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<p>“Impact on the school community” favors gunners and extroverts. Colleges don’t need only those kids who started clubs or who were student council president or captain of the soccer team. There are plenty of brilliant shy kids who would contribute substantially to any student body in college, just as there are wannabe leaders who have been overshadowed by those with more ambition or a louder voice within their high school community.</p>
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At all of the HS I am aware of, there is a daily buzz about the students, both good and bad and the GCs are smack dab in that loop.
At our public HS, one GC has a particular interest in the talented and motivated students and, each year, provides exquisite guidance to the top dozen or so students (out of a class of 250) even though they aren’t all in his “regular” cohort.</p>
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<p>However, only students who attend schools with low GC/student ratios can benefit here, since the overworked ones described in this thread may not be aware of these situations.</p>
<p>Another problem is that some colleges expect GCs to police ED applications, and then put future classes of the high school on an auto-reject list if a student backs out of an ED admission. An overworked GC may not even notice, while future applicants waste time and application money applying to colleges that auto-reject them.</p>
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Really? Anything could have happened once in the past, but it’s very hard to imagine universities having the policy of blacklisting an entire school for the bad acting of a single student. Am I understanding this correctly?</p>
<p>I wrote</p>
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Yes, but it does provide an opportunity for an explanation of any difficulties that a student may have faced and that the GC knows about. The GC recommendation is the best place to say, “In 11th grade, Susie was tutored at home for months and dropped her ECs for most of the year because she was recovering from serious injuries from a car accident” or “Johnny’s grades dipped in 10th grade when his father was being treated for cancer.”
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<p>@ucbalumnus replied
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<p>I was thinking that in these cases, even the overworked GCs would be aware of the situation (and could later be reminded of it in the student’s cheat sheet). It would have been the GC who arranged the homebound instruction for Susie, for example.</p>
<p>But perhaps my examples were not drastic enough.</p>
<p>“The fact is that it’s a fairly good way to tell how much of an impact the applicant in question has actually had on their school community.”</p>
<p>To me, my natural inclination is – oh, gag. “Impact on the school community” often means “won the popularity contest,” which is meaningless to me as a measure of worth, success or potential impact at a top school. </p>
<p>Not everyone wants to BE part of the “high school community.” A bunch of people with whom you have nothing more in common other than your parents chose to live in the same area … and often a bunch of people who don’t have the same ambitions you have and who are all going to go off to the local colleges together anyway and never expand their horizons. Tell me again why it’s important to “make an impact” on them when hopefully you won’t ever see most of them again? </p>
<p>My kids each did EC’s that were outside of the school. Their fellow students and their GC’s wouldn’t have had a clue as to what those activities were. That was just plenty fine with us. Nothing wrong with accomplishments that are under the radar. I find some of the high school gossip talk just so fake and cliquey, and the province of parents who have nothing better to do than compare other kids who don’t concern them, and I stayed far, far away. </p>
<p>I’d rather my kids impress teachers with their commitment and intelligence, than their fellow students. </p>
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<p>That’s very true, but why can’t this be an included supplement rather than something that’s required? It seems strange to me to make something compulsory if it’s only meaningful/relevant to a small percentage of students. </p>
<p>Similarly, when it comes to evaluating the rigor of high school coursework, it seems like this is something that really only needs to be done once per course. If you have twenty students in an AP English class, do they really each need a separately-written statement on how rigorous AP English is? Couldn’t the guidance counselor prepare one statement for such courses that gets included in the application of each student who is in that class? </p>
<p>Ultimately, the guidance counselor model is structured around the notion that each guidance counselor is intimately familiar with the lives of the students. When that is true, then I agree 100% that it should be leveraged for the benefit of the applicant. But when you have a case where the guidance counselor is basically just taking the student’s ‘brag sheet’ and putting it on the high school letterhead, it just seems like a redundant activity. For me, generating another piece of paper should add some kind of value – shed some kind of insight other than what you can get from the rest of the application. The guidance counselor’s letter can do that, but too often it’s just a pointless paraphrase.</p>
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<p>See replies #76-#104 in this thread: <a href=“No real penalty for applying to multiple schools Early Decision or SCEA? - #76 by Pepper03 - Applying to College - College Confidential Forums”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-admissions/1720518-no-real-penalty-for-applying-to-multiple-schools-early-decision-or-scea-p6.html</a></p>
<p>Apparently, such practices have their supporters, despite the fact that they penalize innocent third parties rather than the student who backed out of the ED agreement, or even the GC who did not police the ED applicants.</p>
<p>Our DD’s public school guidance counselors were overloaded. They ended up being paper pushers. It wasn’t their fault. It was impossible to provide individualized guidance and counseling, much less customized and meaningful recommendations, for so many college bound students.</p>
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Okay. Please describe.</p>
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There must be some school, somewhere, that would be favorably impressed by a GC describing the applicant’s success in popularity contests.
I wasn’t aware that schools were requesting letters of recommend from “fellow students”.
This thread is about guidance counselors. If you are in a situation in which a GC’s letter of recommend is obligatory, it is up to you to educate that GC as to your strengths. If they lie outside of school, you had best figure out how to do that.</p>
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It’s not too surprising that some people would like the pool of competitors reduced as much as possible. However, I don’t know which of those were bona fide admissions officers and which were parents or applicants.
Would it be accurate to say that there was a single anecdotal report forming the backbone of that discussion? I’m referring to the one in which someone felt that no one from their HS had been admitted to a certain university because of an incident 6 years previous?</p>
<p>It does seem relevant to note that the GC does not write a letter of recommendation as we commonly think of one. That is usually left to the teachers who know the students best. The GC simply fills out the Secondary School Report which I always thought was a standardized form. It’s main purpose is to confirm GPA, report class rank and to rate the rigor of the student’s classes. Another important piece of info on that form is to report disciplinary action and note any special circumstances that might have affected that student’s performance. I never thought of the Secondary School Report as all that personal or customized.</p>
<p>There is a section to comment on the student’s EC’s or other contributions to the school community, but that section seems secondary. It is the other recommendations from teachers, coaches and outside instructors that elaborate on each particular student. Many larger schools have students do a “brag sheet” to highlight to teachers what they have accomplished or participated in during high school. This can be very helpful if the teacher does not know the student all that well outside of class. </p>
<p>Below the rankings, the counselor does have space to write about the student.</p>
<p>^^^
Right, but it is a few lines and if the GC has the “brag sheet” he or she can certainly come up with a few sentences that highlight the student’s involvement or achievements. If they do not know the student well and have not been provided with any info from the student, then my guess is that each Guidance Office has a few standard boiler plate responses that the GC can choose from to complete that section.</p>
<p>When the secondary school report indicates that the counselor has 500 students, Im sure the colleges will take that into account when reading the counselors report.</p>
<p>A guidance counselor who has the time and energy and inclination can explain circumstances in the outside life of a student that may have influenced a dip in achievement. A kid who goes to a school with not enough counselors who is working to help support his or her family may not know how to reveal that kind of information in his or her application.</p>
<p>Agree @oldmom and those sorts of circumstances are exactly why the GC’s input is critical. Hence I believe the GC’s input should not be done away with. But for the vast majority of students the Secondary School Report is not really a recommendation letter, as most students do not have those special circumstances.</p>
<p>But students are not likely to report these circumstances if they don’t have more than 5 minutes of one-on-one time with their counselors. My daughter had a situation that caused her grades to dip in junior year. It was only through the intervention of a teacher who knew about it that the counselor discussed it in his report. She went to a gigantic test-in high school with a good counselor but he had an awful lot of students to deal with.</p>
<p>If my child had special circumstances I think I would make sure myself that the GC was aware of them. </p>