He said in a previous thread that funds were not an issue. Maybe its all… baloney.
(see his post # 22 from the thread on this topic last April)
@foobar1 “Conditional probability theory says you have greatly increased your odds of admission to at least one top school.” Or greatly increased his probability of denial.
When all candidates are essentially equal, and the only problem is that there is not enough room for everyone, you & Katzman might be right. (Remember, by the way, that Katzman is also trying to sell a product.)
But OP has acknowledged a couple of significant deficits, deficits that wouldn’t impede him at the vast majority of great schools in the US, but that nevertheless might give adcoms pause at the top 30. There is an overwhelming number of qualified candidates out there, coming not just from the US but from abroad as well. What are the chances that each school, in turn, will pass over a boatload of qualified candidates in order to accept a lesser qualified candidate with no compelling ECs? That is the real question. One shouldn’t suspend reality in order to hope that a particular method just might work.
Maybe he is an international, since he seems to live in fantasyland.
Oh, he said he is Armenian. Never mind
It’s not just my opinion. There are websites that calculate admissions chances based on conditional probability theory (e.g. ApplyMap). Based on Baloney’s stats and the list of schools he applied to he has a high probability of acceptance to at least one top school. Statistics say the more schools the better. I look forward to hearing about the results in April.
@MidwestDad3 I think the idea with this strategy is that maybe one, two, five, ten, fifteen schools might say, “Nah. GPA’s too low,” and toss his app in the reject pile. But maybe, for whatever reason, one of his essays or ECs will really resonate with one adcom, and they’ll say, “Hm, the GPA isn’t as high as we’d like, but we’ll definitely bring him to committee.” And if that happens at 10 of his 31 schools, I feel like at least two schools might say yes all the way around. Neither of us are adcoms (unless you are, in which case I defer to your judgment), so nobody can say what’s a deal breaker. And, as a lot of people have said on this thread, fit is important in a school, and that’s a two-way street. Some schools are more willing to overlook certain flaws than other schools (e.g. WUSTL is known for taking super high test scores even if other parts of the app are lacking). He won’t know what adcoms resonate with him unless he sends his app in, so he did, 31 times.
And also, in response to post #343, I don’t think it’s that the OP, didn’t do due diligence, just that he didn’t do due diligence quite yet. He kind of reversed the process from what most applicants do. He applied to a lot of schools, and will do due diligence in March once he sees what his options are. He has stated (more than once, IIRC) that he will visit and take fit into consideration AFTER he gets his decisions. He seemed to decide that Prestige > Fit, which is his prerogative, and formulated a strategy accordingly.
And also @CaliCash, I sure wish the world worked that way, but unfortunately, it doesn’t. The problem with making statements like that is the flip side. By saying the people who work for things and deserve them get them, you’re implicitly saying that the people that DON’T get them, DON’T deserve them, or DIDN’T work for them. You can go look at Ivy results threads - there are plenty of qualified applicants who get rejected that did volunteer work, got good grades, took lots of hard classes, and excelled in many areas. Did they somehow not work hard enough? Did they not deserve it? If you turn that kind of thinking on yourself, you realize how destructive it is. If you get rejected by a school, does that mean you are undeserving of admission? Does that mean that you didn’t work hard? That you didn’t care? Does that somehow reflect on your value as a person? Or does it just mean that you and the adcom didn’t mesh, and that’s that?
IMHO, linking people to their admissions decisions is a road that you don’t want to go down, very similar to people that rely on grades to measure their self-worth. It doesn’t usually turn out well.
He’s not the first, second or 100th person to try this. But its not his GPA that’s the issue- his ECs are weak, and its highly unlikely anyone is going to get in just because they wrote a stellar essay. And, with a gazillion essays to write for these schools ( though there will be some he can recycle, but not all), its also less likely the essays will sing. JMO
(as an aside, the joke about his being an international b/c his country of origin is fantasyland was a little too obtuse in its original format-- sorry but was typing on the ipad)
@butterfreesnd “And also @CaliCash, I sure wish the world worked that way, but unfortunately, it doesn’t. The problem with making statements like that is the flip side. By saying the people who work for things and deserve them get them, you’re implicitly saying that the people that DON’T get them, DON’T deserve them, or DIDN’T work for them. You can go look at Ivy results threads - there are plenty of qualified applicants who get rejected that did volunteer work, got good grades, took lots of hard classes, and excelled in many areas. Did they somehow not work hard enough? Did they not deserve it?”
In fact, it’s not even necessary to speculate. The Elite colleges themselves say that many fine students literally deserved, from a logical and moral standpoint, to be admitted, but there are not spaces enough to admit all WORTHY students. Additional selection must factor in such as geographical, and campus selection must factor in such as how many applying in that major. Either in this thread or another recently the subject came up of too many students applying in the highly popular CS major to some colleges. Not even engineering schools can take in every qualified CS aspirant who applies, given that there are other fields of engineering as well. It depends on what the pool presents to the committee. And those who work on these committees have also said that sometimes, after all those more specific factors are accounted for, there still may be true ties among remaining applicants, and at that point some arbitrary, “illogical,” and painful decisions must be made.
“Moral” admissions. I like that. It’s got legs. It could travel.
Re “moral.” Keep in mind, I’m just using the imbedded premises of those who use terms like “deserving,” “earning it,” etc. It comes most often from those outraged or merely surprised/perplexed that particularly “worthy” students were not admitted. If certain colleges admitted all such students, they would multiply their freshman classes by a factor of at least three (according to those colleges). But according to some people, an Elite college ticket should always (a moral absolute) be a reward for a job well done, regardless of the effect of such an Absolute on the finite size of the campus and the finite resources. According to them, the student’s quotient of hard work should drive, in an absolute moral sense, the admissions decisions. It should be student “decided” or determined, based on those moral factors.
We’re not talking about students who end up with no college admission whatsoever, are we…?
JustOneDad, is your question in 369 addressed to me? I was talking about the colleges most highly valued (greatest “worth”) from (again) the student’s point of view. Effort is supposed to equal outcome, narrowly from the individual’s viewpoint.
^^Yeah, sorry.
(continuing)…The greater the effort, the more “deserving” the prize, based on the “rank”/level of that “prize” as perceived by the public at large (translation, USNWR).
@jym626 Why is indicating a different major to increase likelihood of admission “sad?” Where do you people come up with these absurd moral standards? Also, the extent to which you and other people have studied my threads from many months and years ago is troubling. I do not claim responsibility for the ramblings of my freshman self.
Your posting of needing FA was In a thread you started less than a week ago…
@intparent We applied for financial aid, to see how much we could be granted based on our present stats.
Baloney - I am rooting for you, man!!
Don’t listen to these posters who are shotgunning advice Look at these posters, they have 10’s of thousands of postings!! They have an opinion on everything! They sound like cable news pundits. They should stick to 10 threads (3 reach topics, 4 match topics, 3 safety topics) and think deeply before commenting. They should also walk in the shoes of the OP of each of those threads (=school-visits) and can comment only if they “fit”
You naysayers - this teenager is a high reach for you, don’t spout your advice anymore. I hope the OP gets in some of those reaches, just so that the establishment (that includes all you 1000+ posters) can look in the mirror and see how ridiculous this process is.
Oh, I am sure you guys have time to track back OP and all others (now that includes me) who disagree with you. Instead, why don’t you go back and look at this thread and see how many opinions each you spouted.
This thread has the potential to be VERY long by the time it comes to fruition with admittance decisions.
@Baloney1011 - I didn’t say it originally, but I will agree with the poster who criticized you for faking your major desire to maximize admissions decisions as well. Again, with the lies. Yes, this is a form of dishonesty if not cheating. You’re telling the college that you want to do X when you actually want Y. How is this a morally appropriate thing to do?
I had gone back to OPs prior threads to see what I had missed about ECs and finances. Stumbled on this quote from OP in April 2014 when he was trying to figure out reporting SAT 2 scores. Puts the comments about "bs"ing in context.
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Lying is ethical and morally acceptable in my books, as everyone is given a fair and equal opportunity to lie. Only some decide to take advantage of this opportunity. If I do not take up the opportunity, then it is my loss and someone else’s gain. Might is right. Anyway, I don’t mean to start a philosophical discussion here. Thanks for the quick info.
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