<p>Another thing is that on these forums, when people list their "stats", well, that is all they are, stats. An application is far more than a list of numbers. Yes, numbers play a big role but most who apply to the most elite colleges HAVE the numbers so those alone are not telling enough. You HAVE to have the numbers just to get to the gate. The other parts, also count and we are NOT seeing the full application here. And even IF the rest of the application is stellar, it is no guarantee at schools with low admit rates. But for the sake of the argument, we are not even seeing these other components. We have not seen his resume, awards, recs, essays, and so forth. </p>
<p>As a side note, not until I came to this forum, had I ever heard of kids defining an activity (mostly referring now to community service) in terms of how many hours they had accrued. This is a new concept to me. My kids have no such "number of hours for community service" anywhere on any document. For some reason, this "hour count" seems like a really big deal on some of the student posts of "my stats". I dunno but hours is not that big a deal without knowing just what the person accomplished and so forth. And while 700 hours sounds like a lot, over four years of high school, isn't that perhaps 4 hours per week? Is this SO amazing for an EC activity? I dunno but I am just thinking of ONE single activity in my own kids' lives....let's say the musical....on a typical week, that is 13 hours per week. Dance classes? 12 hours per week. A varsity sport? 16 hours per week. And these are not their only activities either. I don't think an activity that is four hours per week is THAT amazing. But regardless, I never thought of the worth of an activity based on the number of hours involved. The kid's role in the activity, the nature of the activity, the achievement in the activity...that is what I would need to know. That is but ONE example of not having the total picture here. I'm not knocking this particular student because he sounds highly qualified but merely saying that we can't make judgement calls on kids' "stats" without having the total picture in front of us.</p>