SUPER annoying! Same- I tried to remove him numerous times yet the almost daily post cards and emails keep coming. High Point in NC has been a close second in terms of their annoying non stop marketing. They even went so far as to fed Ex him a pen. Yes, they paid to Fed Ex him one pen. And it wasn’t even a good one, basically a Bic pen. Ridiculous.
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My oldest 2 are homeschooled, but my 3rd (S27) is in our public high school. This year (as a freshman) they wanted to put him in honors classes and I balked. He has an IEP and so has cognitive testing every 3 years. His verbal skills rate as average, but his logic/reasoning skills are right at the intellectual disability level. I work on his homework with him and know what he knows and what he struggles with.
Well, it turns out he probably should have been in honors classes. He is getting high As in his classes with almost no work. He is in one honors class because of scheduling (Am Hist) and he has a low A in that.
I don’t trust the GPAs from our school at all. 
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Come on! Throw them a bone. Send in that app already! 
It’s fine that it’s past 11/1 - they’ll still be happy to register your application.
And while you’re at it, don’t forget to put in an app at Northeastern. 
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@TonyGrace I meant to add link. Here it is.
Data Dive, Part 2: Standardized Testing - Admissions Beat | Podcast on Spotify
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I really enjoyed that podcast, thank you for the links! I also thought the Clark U. admission officer had great insights as to why some schools don’t find that test scores add necessary information because of differing institutional priorities (she was making the point that if a big part of an institution’s pedagogy is collaborative partnership and hands on work, referencing her previous institution Olin, a high-stake single seating test didn’t give the information they were looking for).
I appreciated all the voices on the podcast acknowledging that the value of a test score is highly contextual to both the individual student and the specific institution. Quite a bit of nuance in the discussion.
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I was wondering how TO has impacted the incoming classes and what the data reflects. I assume that they have done a deep dive and there has been some degradation of the most recent classes.
“I don’t necessarily believe high scores = high success, or more accurately low scores = low success, but I think it’s a needed tool for context. A 4.0 definitely does not reflect the quality of the teaching or depth of knowledge.”
I could not agree more with this statement and it is basically the tone that the Ivy schools have taken during this TO period. That is why it was so surprising to hear him say how much emphasis Yale will be putting on testing. He also admitted that they assume TO applicants have scores below 50%.
Selfishly, this was great news for us to hear as test score is a strength of my daughter application and we were not sure how much it would help her. Based on what he said in the podcast it will be quite helpful.
I am curious what your thoughts are on the podcast.
I’ve never been happier that our recycling bin is on the path from mailbox to house. For the last 6 years we’ve been dumping college catalogues in recycling before entering our house.
My kids had pretty good luck using their spam filters to stop getting specific school emails in their inbox. If your daughter hasn’t set those up, this is a good time to get those going. Also hopefully she had set up a separate email from her ‘permanent’ account so those emails won’t follow her once she is in school.
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Thanks. Interestingly Yale’s CDS marks test scores as “considered,” as do Brown, Cornell and Harvard (though Harvard marks all as considered, so regardless of which column its under, it is equally important to everything else).
Dartmouth, Princeton. and Penn, on the other hand, still list it as “very important.” No surprise for Penn. There has never been a student from our school accepted with less than a 1500, no matter their GPA.
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Be glad you don’t have twins. We’ve gotten two of everything (including those Highpoint Fedexes lol). The U Chicago pile is absolutely enormous.
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The 11-1 EA day yesterday was an interesting one at our house. Two days ago I wrote how my daughter was chasing merit, had her 13 applications done (and all essays for them) and was pleased with her list. Then yesterday my daughter came home bummed. There is a new superintendent in her district and he wants to cut the International Baccalaureate funding starting next year, and perhaps eliminate IB altogether. My daughter loves the IB program and thinks it has been amazing for her. She was quite upset about all of this. Well I guess the SA is really big into what kids are accepted into which schools and what scholarship dollars they get. He made a comment to the IB coordinator yesterday that “this years IB students were ahead of the kids only taking AP classes in scholarship dollars per student, but not by as much as I would have expected”. In other words, he is desperately searching for justification to kill the program. Well, around 7pm last night my daughter said “if he wants scholarship dollars, I will show him scholarship dollars” and launched her application to a bunch of common app schools. So now Nebraska, Kentucky, School of the Mines, Missouri and many other schools accepting the common app have also been applied to. Her fellow students in IB did the same thing. All IB students get their application fees paid for, so that was not a factor. While I do feel a tad bad she is wasting some schools time with these late applications and her minimal interest in going to them, I am also quite proud of her that she is not letting IB die without a fight.
Anybody else hate this recent trend across America to cut funding to advanced student programs? I simply do not get it.
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That is interesting. We have only gotten material from schools in which my daughter is expressed explicit interest through tour, info session etc… I don’t believe she has gotten anything from UofC even though her school sends 3-5 girls a year there along with many of the other DC area privates.
We, personally, got relatively few unsolicited mailings from schools (relatively is the key word). But then, my children didn’t check the box approving college board sending their info out when they took their standardized testing which I think helped immensely.
For us, unsolicited college mailings were the same as unsolicited car dealerships mailings, real estate mailings and other consumer good mailings. Just another thing to be recycled - not a big deal. Christmas catalog season is underway and that is an avalanche. Goes the same way as the college mailings.
There was a successful (as in, kid got into places) common app essay floating around a few years back wherein the kid added up the postage costs, physical production costs, and imputed carbon cost, of all the mailings they got, multiplied that by 2 million HS seniors or whatever, and then came up with the various ways that $ could’ve otherwise been spent.
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D24 has received the same from 5 schools she was not even considering. Seems to me those schools did not receive the number of applications they wanted and are now trying to go fishing.
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Yes, agree. I have a kid going TO to an Ivy League school, and I found the conversation ultimately encouraging in its nuance. (Although it seemed clear to me that Dartmouth is headed back toward test preferred/required, while Yale seems likely to stay with optional.)
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My kid is halfway through his first year of college and UChicago is still sending him monthly mailings. He never even registered for their mailing list. Talk about the hard sell!
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They really want him!
I found the Admissions Beat podcast fascinating, though not enough to encourage my (high testing, relatively lower GPA) kid to put Yale on their list. 
I thought one of his stated concerns about TO to be really interesting: that sometimes context really matters in a standardized test score, and TO tends to make that context harder to see. (for those who haven’t listened, he used the example of a kid whose scores were below Yale’s median, but far higher than their high school’s average. If the kid goes TO, Yale may never get to see that they actually did really well within their context. I’d never really thought about the issue like that.
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We also opted of school search, but once you register for even one virtual info session all is lost.
Last year (I think?) there was a student who tried to unsubscribe from CWRU’s relentless spamming that was flooding their inbox in the spring but that triggered an email that said “if you are unsubscribing we assume you are no longer interested and are withdrawing your application” 
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I have actually given my kids mental health days - it’s better to take them planned when you know you don’t have much going on than after you’re burnt out/sick etc and then can’t control what you miss. Nice to see I’m not the only one!
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