4-4.5 GPA, with #10 coming in at 4.2-4.30. You can get credit for 5.0 on a 4.0 scale, by taking an AP class (0.7 bonus), and getting an “A+ (0.3 bonus.)” Other school systems have different weighting factors - so, class rank is far more meaningful.”
You must live in NoVa, probably Loudoun or Fairfax county. I live there, and I know someone who finished high school with a weighted GPA of 4.68, it is crazy. At my school a 4.0 isn’t inpressive (even unweighted) really. I have a 4.1 unweighted but it is just crazy how that isn’t considered really good.
The one thing I think they got right was that “chances” based solely on numbers and a few mentions of extracurriculars don’t give a particularly full view of the applicant or take into account the many other factors that play into admissions.
@reachfordreams I think that unweighted means that colleges count all classes as A=4.0, B=3.0, C=2.0 D= 1.0. So a 4.0 would be pretty impressive, since it means that you have never received less than a A during you four years in high school.
My kids’ high school has scattergrams that show admissions from the previous year(s) for each university. This should provide most relevant acceptance trends since the rigor of their HS is accounted for. It was a shock when I saw those numbers because the clear pattern presented was hard to reconcile with the constant encouragement that super ECs, hardships and essays can sway the adcoms. For virtually every selective college there was clearly a point on the GPA and SAT score grids below which there were no acceptances (save an outlier with an asterisk to denote recruited athlete). And at the superselect ivies, Stanford et al, there are almost the same number of supertop kids (near 2400, etc) who are rejected as who are accepted. If your school makes those figures available, there is your wake-up call. For everyone else, there’s cc.
"I have a 4.1 unweighted but it is just crazy how that isn’t considered really good. "
This is only possible if your school is working from a 5.0 unweighted scale. Most high schools don’t use this however.
I sent the authors of the article an email, attempting to explain that college admissions are much harder than they make them out to be. And the response I got was:
“thank you for writing you sound like a great person and I’m sure you’ll get in somewhere good where you can develop your talents”
wait…that isn’t even relevant… =(
First, there’s a difference between being honest and cruel. If Beef was trying to be honest rather than intentionally hurtful, then that’s exactly what posters come to CC for.
Second, the article blames Beef for not giving his name. But how many of us would be honest with someone if we could NOT be anonymous? Like, if someone has bad breath or smells bad, who would tell that person if not anonymously? Almost no one? Would we go up to a total stranger and tell them they have food stuck in their teeth, they need to take a shower, their fly is unzipped, or their hair is greasy and gross? I sure wouldn’t want to, unless it was my very best friend or someone in my family. Would the authors of this article be honest about negative, personal things and give their names? I think they wouldn’t.
So how is this different?
it makes victory that much more sweet
MUAHAHAHAHAHA
seriously
it does.
Beef’s post was awesome, and the people who wrote the article are absolute idiots.
It would have been real news if anybody told this kid that he actually had a shot at Stanford with barely above average stats.
The kid was asking for it when he asked to be chanced with such terrible stats.
Wow, they didn’t even bother to take you seriously.
<h2>“thank you for writing you sound like a great person and I’m sure you’ll get in somewhere good where you can develop your talents”</h2>
this sounds like something an ignorant parent says to some kid they hardly know. lol so hard at the lack of sophistication, courtesy, and respect some clown in the LA newsroom decided to show a reader. small time journalists are always ridiculously stupid
The issue over Beefsupreme, at least for me, isn’t about accuracy, but rather methodology. I mean look at college rejection, no school says anything along the lines of, “Screw you” or something like that. There are nicer ways to say someone doesn’t have a chance, I agree that reality is necessary, but sometimes discussions lose all civility.
Another part of the article I found interesting was the focus on numbers (SAT, GPA etc.) here at CC, which I found to be definitely true. Any thoughts on this issue?