Yes it’s painful. I think the WL will be very true this year. All the high stats and extremely strong students at our school last year, they were NMF, presidential scholar winners, strong leaderships, were all WL or denied from the top 18 schools it was very crushing to see. They didn’t have hooks that schools liked to see. They did go to great schools but not the ivies as they were hoping. I think this year will be even worse with the number of applications schools have received.
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That seems true across the board. So different from '18 and '19’s experience. Whether '23 families realize it or not, high school GPAs were very inflated during Covid years/remote learning. This resulted in tens of thousands of seniors applying with 3.9-4.0 unweighted GPAs. Then … throw in test optional and 50K- 100K apps at colleges. The perfect storm. I wonder if essays/recs were even read? How could they be? Probably a lot of software spitting out results.
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Maybe we can turn this into the most efficient system possible: AI (via ChatGPT) writes all the essays, AI (via an AES system) reads them!
(Insert obvious allusion to the Soldier in White from Catch-22 here.)
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Kid was deferred from U of Minnesota. However, when I went into update with his higher gpa, it said data transferred from Common App. Yet there were no senior classes listed and his ACT score was not on there either. So we updated all that info in the SRAR section within the U of Minn app. We shall see the outcome.
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A bunch of freshmen at the high school was caught for cheating because of the AI tool. Teachers say it’s very easy to catch plagiarism when this tool is used since the AI dumps what it writes in some kind of tool that allows for easy plagiarism check.
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I am a professor, and we have been dumping stuff into Turnitin that was produced by ChatGPT and it is not picking up plagiarism. I am getting less than a 5% match. We can detect a change in voice, but there is nothing we can use to prove it. Smart kids will use it as a guide and not copy it word for word. I did ask ChatGPT to write 3 500 word essays on the same subject, and they basically all sounded the same. It is a matter of time before it starts spitting out work that is too similar.
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For the experienced parents here…
When your older children had all of their results in the spring, did you find the “accepted student days” or just regular ole revisits most helpful in making final decisions?
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Eventually inputs could allow it to learn someone’s style and turn out work that sounds like a particular student. When I took “Programming for Poets” (cringe) back in the 80s, that’s exactly what we experimented with. To me, that’s where this is heading.
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A regular visit is better than no visit BUT I do think accepted student days are worth it if you can swing it. It is definitely what sold our D20 on her school and we had done both! Her Jr year regular visit was just “eh” and more about processes etc. but was good enough to keep it on the list. The Sr year accepted visit was more “wow” and students were making connections and interacting differently now that everyone was a potential future roommate, classmate etc. For us the vibe was just very different - the regular visit was more informational, what we need to do etc. whereas the admitted student day was all about how excited they were to have them at the school and really selling themselves to get the students to attend.
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Did you go to all accepted admitted or just the realistic choices?
We only went to one admitted student day but probably would have done one more as she was really down to a top 2 by that point. Unfortunately that was Spring of 2020 so by March almost all schools had canceled their in person visits due to Covid.
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Edit/Update College Board just announced they won’t allow AI art in AP portfolio. My dd says that half her class is affected & now have to scramble to redo their pieces. That said, we’re not sure whether the AP grading bots will know the difference.
We are having fun with this topic in an AP Art context. While my dd laughs at this, she does have classmates submitting AI-generated art for their AP portfolios and to Scholastic Awards. (You can tell, if you know what to look for. Just like you can tell when kids are just copying a photograph vs. drawing from observation.) And Scholastic eats it up. Assume it may fly by AP as well. Those kids won’t graduate with actual drawing skills, but many of them don’t care anyway. Like mini Miguel Calderóns. Very efficient!
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For my D19 the accepted student days were extremely helpful when making the final decision. A few things that you get
- A good feel for their potential future classmates. Everyone is accepted, half the kids already committed some are committing during the visit.
- A deeper dive into the major, a chance to meet professors, go over the curriculum, ask questions.
- How well run the school is. Some were perfectly choreographed events where you felt like a VIP from the time you parked until you left. Others were on the edge of chaos.
I think at this point it becomes a lot more real and they start picturing themselves there.
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Definitely the accepted students days were more helpful. For S18 we did a visit to the East Coast coinciding with the admitted students day at his top choice there, and went to two other possibilities out there on the same trip. But he made his decision to attend UCLA at their admitted students day the following week. For large universities like that the admitted students day is (or rather was pre-COVID) a huge and very impressive event.
S18 had 12 admits out of 13 applications. He only went back to 4 of the top 5 (he’d already decided before the admitted students day at UCB, which was the 5th realistic possibility). Most of the rest were places he’d never visited and were safeties.
D18 didn’t bother with revisits as she’d already visited twice for auditions and a competitive scholarship interview, and the result was clear (nowhere else could come close to the combination of it being her top ranked ballet program admission and a full scholarship).
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She’s lifeguarding and hanging with friends.
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My daughter runs the Instagram page for this at her HS. 
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D19 was able to do two overnight stay in dorm visits at schools in the fall. We had done 2 other visits in the Summer. In the Spring there was one school she had been accepted and not visited so we went to the accepted day and she was able to do another dorm overnight stay. Different vibe for sure. More rah rah. We did get some good info from a student in the Honors Program. She ended up going to that school, but really it was more about the money.
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I would expect that accepted student days are more useful, but the way they’re set up always kind of annoys me, because they seem to consistently assume that everyone’s a local, even at places that have a national reach.
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Ugh, 100%.
I just had to book (another) $1200 trip to a college to compete for a higher level scholarship weekend in Feb when we already had to meet an on-campus deadline for a lower level scholarship competition there back in December! That is $2000 total in trips just for that one school! I complained and got nowhere.
Also, on the weekend, the actual competition- not the breakfast, but actual competing- will begin at 8:00 AM! Seriously, we have to take mass transit to get to your campus, people! On a weekend, that means waking up at 5:30am to take all the transportation necessary to get there by 7:30 to be safe.
The times of these events are often weird, there is no transportation from the airports for participants or lodging on campus at most of them (even for the student) and the assumption is that we can just drive over from home every time they add something or suddenly do an invite for only 2-3 weeks away.
Sorry. I had to vent. The total cost for scholarship visits travelling at cut-rate (I mean, we have/are flying Spirit with only handbags for two visits!) will be $5000 for S23 and me. That is 10% of our household income this year. Luckily bio-dad is pitching in for these visits, but many families don’t have that kind of money on hand, so they can’t compete for these scholarships or go to admitted days.
We are leaving today for a different competition weekend at the small LAC where I hope S23 will choose, so I am praying he loves it. Weather, please be good!
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I don’t know if it’s still the case, but my D17 didn’t apply to Ohio University (even though they had great programs in what she was interested in) precisely because their honors program required finalists to come, without funding from the college, to that middle of nowhere campus in person for in-person interviews one weekend in the middle of the spring semester of senior year.
Like, even leaving aside the timing aspect of it, could you hang up a more obvious “Poor People Need Not Apply” sign?
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