<p>
</p>
<p>Works both ways. When my daughter visited Amherst, she felt that Amherst was kind of bland. It didn’t distinguish itself from among all the other great schools out there. And she had to cut her list down to a manageable number. So she didn’t apply. True story.</p>
<p>lookingforward, thanks so much for taking the time to tell us about reading for an Ivy!</p>
<p>@LadyDianeski: What’s with your continuing fascination with Andrew Ferguson and his book?</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Absolutely right, JHS. LOL, why would anyone think the half-interested and sketchily educated HS English teacher grading my D2’s poetry composition or essay on Flannery O’Connor is any more “objective” than the adcom that will later read her college admissions essays? And it’s well known in my D2’s HS that certain teachers are notoriously “hard graders” and others are “easy graders,” such that the luck of the draw may determine which of the top students in any given class makes val, which sal, and which “merely” top 10%—but with a vastly reduced chance of admission to some super-selective colleges if “merely” top 10% as compared to valedictorian. (Brown, for example, reports that for its Class of 2014 it accepted 21% of the vals who applied, but only 16% of the sals and 11% of those in the top 10% of their HS class). And the “brownie point” system is in full force in some HS classes, with lots of opportunities for extra credit points (highly discretionary with the teacher) to make up for that blown test or botched lab; while in other classes you get one bite at the apple and no opportunity to make up for a sub-par performance. What exactly is “objective” about HS grades? They’re basically an attempt to impose a false precision on an inherently inexact, high-variance, and substantially subjective set of evaluative judgments. </p>
<p>Or would those objecting to the “subjectivity” of college application essays feel better about the whole thing if we asked the adcoms to assign a letter or numeric grade to each essay and awarded “objective” points toward admission on that basis—just like the HS English teachers “objectively” grading the HS essays and compositions?</p>
<p>alh - mailbox full?</p>
<p>The UC’s are not abandoning the SAT II’s because they are somehow flawed or not predictive of college aptitude. They are trying to wriggle out of the requirements of Prop 209. (That is a racially blind admissions policy). Not enough URMs do well on the SAT IIs, so in order to get more URMs just abandon the SAT II.</p>
<p>TatinG, can you post a reference? </p>
<p>What I’ve heard is not that URM’s don’t do well on the subject tests, but rather that kids who attend schools without much college advising don’t realize that they have to take these tests. Too many well-qualified students have been unable to apply to UC because of this, and it has become yet another factor that privileges students from wealthier backgrounds.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>OMG. That is one of the funniest things I have read on these boards.</p>
<p>I think Calreader has it right – it turned into a huge barrier for admissions for kids who found out too late that they needed tests they hadn’t taken – and I think that it also became more difficult to squeeze those in as the ACT gained popularity in California. </p>
<p>When I was a kid, I took SAT’s in one sitting, and then 3 SAT II’s on another day in a single sitting, and that was all the testing I ever did. With my son it was the same way – but by the time my daughter was applying to colleges, it had become a really protracted process — and for her, the SAT II’s ended up being an unnecessary tail-end process after she had already decided to submit ACT’s to her other colleges, and knew she was guaranteed admission to the UC’s … so she had to sit for a test where the scores didn’t even matter – no matter how badly she did, her UC admission index score would come out fine – and she knew that she wasn’t going to submit those scores to any school other than the UC’s.</p>
<p>Thank you, lookingforward, that was helpful. Here is something I am struggling with, though. You wrote: “We liked out-of-the-box things (which show the kid’s ability to go beyond what’s available at school or arranged thru school) and some hard-work activities.” And it seems from the NPR piece that Amherst is completely uninterested in the kids who only participate in school-based extra-curriculars. And yet, presumably, your Ivy and Amherst want to have some percentage of students who will be involved on campus and participate in campus activities. So why rule out the kid who was an active member of the high school community, playing sports, writing for the school newspaper, participating in student government and so on? </p>
<p>I mean, I know that there are plenty of clubs that seem to exist solely for the purpose of providing ECs for kids, and there are kids who join clubs and put the clubs on their “activities resumes” without really participating. But surely the admissions people can figure out the difference? </p>
<p>I guess I just don’t understand what is so wrong with “only” doing school-based ECs. And my daughter has been so incredibly busy, between AP classes, school newspaper, clubs, sports, tutoring through the honor societies, etc., that it never occurred to me that she should also have outside ECs, and I can’t imagine when she would have had time for them, at least without entirely sacrificing her social life. </p>
<p>The NPR piece bugs me not because I had no idea it was like that; I mean, I knew about the preference for kids with a single-minded passion; I just didn’t realize these schools wanted their entire student bodies to be like that. I had assumed there was still room for a good number of the well-rounded valedictorian/student government kind of kids. And I hated their blithe tone of “I rejected a Rhodes Scholar, LOL!”</p>
<p>Simpkin, I wouldn’t assume from the very brief NPR piece that you got a full picture of the admissions process at Amherst. My kid goes there and he knows plenty of students who were/are traditional well-rounded, talented students who had traditional ECs.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Simpkin, I know you are anxious about upcoming decisions, but please remember that what you listened to on NPR was simply a 7 minutes of edited soundbytes which were extracted from hours of committee deliberations. The adcoms didn’t admit mcnugget guy simply on those two words.</p>
<p>A: “charging too much” As much as I think $40k for tuition is insane, as long as there are lines of people who will pay it, then let the invisible hand of the market go to work. Every so often as school like Elon Univ. comes along, and charges $26k for a private small college experience. Noticed this week that their biz school got rated #60 now by Bloomberg/Business week. That will attract a lot of attention.</p>
<p>B: Saw a parent kvetching about their kid not getting in somehwere with lots of EC’s and a 5.0 gpa WHAAAAAT???!!! Can you say “grade inflation”?? That’s why adcoms get cynical about GPA. </p>
<p>C: Kids/families as “customer”. Again supply/demand. We’re using sites like this one now to bash, blast and otherwise besmerch colleges ad nauseum. That’s ok. It’s also ok for them to treat us however they want…if kids continue to line up at their doors to get in. The only exception to this should be state schools who get tax dollars. They should of course be held accountable for underperformance, and poor customer/student service.</p>
<p>You guys need to read The Gatekeepers. If you think the NPR piece isn’t representative…you have another think coming. It’s totally accurate. Read The Gatekeepers, and you will most certainly agree.</p>
<p>Mitch–
I thought it was quite reminiscent of the tone of the deliberations from “The Gatekeepers.”</p>
<p>I listened to the NPR piece, and my reaction was that there are too many qualified applicants to a small school like Amherst. They end up making decisions in favor of an amusing line in an essay, or by getting an impression that a student is very ecumenical by studying multiple religions. I was disappointed to hear about the valedictorian with amazing stats who was waitlisted. What the admissions story didn’t elaborate on, was what percentage of Amherst students are recruited athletes. At Amherst it is probably 30%, and they have to have very good stats, but probably aren’t valedictorians.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>The standardized tests are too easy, and the HS grading standards too low, to distinguish students at the highest levels of performance. However, rather than develop better academic selection criteria, colleges resort to all sorts of extra-curricular baloney that is (a) hard to assess, and (b) has little to do with the core mission of liberal education, which is (or ought to be) primarily intellectual (not political, moral, occupational, or religious). </p>
<p>The widespread assumption is that abandoning “holistic” criteria would result in selecting a boring class of one-dimensional nerds. Given the unimaginative nature of standardized tests, and all the crap covered in many HS classes, this may be true. On the other hand, I’m not so sure that playing varsity field hockey or performing 200 hours of community service results in more productive discussion in the average college class. Not that these aren’t worthwhile activities that parents should encourage anyway.</p>
<p>Colleges have set up a false dichotomy between “numbers-driven” and “holistic” admissions. Make the numbers more discriminating across a broader range. Make the subjective factors more consistently relevant to creative academic work. Ignore most extracurriculars completely. Instead, offer Oxbridge-style interviews (“How would you design a gravity dam for holding back water?” … “How would you organise a successful revolution?”) Any community of bright kids who could handle that could also figure out how to entertain themselves after class without some committee trying to craft the perfect balance of humorous oboe players from rural Maine and compassionate Latino soccer goalies from downtown LA.</p>
<p>A friend teaches at an exclusive private high school that Amherst visits each fall. Recently, Amherst recruited half a dozen kids from that school, all URMs. They were all admitted. When they got to Amherst and their classmates found out which high school they were from, the Amherst students’ reply was, “Oh that’s the inner city school.” The point: Even though the high school is 85% white, the URM admissions numbers over the years, for that school at Amherst, is golden .</p>
<p>Mitch, I’m not saying the NPR piece isn’t representative… in fact in an earlier post I said it sounded exactly like a similar piece done at a different college a few years back. What I am saying is that there are plenty of students at Amherst who are what you’d think of as traditional, well-rounded, and with traditional ECs. How do they choose amongst the many, many applicants of that sort? Well, as we all know, letters of rec and essays count for a LOT at that level of deliberations. I don’t think this comes as news to anybody. It probably is a big plus if a student has a non-typical background – culturally, geographically, economically, educationally, or some other *[fill in the blank]*ally – but if you walk around Amherst you’ll see a lot of top students from affluent white families in the northeast. They all got in there somehow.</p>
<p>Fortunately, you’ll also see students from different walks of life and different parts of the world. That creates a student body that is stimulating, even for the more “traditional” students.</p>
<p>As a parent who was a few years ago also waiting with some nervousness for an admission decision, I admit I also thought about all those out-of-box kids “taking up spots” and whether that was fair or not. Scarcity makes your mind go to those places!</p>
<p>But it all works out. I also have a kid at our flagship state univ’s honors college, and she is getting an education every bit as excellent as my kid at Amherst is getting. In fact, in certain ways an even better one because of the opportunities that come to ambitious students in a larger academic environment.</p>
<p>Some historical context…</p>
<p>I may have the name and title slightly off because I read it a LONG time ago. There is a book by someone named Boyer. I think the first name is Allan, but that may not be the correct spelling and I’m too lazy to google right now. He wrote a book for the Carnegie Foundation–at least that’s my recollection–which is entitled something like “College in America.” </p>
<p>Reading that book will explain how we got where we are. You see, someone actually did a study to figure out which kids succeeded in college, expecially top colleges. Believe it or not, ECs DO have predictive value. The study compared students with few or no ECs with students who had lots of them or who were passionate about one or two.
If you control for gpa and test scores, the kids with substantial high school ECs graduated from college at a higher rate and had higher GPAs than those without such ECs.</p>
<p>And, so, once the study came out, selective colleges started to take ECs into account. </p>
<p>It’s a really old book, but it does explain how ECs became more important. </p>
<p>Now, I think this approach missed something. When nobody knew that ECs could be all that important for admissions purposes, the result of the study was kind of a no brainer. If two kids have 3.8 unweighted gpas at the same high school and both have identifical test scores, then it’s likely that the kid with substantial ECs will succeed. But personally, I think that’s in part because the kind of kids who did ECs back in the 1950s and early 1960s did them because they wanted to and that sort of initiative did demonstrate a certain quality that made it more likely these kids would do well. Plus, if kids were spending 15 hours a week on ECs and doing well, when they encountered a more rigourous work load in college, they could drop the ECs or limit them and still do well. They had an additonal 10-15 hours a week. A certain percentage of kids with no ECs were working 24/7 to get those grades and test scores. When they encountered more difficult college work, they couldn’t spend any more time on school work than they had in high school and some weren’t able to keep up with increased demands. </p>
<p>In any event, that study, which was sponsored by the Carnegie Foundation lead to a change in admissions practices. </p>
<p>The problem is that now there are a lot of kids who participate in ECs in high school simply to increase their admissions odds. While the time constraints are still relevant, they simply aren’t the same sort of kids who did ECs in the late 50s and early 60s for reasons which had nothing whatsoever to do with getting into college. </p>
<p>In any event, LadyDi is simply wrong when she says there is no correlation between ECs and academic success in college. There is if you control for gpa and test scores. So, it is perfectly valid, IMO, for a college like Amherst to take ECs into consideration when choosing among academically qualified candidates–though I suspect the correlation now wouldn’t be as strong as it was before everyone got the memo to do ECs.</p>
<p>I dislike the Oxbridge interview method because it plays to extroverts even more than the US one. Oxbridge has studied its process too and one of the conclusions was that when upper middle class people, especially males for some reason, interview secondary students, they tend to weed out kids from the working classes. These kids have different accents that sound uneducated. It affects perceptions. Kids form the right “public” schools were coached as to what to wear at an interview. Kids from grammar schools–or whatever the correct term is now–would show up wearing what some interviewers deemed inappropriate clothing and they were subconsciously marked down for it. </p>
<p>Plus, kids from public school had been drilled in interview techniques. They may never have answered the same question but they went through mock interviews. Kids from government funded schools were far less likely to receive such coaching.</p>