<p>calmom, </p>
<p>as you know, some of us parents hang around on this list because we are college admissions junkies whose kids are already settled in college. </p>
<p>your daughter's story makes me curious because it appears somewhat anomalous. Would you mind telling us her hook?</p>
<p>Calmom,</p>
<p>I too would like to hear your explanation of the anomaly, but for my purposes it constitutes a good data point. Any kind of statistical work has some variance in it, I fully expect lots of cases like your D's to show up. The interesting question is how many show up. Is it 1% of the cases or 50% of the cases. We don't really need to understand the reasoning behind each case to have a useful result.</p>
<p>Gasdoc, Was your daughter a legacy at ND? Many ND rejections can be explained by the heavy legacy preference at ND. According to research in the Price of Admissions, about a quarter of ND's freshman class typically go to legacies. Add in athletes. What you then have are "median" scores/GPAs and an overall admit that make it appear that a non-legacy joe average student has a solid shot, when, in truth, non-legacy students have to be above the medians and have a lower admit rate.</p>
<p>curious14, your data collection would seem to exclude kids who were accepted ED. There is no data for them other than that one acceptance. Yet excluding these students might give a distorted picture.</p>
<p>Marian, </p>
<p>Yes it excludes ED. But for the question being asked here it doesn't matter.
I plan on dividing the data points into three sets. 1. Those where the relative pattern of acceptances and rejections requires no explanation. 2. Those where an anomaly exists but for which there is an easy explanation, e.g. recruited athlete for the Harvard ping pong team but St. U has no team. 3. Those where an anomaly exists and for which there is no easy explanation. I'm curious what the relative proportions will be. I have no axe to grind here just curious.</p>
<p>Pye, I can't believe you have been here as long as you have and somehow missed the rather detailed discussions of my daughter's admission saga last year.... if you did and really want to know, send me a PM and I'll fill you in. I am not going to post details in this thread because it is totally irrelevant. Suffice it to say that my d. had a couple of strong points -- an art and a single academic area, which I will call a passion -- a strong GPA, good recs & amusing essays... and she targeted reach colleges with strong departments corresponding to the passion and which had somewhat holistic admission practices. </p>
<p>The year before my d. applied to colleges, some cc'er posted that the secret to college admissions was a 2-element descriptor -- such as "quarterback + poet" or "bassoonist + math olympiad"... -- just 2 strong qualities that could some up the applicant in a way that everyone on the ad com would end up defining the applicant in the same way. So we played that strategy. </p>
<p>The reason I don't want to go beyond a generic discussion in THIS thread is that it doesn't matter -- imitating my d. won't help the next applicant who comes along. The problem is that people who ask "what can my kid do to fit what the colleges are looking for" have it backwards -- the way to approach college admissions is to figure out what the kid has and wants, and then ask which colleges will best meet the kid's desire --and then narrow down the list by isolating those colleges that are likely to really want what the kid has to offer. </p>
<p>I think the reason there are so many questionable results is that there are large number of kids coming through competitive high schools doing the same things and taking the same courses with the same high grades, because everyone has told them that is what they have to do to get into college. Then all of these kids with the cookie-cutter applications apply to the same sequence of reach & supposed "match" colleges, many of which are highly prestigous but somewhat generic in the sense that you can't really pinpoint anything that is unique or special about the college (other than its general high quality and its relative prestige). </p>
<p>So you have a bunch of exceptionally capable but indistinguishable students apply to the same set of excellent and highly coveted but indistinguishable colleges... and there really is no clearly articulable way for the ad coms to distinguish, so the results look capricious. </p>
<p>And along comes a kid like mine who broke the mold.... and it doesn't even matter that the way she broke it wasn't particularly distinguished, she at least is standing out and looking different. So she get into her reach colleges... and waitlisted at a match/safety because that one is not a particularly good fit nor does it have a holistic admission process.... so in hindsight it's really no surprise. Except that it's a good lesson as to why the reach/match thing doesn't really work. They are all either "reaches" or "safeties" when it comes down to it... a true safety is one at which admission is guaranteed, like an instate public that is required by law to make room for the kid. And if the college is at all selective - then it doesn't matter how good you are, your chances of waitlist/rejection are whatever the statistics show the college generally turns away.</p>
<p>As an aside, I think that we will find that a disproportionatly large number of the anomalies, or apparent anomalies, involve State Universities. Many of these schools are under political pressure to achieve geographic diversity within the state and some are stuggling to achieve racial diversity despite state supreme court rulings or legislation restricting the use of affirmative action. The net result is a heavy focus on grades and class rank which tend to favor URMs and kids from rural school districts. The states that come to mind are California, Michigan, Virginia and Texas. Some of you may be aware of others.</p>
<p>Thanks for responding, calmom. I was just being lazy about checking back over the archives. I remember a couple of Barnard stories and wasn't sure anymore which story went with your daughter--I'm getting into that short-term memory age bracket. I promise to do my homework now! One aspect that made me curious was that your D was in at U Chicago and waitlisted at Brandeis. I would have guessed Brandeis would jump at someone desirable to U of C. But I guess the Brandeis applicant pool differs significantly from the U of C pool in certain respects.</p>
<p>curious: Why do you consider those anomalies? In some cases (Texas 10% rule, NC limit on OOS) they are state-mandated; in others, the schools are pretty up-front about it. You may not agree with the policies, but they are the opposite of a "crapshoot".</p>
<p>You are not going to be able to prove anything with this kind of effort, though, especially not at the state u level, since their applicant pools differ pretty substantially from those of the private colleges to which you want to compare them, and also the in-state/out-of-state distinction makes a difference.</p>
<p>JHS,</p>
<p>Actually I qualified it as an "apparent anomaly", since it does have an explanation. These sorts of results would go into group 2.</p>
<p>JHS,</p>
<p>The State U's face a dilemma. They want to be nationally competitive for students and they want to secure the support of their state legislatures. I understand why they do what they do. I don't have a problem with it unless they get sanctimonious and pretend that their approach is morally superior.</p>
<p>You can find the schools that take anamolies by looking at all the scattergrams from a good public school--like Garfield in Washington. Looking at their scattergrams last year, it was easy to see that Barnard sometimes takes anamolies and Georgetown doesn't, for example.</p>
<p>Cheers,</p>
<p>I'm confused. Can you elaborate? Do you mean that colleges accept students with both lower test scores and lower grades than students that they reject at the same HS? I am surprised that a high school releases that data.</p>
<p>
[quote]
Do you mean that colleges accept students with both lower test scores and lower grades than studens that they reject at the same HS? I am surprised that a high school releases that data.
[/quote]
It happens all the time. Thanks to software from Naviance we can see those scattergrams too. In our school at least they don't post the scattergrams unless there are enough data points that they feel it's relatively anonymous. Some universities really do just take the top students. Others (Stanford notably at our school,) clearly only take kids with hooks. 12 kids applied over the last couple of years. 2 were accepted. Of the rejected kids, 4 had higher GPAs than one kid and two had higher GPA than both, 3 had higher SAT scores than both kids, 5 had higher SAT scores than both. I know through the grapevine than one was an URM and a legacy. The other a recruited athlete. Conclusion, while my son applied, his scores were higher than all who have applied and GPA were higher than all but one who applied in the past, I still don't think he has a snowball's chance in **** of getting in. I'm not against anomolies - GPA and SATs certainly shouldn't be the be-all and end-all in college admissions, but it's nice to have a better idea of what your chances are.</p>
<p>BTW at least at the UCs I think the new rules help over represented minorities more than underrepresented ones. :)</p>
<p>Gasdoc,
Is your d Catholic? Or did she attend a Catholic HS? I'm wondering if that plays any part in ND acceptances. They say not. But in our town, the local Catholic HS has very good success getting their students into ND, and not all of those students have SATs above 1400. There seems to be a long standing relationship there.</p>
<p>mathmom,</p>
<p>Could you explain the last comment?</p>
<p>Also,</p>
<p>If you take out the legacies, recruited athletes, and URM's were there cases in the Stanford data at your kid's HS of students with lower weighted GPA's and lower test scores being taken over kids that were higher in both. I just doubt that, for privacy reasons, it would be possible to figure this out from the released data.</p>
<p>My personal belief is that this whole process is a lot more predictable than we have been led to believe. Going out on a limb here I would guess that: at private colleges and unversities, students who are not recruited athletes, legacies, or URM's are rarely admitted without above average test scores. For state flagship U's I would guess that students who are not in the above groups or are not in the top 10% of their HS class are rarely admitted without above average test scores for that college. By rarely I mean less than 10% of the time or possibly much less. Colleges have an incentive to make the process appear more "holistic," i.e. unpredictable, because it encourages more marginal students to apply thereby making the school appear more selective.</p>
<p>Curious, if you check the common data set, you will see the 25-75 spread for SATs and also the percentage of students in the top 10% of class rank. The SAT spread for most schools is very similar and is about 200 points.</p>
<p>edad,</p>
<p>Yes, I have noticed the consistency of the spread too. What do you make of it?</p>
<p>Most colleges look beyond the SATs when considering admissions. If they didn't most of the very selective schools would have student SAT scores clumped near the maximum.</p>