<p>That’s Hilarious!</p>
<p>I’m not quite sure, to be honest. Here’s what I envision:
You have an interview at a school. The AO is taking notes of you ask you speak. Maybe he scribbles down, “Great fit!” or “Plain obnoxious!”. Some sort of grading system, if you will. He pairs his notes with your file. Those who have negative comments will be cast aside. Those with a mixture of positive and negative comments are saved, but only if they must fill more spots. Those who have an overwhelming good response to them are placed in the front. The AOs then meet together and present their top choices. They share their notes and what they cannot express on paper with the other AOs. Then the AOs talk about them. If a mutual agreement is made (positive or negative), the candidate is placed in a “yes” or “no” list. Those who cannot be decided yet are placed in a “maybe” list. I would think that the dean of admissions has a very powerful say in it, as he is the “head honcho”.
Those mixed files that the individual AO had are sent to the dean of admissions. He makes a decision of “yes” or “no”. Those “yeses” are evaluated with the maybes that the AOs couldn’t decide on. All of the yeses are sent to the dean of admissions, who has the final say.
I think that the admission process is not just about grades and scores. At many of the local, personable schools, the personality matters, not just the scores. And, although schools are supposed to be need-blind, the ability to be full-pay is factored into the equation. I like to joke that a big, fat check is attached to those files of candidates that are less-qualified.
Those final yeses are sent to all of you, who shriek and shout and dance and brag about your wonderful accomplishments! I know I did!</p>
<p>BUMP!!! I sincerely hope that the people applying to ninth grade after summer will be a smaller group of applicants… One can only hope :)</p>
<p>I’m sort of laughing at the suggestion to a parent to take out a $50,000 loan if it’s the difference between entering and not entering BS. I mean - it’s not a lot of people in this economy who can shoulder $200,000 in loans right before the child graduates to college which will mean another $200,000 in loans. Especially if there are other children in the picture.</p>
<p>Advice requires some modicum of sensitivity and perspective.</p>
<p>I believe that the dean of admissions doesn’t have that much say. The head of your grade/gender group has more of a say. Dean of admissions just signs off on applicants in the end as well as advocate for the people they interview.</p>
<p>The dean of admission has the final say in all admission decisions, as he/she reviews applicants last time</p>
<p>Do you have to submit your application before an interview or vice versatile or it doesn’t really matter what order you do which.</p>
<p>@rizzle: Great question! Some schools will require you to submit the “Candidate Profile” before granting you an interview, but none will require your written application to have been completed. I’d recommend interviewing early and then paring your list down afterward. Also, even though 2012-13 applications won’t be available until August/September, you can look through the 2011-12 applications to get a sense of what to expect. Just remember that the essay prompts will generally change meaningfully from year to year. The Candidate Profile, however, will not change much, so you could actually get started on that during the summer.</p>
<p>Would anyone recommend visiting the school before applying (a year in advanced)? Not interviewing early, but just touring the schools. Doesn’t that show interest for the school? They obviously won’t remember you, but you can say during the interview that you visited a while ago.</p>
<p>@over: We made preliminary visits to schools a year early. Some schools offered tours and some we just visited independently. If you live in New England, this is a good idea. I’d recommend trying to attend a sporting event, theater production or some other event open to the public where you can get a sense of campus life and the student body. Calling the admissions office over the summer is a good idea. They’re not very busy compared to the autumn.</p>
<p>Re-posting the following info in this “high profile” thread so it’s easier for future applicants to find. While it is true that schools would use their FA money to secure the funding of exisiting students on FA first before extending any to incoming students, it would be wrong to think that in order to increase chances for admission one may apply for admission without applying for FA, and then try to get FA in subsequent years. In some schools at least, unless you can demonstrate “signicant changes in circumstances”, don’t expect it to happen. The following are relevant excepts of Q&A from SPS and Hotchkiss.</p>
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<p>Stop your cynical posts about people trying to get FA by cheating! People’s situation can change especially in this economy. And stop discouraging people from applying for fa, you are not the one who decides fa for those qualified to get it.</p>
<p>Invent, you are a mad man/boy! But i start liking you… 
btw, what you said is covered. It’s called “significant changes in circumstances”.</p>
<p>You are a scary man to all financial aid applicants! :D</p>
<p>The triple A and B system is interesting… The first time I’ve heard about this.</p>
<p>Fixing kraordrawoh’s post: One school that I know of does require that you submit an application before you go for the interview. Of all places, it’s Roxbury Latin, a very traditional day school in West Roxbury, MA. This shouldn’t be a concern for a lot of you, but it does appear.</p>
<p>There also candidate profiles that you fill out at some schools. They’re basic conversation starters, like a list of your EC’s, sports, etc. They’re so that the interviewer can spend more time focusing on what specifically you do as opposed to what you do for those.</p>
<p>200th post! :D</p>
<p>i don’t know how much this will help, since I know everyone is interested in the particulars of the admissions process, but rather than worrying about the logistics (i.e. how much weight the interview vs. the SSAT will have), you might just try being yourself and providing the admissions committee with the most genuine portrait of what makes you tick that you possibly can. That might sound naive, but it’s what I did, and I was happy with my results (which I’ve posted at the end of this post). </p>
<p>If you are genuinely a theatre nerd, write your essay about theater. You’ll probably find that the essay will practically write itself. At your interview, gush about how you would absolutely love to take advantage of all the theater-related opportunities at the school, which your public high school (or whatever option you’d have if the BS didn’t admit you) doesn’t have. At my interview for Andover (and the other schools to which I applied), I pretended I was just talking to an aunt or uncle about how much I love school, and how I wanted to apply to boarding school to be in an intellectually stimulating environment. </p>
<p>Genuine passion will come through, and if it’s backed up by strong grades and scores, I can’t imagine you’d have significant problems with admissions. (Maybe I’m just out of touch, though). </p>
<p>Back in 2000 when I applied, I was admitted to Andover, Exeter, Deerfield, Milton, Taft, Hotchkiss, and Choate, and waitlisted at Lawrenceville (I took myself off of that waitlist).</p>
<p>Is it typical for the interviewer to ask which other schools and how many schools you are applying to? That happened today, and it was really awkward because the first one I mentioned is their rival school.</p>
<p>I’m also not going to think about my dad asking the worst possible question. Hopefully the interviewer will be forgiving.</p>
<p>They all ask about the other schools–while you can hedge (and probably should if you’re not sure exactly where you’ll end up applying), I think it can be a talking point. There have been interviews where interviewers strongly recommended another school to a candidate’s parents during the parent interview–and the school really was a better fit. My kid had a nice talk with his Groton interviewer about Holderness, because the interviewer was an alum and had loved it there.</p>