<p>Calmom, your daughter has had an excellent outcome so far. Please keep us posted as she progresses at Barnard!
I think, though, that class rank is not equal either because schools and populations are not equal. Yes, outstanding students will rise to the top, but the “top” of one school is in a lower percentile at another for equivalent students. And grading varies. We have schools or programs within schools that students have to test into, so schools or programs are already selecting the students before they even enter. The kid who didn’t test in might end up number 1 in rank at another school, while the kid who did test in might be at the bottom of his or her class at the selective program.
I do think that colleges are aware of this, which is why the anecdotal reports will vary (your family’s outcome vs. mine). Believe me, our school does NOT prep them for the SAT, and does NOT teach for any test (except for teaching the lower achieving students to the state test, forced into this tactic by NCLB). We do have about 33% of the school that tested into a program with an IQ of over 130. But it is also why I started this thread - because there are so many confusing variables out there.</p>
<p>D is attending Cornell this fall, which is a great school. I just wish we had cleansed the house of PU gear about 4 years ago and not attended the 25th reunion last year. Beware HYPS parents - bumper stickers and t-shirts speak louder than words to your kids!</p>
<p>D’s common app essay liked by the very experienced CC was of the “risky” variety, but the supplement essay for Cornell was slightly superior to the one for Princeton (which was more of a “feed our school ego” prompt). Class rank was not issued by D’s high school, but this was a moot point for PU given the large number of applicants from her class. The Cornell admissions dean who visited D’s high school in fall 2009 remembered D’s visit to the University campus the previous April - evidently a plus.</p>
<p>In any case, it is water under the bridge now, and she is looking forward to gazing over Cayuga Lake for the next few years.</p>
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The supplement prompt for Cornell was indeed excellent, and elicited by far the best piece of writing that my son produced for any of his applications. I recall feeling a certain exasperation at this, because really he hadn’t a bat’s chance in hell of getting into Cornell…I remember wishing he could send that same piece of writing to Brandeis or Skidmore where it might have been of some use!</p>
<p>Levirm – my daughter has already graduated from Barnard – I’d note that she graduated at the top of her college class, with a college GPA slightly above her high school GPA… so I think the college (in hindsight) was obviously right to place greater value in her top 3% academic performance than in her bottom quartile test scores.</p>
<p>It isn’t just my daughter - there are studies that show that high school GPA is a better predictor of college performance than test scores – and I have a son who had much better test scores but blew things off his first couple of years in college. One of the things that happened with my son – and one reason I brought up the issue of learning style – is that he started off strong in the fall but slacked off during spring semester. In hindsight I could trace things back to similar behavior in high school – he’d lose interest in a class, turn in some but not all assignments. In high school he managed to get away with it by talking his teachers into waiving assignments or grading him on exams only – in college, it didn’t work. </p>
<p>My d. is an entirely different person – she will jump through whatever hoops it takes to get what she wants, and she’s very conscious and conscientious about grades. She enrolled in an upper level course her first semester – she was the only freshman in the class – got a “C” on the first midterm and called me in tears. It was the very last “C” she ever got on anything in college. She pulled her grade up to a B with near-perfect performance on the remaining exams… and that was the last B she ever got. I would get calls where she was upset over an A- rather than an A in a course. And you wouldn’t believe the angst once my d. discovered that an A+ was a real possibility. So d was bound to do well in a highly structured, demanding academic environment (as long as she didn’t have to do much math along the way) – S. really needed a more forgiving place. </p>
<p>Unfortunately, I think that colleges are more likely to look favorably on the high GPA/weaker test score dichotomy, than the high test score/ weaker GPA dichotomy. My d’s high school wasn’t great, but it wasn’t horribly weak either – graduating at or near the top of her class clearly was an accomplishment. So the dichotomy spoke for itself: “performs well; doesn’t test well”.</p>
<p>With high scores, lower GPA - its harder to tell. Even if the high school is super competitive and highly regarded academically–there are other students with higher grades – so the ad com still is going to ask, “why doesn’t student X perform as well as the others?” The most competitive colleges definitely don’t want to bring in potential slackers, and the high SAT/weak GPA kind of telegraphs that they may be looking at a kid like my son – so you’ve got to get around that in the application process. LOR’s and essays might help. If there is a good explanation - like missed school due to an illness – then the g.c. can be a big help in getting the message across. </p>
<p>But – and again why I suggested considering your d’s learning style along with “fit” – I learned the hard way that there’s more to college than just getting in. Other than the excellent learning experience that comes with taking a fall, my son didn’t really benefit from the failed experiment of a college that was a mismatch for his poor study habits. He did a whole lot better years later, as a transfer to a college that is too far down the rankings to be noticed in CC-world – but where he really could excel, without ever having to put undue energy in whatever it was he didn’t feel like doing, and pretty much test out of requirements that he perceived as a waste of time. But in hindsight – he should have gone to one of his safeties in the first place. (I’m not speaking rhetorically – these were schools that he very much would have liked to transfer into later on.)</p>
<p>I do think that even with an “lopsided” profile – a focus on “fit” works. Colleges can see “fit” in the admission process – and that’s one reason why admission results can often be surprising. But sometimes we parents need to step back and be objective, and not get so stuck on the rankings that we forget that the goal really has to be to find the best fit college, not the best ranked one.</p>
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<p>Last time I checked, Cornell was still Ivy League. !</p>
<p>Congrats to your daughter – I’m sure she will do well.</p>
<p>CC is the only place in the world where an admission to Cornell can be perceived as anything other than a resounding success.</p>
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<p>I hear it’s a “lesser” Ivy, just barely ranked above the “near Ivies”. :D</p>
<p>ShawSon has impressive strengths and impressive deficits as well, so the lopsidedness is fairly extreme. A professor who studies the neurology of reading actually arranged for a brain scan (fMRI, I assume) of his brain doing various tasks because she thought it was so unusual.</p>
<p>Strengths: Abstract conceptual reasoning (very strong); associative reasoning (seeing the connections across fields or phenomena that most people wouldn’t see) stronger; strategic reasoning (thinking through multiple rounds of complex interactions) extraordinarily strong. [In complex repeated interactions, most people stop at figuring out what they are going to do in the upcoming round. Some people think through how the others will respond given what they do in this round and then pick a move based upon the anticipated responses of others. Some, very few, can play it through ten rounds in their heads. I can’t. He can. It also involves just seeing how to optimize against whatever the conditions are.] A lot of these intellectual strengths were evident at a very young age and I always talked to him like an adult. He’s also talented at art – a local organization awards $2000 each year to art majors based upon their portfolios and they normally give out 4 $500 awards or 5 $400 awards. Although ShawSon is not an art major, they gave him a $1000 award and then 5 $200 awards to others.</p>
<p>Deficits: He also has major deficits. He couldn’t read until third grade and although his reading comprehension is very strong, he gets fatigued quickly from reading. He couldn’t write adequately when he entered high school and just became a good writer as a result of deciding to compete in Moot Court competitions. He puts the Capital T in Tone Deaf. I’ve never heard anyone sing so badly (although his brain is rewiring and he is not as awful as he was, but fortunately he doesn’t try to sing). When he was a toddler, ShawWife enrolled him in a class where they asked the kids to put their hands higher as the notes went up and lower as the notes went down. Most kids got it and his hand just moved randomly. He also cannot do foreign languages. He had a disastrous experience in middle school language and cannot really hear or reproduce the sounds (no mas in Spanish sounds like No Mass). Finally, when he was little, he would have a speech delay – you’d ask him a question and he’d answer 45 seconds later with a deep, thoughtful answer. But the pause, at least for an American, was seemingly endless. This too has improved tremendously.</p>
<p>Since the OP is interested in how one handles college admissions under these circumstances, I can largely skip how we tried to help him except for one thing. We arranged for partial homeschooling in the last 3 years of high school so that he could work on math with a Harvard grad student rather than sit in HS math classes that went at 1/2 the pace he wanted to move at and to work with various tutors on writing so that he could learn to write well before college. He took no foreign language classes in HS.</p>
<p>Due to his need to work on the reading and especially writing and due to an illness that seems to have been eliminated by a surgery in his gap year, his ECs were relatively light (Moot Court, writing a novel, designing complex board games and starting a club for games of strategy) but interesting.</p>
<p>The numbers turned out well. SATs (2320, math II 800, chem 800, lit 770), ACT 35 and a couple of 5 APs. Grades were excellent. For classes at his HS, he had 3.98 UW and not sure what the weighted GPA was but well above 4. But, the transcript was a bit confused because he had homeschooled courses that the school gave him belated credit for when he took the HS finals and a class at Harvard summer school and a few other things.</p>
<p>We figured that, given that he hadn’t even taken a foreign language and the partial homeschooling, we had to address the lopsidedness directly. In the homeschooling part of the common app, I described who he was and why we had designed the educational program we followed and why it had been a real success. He had recs from the person at Harvard who taught him expository writing and the Superintendent of Schools as this was the first partial homeschooling program in the district.</p>
<p>He also applied to quite a number of schools. Key criterion other than my undergrad and graduate alma maters was curricular flexibility and the presence of smart kids. But we just weren’t sure which schools would want him given the lopsidedness and which would just reject him out of hand. My undergrad alma mater, which gives strong weight to legacies, rejected him outright, but that was probably good because I loved it and he might well have chosen it because of my love. But, while it was great for me, it didn’t have the curricular flexibility and would not have been great for him. The good news: He got into a number of fairly competitive colleges. He picked one which was clear about its willingness to accommodate his lopsidedness. And, in the more good news department: He finished his freshman year, had fun, got terrific grades, got involved with an engrossing EC, and won some kind of prize for academic achievement.</p>
<p>As pay3tuitions said, I think it is better to address things directly but not make the deficits or lopsidedness the center of the application. To the extent that you/your kid understands how you will thrive at their school and he/she can explain it succinctly, so much the better.</p>
<p>P.S. Sorry to have gone on for so long.</p>
<p>Lopsided son:
graded 3.4-3.5 unweighted, SAT1 1570/2100 (doesn’t write well) 7 on AIME,
but B in BC calc, 5 in AP Bio but A- in class and 740 SAT2. Took 3 AP’s this spring
(Calc Chem and USH) but we don’t have the scores yet and we don’t know how much difference they’ll make anyway.
Active in music and sports but not a star or a leader; made regional science fair once.
He’s not sure what he’s interested in, not humanities but both science and social sci are possibilities.
He likes to tackle hard problems but can be both slow and careless.
We’d like to find a place he’ll be challenged but not overwhelmed; I worry that even if he was accepted at a place like Chicago it might be too much for him.
For safeties looking at Binghamton and UMass-Amherst; Bates looks like a low match and MacAlester may be a match; Bowdoin + Carleton are reaches and they seem to care more about grades, and even though Chicago is supposed to be less grade focused our school’s Naviance data makes it a big reach for him.</p>
<p>Again, thanks for the interesting stories, everyone! I think one of the things to address is that the profile of a higher SAT than grades students “appear” to be slackers - but often the students are not slackers. Some just care more about learning than grades. Some have sticklers for teachers who downgrade projects because the students did not stick to the topic originally cleared with the teacher but did a stellar job on an offshoot of that topic; that sort of thing. Some understand the concepts and explain them to everyone else but choke on teacher-made tests, but perform better on standardized tests which have been scrutinized by cognitive psychologists, validated and tested for reliability. Some are very involved in ECs and devote less time to studying. Some are weak in a particular area which brings down the GPA. Some are truly in extremely competetive programs where students are judged within those pools. I’m not making excuses for these students, but I’m just making the point that many of them do put forth the effort and are very smart and would definitely thrive around other students who are very smart. Thanks, Shawbridge for explaining your excellent approach with your son’s unique situation, but what do the rest of us do?
Mathmom - congratulations on your daughter’s success. I tried looking up studies that you referenced but can only find studies by the College Board or by Fairtest, or studies correlating SAT scores or grades with success in particular majors. Anecdotally, our high SAT/not in top 10% of class kid just graduated from Wharton and did very well. He also had campus leadership. I know that he would have been frustrated if he was not with at least some intellectual peers. Based on this experience, I am hesitant to go ONLY by GPA if the SAT clearly indicates that the student has more potential. My daughter visited a couple of schools where her SAT was way above the 75% but her GPA was similar to that of the student body, and her response was that she thought that she would not be intellectually stimulated at those schools. My feeling is that those GPAs were earned within a different context than my daughter’s GPA. So, yes, I am looking for “fit” but this “fit” does not seem to lie with the GPA alone.</p>
<p>I am hoping that this thread continues through this year because I have a rising HS Junior son who is lopsided (math and science type) and has high aspirations for himself. He has not yet taken the SAT or ACT but based upon school standardized testing, he is always lopsided (high math, low to average reading). He is doing some CR and W (SAT prep) this summer with an AP English teacher but I don’t know if he has the endurance or drive to succeed at the SAT/ACT in those subjects. We will need help organizing his eventual college list into what truly are reach/match/safety schools for him (although we KNOW from CC and our college tours that HYPSM are reaches for everyone).</p>
<p>A lot of interesting perspectives here; many of you have captured what I think is my main concern for S2 - that he get into a school that is the best fit for him; I suspect that will be a school with a lot of very bright kids. He learns amazingly quickly and grasps challenging concepts quite easily. He rarely has teachers or peers that challenge him and if he isn’t in a tough school he won’t reach his potential. We have visited MIT, CalTech and Brown. He particularly likes both MIT and CalTech. But they both get so many talented applicants that it must be easy to eliminate those with weak GPAs. I just don’t want the automatic assessment to be ‘smart kid, lazy student’ because it’s definitely more complex than that.</p>
<p>seiclan, how is your son at writing?
I think that math-oriented kids can learn a lot about writing if someone just sits down with them and explains some principles. These kids get principles! Unfortunately, many kids have not had the opportunity to have someone sit with them and explain things like what a clause is, how to vary sentence structure to increase flow, etc…</p>
<p>New to this thread. My S fits the thread description. Lower gpa, higher test/ACT scores. Need advice on narrowing list of schools since he’s a rising senior. Would like suggestions for Midwest LAC’s that would be a good match with a few reaches thrown in. 3.1 uw gpa, 31 ACT, varsity athlete, not too many other EC’s. Also how many schools should he have on his list with these lopsided stats to be safe. Thanks.</p>
<p>levrim- I honestly don’t know how he is at writing (I have never read anything that he has written) but he is studying writing and CR for the SAT this summer with a high school teacher who teaches AP English Language at his HS. I am hoping that this will make the difference. What you said about writing principles makes a lot of sense. He is very good a following principles, rules and formulas. He is taking the PSAT and SAT this October so we will find out if this approach worked or if he needs a more intensive program. He is a top student at his HS (at least, so far) so his test scores are really what will determine which type of colleges are in his range. Most of the other threads here on CC deal with the lower GPA/higher board scores kid…my son is the opposite (at least in CR and writing).</p>
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<p>But colleges like MIT are filled with kids who fit the profile of “smart kid, driven student.” Relaxed or independent-minded isn’t the same as “lazy” - but it may be just as much of a misfit for a university filled with hyper-competitive types.</p>
<p>I think parents who are worried that their high-SAT, lower GPA students won’t find challenge at other colleges are selling the other colleges short – there are dozens of excellent and challenging academic environments to choose from.</p>
<p>I’m not suggesting that you throw out the SAT scores and consign your kid to colleges where a 3.2 GPA high school is the norm. I’m saying that a lot of these lopsided students can do very well at college that are not quite as prestigious but still can provide excellent and challenging learning environments.</p>
<p>I mean, we have a long time CC poster who has an absolutely brilliant daughter who turned down Yale in favor of a full ride at Rhodes, where she earned a Goldwater scholarship – and has now since graduated and been accepted to several medical schools, including Yale. Your lopsided kids may not qualify for a full ride at a school like Rhodes – but they probably can get accepted and study right alongside the kids who are brilliant enough to win the prestige scholarships. And that CC poster never once indicated that his daughter felt underchallenged at her college – on the contrary, the impression we got was that the daughter was working very hard, AND making a lot of friends and thoroughly enjoying her college experience. </p>
<p>Throw out the US news rankings, don’t pick schools by their SAT ranges, and look at books like Harvard, Shmarvard or Colleges That Change Lives for ideas. USE the SAT score strategically to win admission at places where the kid’s GPA is a little lower than typical, but the SAT score will definitely stand out in the applicant pool.</p>
<p>So what type of school is a good fit for a hard working top student who dosen’t get the corresponding standardized test scores? Just asking…?</p>
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<p>Plenty of schools will be a good fit. In reality, many schools place more value on past performance (GPA) and rigor of HS curriculum than on standardized testing performance. In the Southeast, a few schools that come to mind are UGA, USF, FSU, etc.</p>
<p>If you check out a school’s Common Data Set, in section C7 it lists academic factors like GPA, rigor of HS record, and standardized testing, and colleges evaluate their importance. Many schools - like the ones above - consider GPA and rigor “Very Important” but only weight standardized testing “Important”. These schools might be a good starting point for students whose SAT/ACT scores do not “match” GPA.</p>
<p>There are also many schools that do not require the SAT/ACT:</p>
<p>[Optional</a> List | FairTest](<a href=“http://www.fairtest.org/university/optional]Optional”>ACT/SAT Optional List - Fairtest)</p>
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Wherever they can get in. Except for the schools where admissions has dropped down to the single digit range, students with a strong academic track record will be seriously considered at many colleges, even with unimpressive SAT scores. My daughter did fine both in the admissions phase and in performance where her ACT’s & SATs put her at the tail end of the range for the schools. </p>
<p>I think the bigger barrier for those high GPA/low SAT students may be qualifying for merit money. My d did get merit offers from match/safety schools but they were relatively modest.</p>
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<p>seiclan, I think small schools that enable your smart and hard-working child to distinguish him or herself with professors who are paying attention to both effort and intellect. Although ShawSon has learned to manage his lopsidedness, the fact that he goes to a school of 1650 students means that the professors quickly notice this super-smart, super-hard-working kid. They still pay a lot of attention to the grades you get on their tests, but if your child does well on normal tests, all will be well.</p>
<p>ShawD was in the past a bad standardized tester and I had helped her pick schools that a) were less reliant on testing; and b) in some cases might be better at judging the kid’s actual work. For example, New College of Florida doesn’t give grades, just narrative reports. [Maybe a little too small for ShawD at 865 students total]. </p>
<p>Interestingly, ShawD s practicing for 3 weeks for the ACTs and is getting tutored by my wife’s cousin in English, writing, grammar. She’s about to get some tutoring in science and math, but took a full science section as practice and got a 33 (much higher than she would have had in previous, pre-Ritalin years) before the tutoring. But, she’s still interested in being a bigger fish in a smaller pond and having a chance to be at the top of her class. Tonight, ShawSon was encouraging her to apply to his school and she said, “I don’t want to go to such a high pressure school.” ShawSon said “It is not hard to get A’s. You don’t have to work that hard.” She said, “You who made no mistakes on the math SAT are not a credible source.” She may be premed, which adds another layer of pressure. So, we’re looking at schools where the students are good but the pressure meter is turned down a notch or two (e.g., Goucher, Oxford College of Emory, College of Wooster, Colorado College as well as a few Canadian schools that are on the smaller end as ShawD is a dual citizen).</p>