<p>calmom - you are probably right that it is geared to providing general information and not the place for these questions. However, you can learn a lot from how an admissions officer fields some of these questions and the answers them. This is my second time around so I am quite familiar with the information available from collegeboard.com, guidebooks, etc. They typically do not tell you enough to really estimate your child's realistic chances, though. For example, the sites and books do not tell you, typically, if the school recalculates grades,and if so, how they recalculate. GPA might really change a candidates chances. Also, although schools might assign importance on the collegeboard grids (common data sets), among the more selective institutions they are pretty much all checked off so quirky or small differences are helpful to know. Another example, the guides do not tell you how schools look at the writing section, etc. In one day we heard two different responses to a question about the writing section of the SAT. One said they didn't think the writing section has enough history behind it to use it and one said that the writing section was very important in their decisions. Good information to have, I think. Also, since son #2 is interested in engineering, we would like to know statistics (SATs, GPAs, etc) around schools of engineering within bigger institutions. That information is frequently not available on websites and guidebooks as it is embedded in the overall statistics. Some schools look at engineering students holistically, some concentrate on math/science grades and scores and some are really selecting mostly students who have been in competitions and/or done research. These are just a few examples of little pieces of information about the admissions process that could be very helpful in developing the list of schools ala reach, match, safety, etc. ED information is another area where specifics helps. We had one admissions officer tell us that ED is mostly used to select athletes and URMs. That's good information as someone who is neither probably shouldn't waste their ED option at that school. I do agree with you that the admissions session is important for getting a feel for the school and, especially, the tour and what schools chose to show you on the tour. Obviously there is a big pool and some of it will come down to perceived "fit" and chance. I think my questions are not so much about chances but about reality.</p>
<p>One value I have found in information sessions is getting a sense of what other students in the area have an interest in this or that college. I have noticed that students dress very differently for an MIT information session from how they dress for a Stanford session.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>This is the reality-check value of attending college information sessions, college fairs, or other opportunities to visit admission officers. Yes, definitely one should do a lot of Web-based research (beginning with College Confidential? :) ) on colleges of interest before visiting such a session. One tip I have on Web-based research is that the College Board College QuickFinder application </p>
<p>provides very high comparability of information from college to college, based on Common Data Set definitions. Most college admission offices still think in print mode rather than Web mode, so often the viewbook </p>
<p><a href="http://www.stanford.edu/dept/uga/pdf/Stanford_Viewbook.pdf%5B/url%5D">http://www.stanford.edu/dept/uga/pdf/Stanford_Viewbook.pdf</a> </p>
<p><a href="http://www.yale.edu/bulletin/pdffiles/viewbook.pdf%5B/url%5D">http://www.yale.edu/bulletin/pdffiles/viewbook.pdf</a> </p>
<p>has more detailed and more up-to-date answers to frequently asked questions than the college admission office website FAQ page. </p>
<p>But, yes, the point remains that it is still useful to see live human beings in person when trying to develop a sense of what a college is like, and especially when trying to develop a "theory of mind" about how college admission committees make their decisions. Random questions asked by varied persons, answered on the spot, give a different picture of the college and how its admission committee thinks from the picture you get in official college publications or in kiss-and-tell books by former college admission officers. It's good to gather information from all those sources. It's especially good to actually meet admission officers in person to develop a sense of how they think.</p>
<p>One thing I have noticed when attending college fairs is how much a rep has to be prompted to tell me something unique or special about their school. They will go on and on about how they have small classes, no classes are taught by TAs, etc., in other words nothing that sets them apart from the school to their left or their right. If you keep asking questions they finally hit upon "oh, and we also have...", which usually answers my questions. Often this information is SOMEWHERE on their website, but not very prominent. The information they give me (finally) is not at all trivial but the type where I can go to one of my students at the fair and tell them "go check out this school because it has this program or that option".</p>
<p>Yes, colleges do visit selected high schools. The colleges set these up, not the high schools. The colleges have selected areas and schools that they like to visit to meet with students from that school and answer their questions.</p>
<p>And just to preempt a question, parents are not invited to the high school visits.</p>
<p>The United States federal government gathers information about colleges through its Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) project,</p>
<p><a href="http://nces.ed.gov/ipeds/%5B/url%5D">http://nces.ed.gov/ipeds/</a> </p>
<p>and private publishers such as Peterson's and U.S. News have for years been sending surveys to colleges. Now the College Board and the private publishers have a consortium effort called the Common Data Set Initiative,</p>
<p><a href="http://www.commondataset.org/default.asp%5B/url%5D">http://www.commondataset.org/default.asp</a> </p>
<p>designed to reduce duplication in college surveys and ensure comparability of facts and figures reported by colleges.</p>
<p>Some of the federally gathered information is distributed through the Department of Education's College Opportunities Online Locator </p>
<p><a href="http://nces.ed.gov/ipeds/cool/%5B/url%5D">http://nces.ed.gov/ipeds/cool/</a> </p>
<p>and other aspects of the federal data are reported by the Education Trust College Results Online site. </p>
<p><a href="http://www.collegeresults.org/default.htm%5B/url%5D">http://www.collegeresults.org/default.htm</a> </p>
<p>Students choosing colleges sometimes look at reported score ranges for the students at various colleges to decide what colleges to apply to. The National Association for College Admission Counseling (NACAC), </p>
<p><a href="http://www.nacacnet.org/MemberPortal/%5B/url%5D">http://www.nacacnet.org/MemberPortal/</a> </p>
<p>IPEDS, and the Common Data Set Initiative have collaborated to set common standards for colleges gathering data about admission characteristics of their applicants and reporting data about their enrolled classes each year.</p>
<p>Another participant on College Confidential has compiled a great list of colleges that post their Common Data Set filings online </p>
<p><a href="http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showthread.php?t=76444%5B/url%5D">http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showthread.php?t=76444</a> </p>
<p>(go to the last page for the latest updates) </p>
<p>and that provides a good starting point for research on many colleges. </p>
<p>I see from time to time that reports about college score ranges don't always follow NACAC-IPEDS-CDS principles and practices. By the National Association for College Admission Counseling (NACAC) Statement of Principles of Good Practice, </p>
<p>and by the actual practice of the Common Data Set, colleges report only interquartile ranges for each section of the SAT (and in rare cases SAT composite scores), and interquartile ranges for ACT composite scores (and in rare cases ACT section scores too). The NACAC principle reads like this: </p>
<p>
<ol> <li>refrain from the public reporting of mean and median admission test scores and, instead, report scores by the middle 50 percent of the scores of all first-year applicants, admitted and/or enrolled students;
</li>
</ol>
<p>The Common Data Set instructions read:</p>
<p>
C9. Percent and number of first-time, first-year (freshman) students enrolled in fall [year] who submitted national standardized (SAT/ACT) test scores. Include information for ALL enrolled, degree-seeking, first-time, first-year (freshman) students who submitted test scores. Do not include partial test scores (e.g., mathematics scores but not critical reading for a category of students) or combine other standardized test results (such as TOEFL) in this item. Do not convert SAT scores to ACT scores and vice versa.</p>
<p>The 25th percentile is the score that 25 percent scored at or below; the 75th percentile score is the one that 25 percent scored at or above.
</p>
<p>However the very interesting Education Trust college profiles </p>
<p><a href="http://www.collegeresults.org/default.htm%5B/url%5D">http://www.collegeresults.org/default.htm</a> </p>
<p>suffer from a methodological error: "The median composite ACT score is estimated by averaging the 25th percentile and 75th percentile composite ACT scores. The median combined SAT score is estimated by adding the average of the 25th and 75th percentile verbal score to the average of the 25th and 75th percentile math score, and dividing by two."</p>
<p><a href="http://www.collegeresults.org/aboutthedata.aspx%5B/url%5D">http://www.collegeresults.org/aboutthedata.aspx</a> </p>
<p>Such a calculated "median" composite score should NOT be assumed to be exactly the same as the actual median of all scores of students in that college's entering class. What the actual median is has to be determined from the data themselves, and colleges are not to report the actual medians, by NACAC principles. I have also seen attempts online to estimate 75th percentile levels for SAT composite scores, simply by summing the scores for the 75th percentile on each SAT section. I hope it is so apparent that it goes without saying why that figure may not be the same as the actual 75th percentile level of composite scores in that group of students: if various students score higher on one section than another, matching the math scores of the 75th percentile math scorers with the critical reading scores of the 75th percentile critical reading scorers may overstate the composite scores of the top quartile of students.</p>
<p>It's sufficient, of course, to look at the interquartile ranges to see if students with certain levels of scores have a great or meager chance of getting admitted. And once a student wraps his or her mind around how to read interquartile ranges reported for each test section, it is really much more helpful for the student's planning to know those ranges than only to know a (possibly incorrect) median composite score for a college to which the student may apply.</p>
<p>And of course this College Confidential site has a wide variety of college-specific forums for discussing information about particular colleges that are of interest to you. These days pretty nearly any college has a website, and it is always a good idea to browse college websites to look for official information from the college. My one tip about that is that many college admission offices still think like people from the printed brochure era, so often the Web posting of a college's viewbook has more up-to-date and detailed information than the FAQ section of the college's admission office website. </p>
<p>A lot of college information sessions begin this week. Let's share reports of what we learn from college information sessions this year.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Could you describe how different? Also, in general what kids should wear?</p>
<p>I wouldn't propose a dress code, and it may be that the difference I observed that year between MIT and Stanford was a difference between weekend dress (MIT) and weekday evening dress (Stanford), but I noticed that most of the students at the MIT meeting were wearing T-shirts proclaiming their allegiance to one or another extracurricular activity, the most represented of which was Science Olympiad. The students at the Stanford meeting were predominantly in rather dressy-looking schoolday clothes. This year the two meetings are again on a Saturday afternoon for MIT and a weeknight for Stanford in my town, so I can't exclude that that might be the main difference between the patterns of dress at the two meetings. My son usually wears T-shirts about one of his summer programs to such meetings.</p>
<p>Report: Caltech Admissions Info Session - Aug. 9th, La Jolla Sheraton Hotel.</p>
<p>The conference room was pretty well full of parents and prospective Caltech students, which was mildly surprising given that it was a gorgeous Sunday afternoon and both the US Open tennis finals and the Chargers' season opening football game were on TV.</p>
<p>The format was the a slide show/info session given by the Director of Admissions followed by a panel discussion and Q&A that featured four Caltech alums from the San Diego area.</p>
<p>The focus of the slide show was Caltech is a Small School (900 undergrads total) doing Big Science. They sold heavily on the undergrad opportunities for significant research. They also sold the Pasadena weather (as opposed to the dreary, freezing winters at say MIT) and also the opportunities for pretty much any undergrad who wants to compete in Div. III sports (they said "compete," not necessarily "win").</p>
<p>The alums agreed that the work at Caltech is indeed demanding, but that it was well worth it and had the effect of making the first first year at subsequent grad schools a breeze. They all also praised the friendly sense of community among the small student body. </p>
<p>For such a small school the intro freshman science classes are still pretty big: >200. Since all freshman must take the same math, physics, chemistry core, they teach it to the entire fresman class all at once, resulting in these large classes. As you progress through Caltech and specialize, the classes get smaller and smaller.</p>
<p>The most surprising thing came from one of the alums. She is currently a professor at UCSD and serves on the grad school admission committee. And she said (in response to a question about the value of a Caltech degree) that having gone to Caltech is a big boost for getting into grad school, which isn't a surprise, but she also said that at UCSD they reject many grad school applicants right off the bat based on which undergrad school they attended. They accept grad students only from the schools with the better reputations in the field.</p>
<p>This runs counter to the prevailing orthodoxy on CC -- that it doesn't matter where you went to college. That bright kids with good grades from any college will get in. This prof made it clear, that for UCSD at least, that this is not the case.</p>
<p>Thanks, coureur, for the visit report. My wife is slated to accompany my son to see MIT's show this weekend; I'll be on for Caltech's visit here next week. </p>
<p>I wanted to highlight one thing you heard. </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>This sounds like a good issue to get a reality check on in other information sessions. What assurance do we have that it really hardly matters where one goes for an undergraduate degree? Are some graduate programs in some disciplines very choosy about the sources of their students' undergraduate degrees?</p>
<p>tokenadult & coureor,
Its interesting to read about the Caltech presentation and then to think of the reality. Most interesting is the 7 social houses (dorms) and the 8th, quiet one. Every student I know has chosen to stay within his/her House. Movies, barbecues, games, movie trips,hiking, often originate in one's house.
Current class has 39% females.
CORE classes are taught in a group, but then split into sections. Students seem to prefer the late night study groups. Humanity courses have been surprisingly good (very small).
Anybody can get involved with ECs, including sports. I got hooked on basketball, and enjoyed watching the coach rotate everyone into games (some players <5'6"). It was exciting to watch the men's team almost win, then win; and the president and his wife were also there to cheer the team on. Same fun with the girls' team.</p>
<p>CalTech's visit day was one of the most positive, encouraging, wonderful college visits we made. The admissions guy gave really practical, helpful information regarding applications/essays/letters of rec. The students who did the tours and info sessions were marvelous and straight forward-even regarding things like psychiatric visits. Of course the campus is absolutely gorgeous! I like their approach to sports, but think it would be hard someone who is more "competitive."</p>
<p>Not to be too cynical, but having been to numerous fairs and college visits with my 2 children, I haven't really heard much from an adcom at a fair that I didn't read via the internet.(Thank you Google and CC!) There are so many people looking to speak to the same schools, and rarely has someone asked a question that I found informative to our particular circumstances. The college fairs IMHO, are really more an opportunity for the school to present very vanilla information about themselves to the general public. I would be more interested in how one can get more detailed info about a particular school short of visiting them or personally knowing alumni.</p>
<p>I have seen some specific examples of answers to questions that were more specific in person than on any page on the college's website. I agree that the canned part of a college information session tends to be very bland and conservative to a fault. That's what I like about impromptu questions--I've picked up which colleges are more or less negative about homeschoolers, for example, by asking specific questions one-on-one. I will appreciate reports from parents this fall about the sessions they visit, both to check whether what is said on the road is consistent with what is said in college publications, and to compare the "vibe" I pick up from some colleges with that picked up by other parents at other meetings.</p>
<p>I have not seen many students get excited about a website. On the other hand I have seen many glowing faces on the return trip from a college fair. For students such as ours, this is the easiest way to make face to face contact with a school. Very few colleges will come down and visit our local high schools, even ones who have accepted our students. I am still a strong supporter of fairs.</p>
<p>Pretty close minded of UCSD I would think, rejecting someone outright because of a school without even looking at the student, that is pretty sad and would turn me off immediately from UCSD if it were indeed true, that they judge by appreance, not by substance</p>
<p>I suppose the argument is that with limited space, they have to look at every sign of substance an applicant for graduate school has, and one sign of substance is where the applicant challenged himself or herself as an undergraduate student. I do think we should ask about how colleges are viewed by graduate school admission committees as we visit college fairs and college information sessions, to see if this is a common view or not.</p>
<p>I doubt the UCSD process is literally to throw the application in the REJECT pile if the undergrad school is a bad one. If the test scores are near-perfect, that would be an immediately detectable sign of life, and they could scan the list of recommenders to see if it includes anyone they have heard of. Unless there are some redeeming signals that leap out very quickly from the file, it's easy to believe that the rest of the pplication will be ignored. </p>
<p>With that said, yes, there are examples of top people who were rejected at top schools based on undergrad school attended, with the file probably not read in its entirety.</p>
<p>Villanova University has posted its list of information sessions and high school visits, which includes international visits. </p>
<p>American University has begun posting its schedule of information sessions, and it looks like updates will include overseas sessions. </p>
<p>Dartmouth has updated its list; R.S.V.P. is requested. </p>
<p><a href="http://inyourcity.dartmouth.edu/infosessions%5B/url%5D">http://inyourcity.dartmouth.edu/infosessions</a> </p>
<p>Amherst has now posted its schedule. </p>
<p><a href="http://www.amherst.edu/admission/important_info/connecting.html%5B/url%5D">http://www.amherst.edu/admission/important_info/connecting.html</a> </p>
<p>Some other colleges still promise to post their schedules Real Soon Now. Many visit programs are underway now or begin this weekend.</p>