<p>The admissions section of the Carleton website has been totally redesigned - what do you think?</p>
<p>I think it's great! I love reading all the personal anecdotes from so many different students -- it makes the college feel so personable. S and I have been looking at Carleton for a couple of months now and it has zoomed up his list to #1 or #2. We can't wait to visit, and were hoping to during spring break, but S's break is only a Thursday thru Monday, and that weekend is reserved for admitted seniors. :(</p>
<p>The "ask us" section is a great idea and having the form right on the page makes the admissions office seem much more accessible. The student anecdotes come off as genuine, and while I'm sure Carleton has cherry-picked the comments, they still seem way less canned than the student testimonials at other colleges. All in all, a solid redesign.</p>
<p>The affording Carleton section is better, and I like that the average financial aid awards by income bracket are displayed front and center, no digging needed. My main gripe is that that information is presented for just the incoming students with need, not all admitted students. I would imagine that the financial aid offers made to all admitted students are on average a bit worse than the offers for those who end up attending, since the people who got the worst aid packages probably went elsewhere. Not that Carleton has any incentive to show this information instead, but I think it would be a good step towards transparency in admissions. The data that is directly relevant to applicants is what should be presented in a non-statistically misleading world.</p>
<p>Also, in the academic subject tag cloud (which you see by looking at the admission page for any major), some words are in a larger font that others. On other websites this is because of word /topic frequency or some similar metric. What I don't understand is why linguistics is the third largest after bio and chem? It makes linguistics look like a big department like bio and chem are, which it definitely isn't--it's one of the smallest. And international relations is in the teensiest font, which is definitely inaccurate because it's one of the most popular majors. Not sure what's up with this.</p>
<p>The size of the academic subjects in the tag cloud indicates how many connections it's got to other things--how many times it's mentioned in a student quote, listed as the major of one of the profiled students, offers a course which a student tagged as a favorite, etc. </p>
<p>Since there are only about 15 profiled students so far (not counting Toff the cat!), it's not yet a representative sample of all Carleton students & their majors. But it should get more so as the number of profiled students grows.</p>
<p>Not that I...ahem...have any inside knowledge or anything. ;) Let's just say that feedback posted here will very quickly get to the people in a position to do something about it.</p>
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Let's just say that feedback posted here will very quickly get to the people in a position to do something about it.
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If only my landlord were 1% as responsive as [s]you[/s] the thoughtful people behind the admissions site redesign are! :-P</p>