Stanford and other Top Level CS schools

[JustOneDad]

I’m not going to try to dissuade you from applying. However, I think the biggest mistake you could make is to put great efforts and hopes into the Stanford basket. You would be far better served to work hard on some real nice matches and maybe even another reach. Let success with Stanford be a nice surprise.

You are a good candidate and I’m confident you are going to get into a very fine school.

[billcsho]

OP should apply to Stanford if he/she really likes that school. More important is to have enough matches and at least one safety school on the list as well. Stanford is in no shortage of highly qualified applicants and the admission rate is in single digit.

[DrGoogle]

Stanford is not the school that is impressed by high scores. From my limited experience, it’s Princeton or Yale or maybe Caltech. In the past, Stanford accepted kids with 1700 SAT score.

[ballerina16]

OP is planning to apply to Stanford. The question was if he should apply REA. And Stanford is a lottery school. Very often there is no difference between student A who got in and student B who did not.

[JustOneDad]

Um…you don’t perceive any difference. Wouldn’t that be a more accurate statement?

[ballerina16]

Any highly competitive process has a component of luck or randomness There are too many talented people for too few spots, and very small differentials of talent between similarly qualified candidates.

[Falcon1]

^^ Exactly right. Being accepted often involves no small amount of serendipity.

[renaissancedad]

I think every admissions officer at a top school would admit that they turn down many applicants who are just as qualified as many of the ones they accept. “Very small differentials of talent” is a good way of putting it. It’s not random, but there is certainly serendipity involved in many cases.

[JustOneDad]

Really? Is this your original research?

At what point does the Admissions Committee enter either the “random” phase or the “serendipity” phase?

[Falcon1]

Just watch the Amherst admissions video where the admissions officers flat out says so because obviously there is a fair amount of subjectivity that goes into making the decisions.

[renaissancedad]

@JustOneDad, I’m not sure why you’re being so belligerent. You can disagree without being derogatory about it.

The process is obviously not “random”. Adcoms spend thousands of hours culling through files and trying to come up with a top class. There’s no flip of the coin involved.

The process is also clearly subjective, based on the statements of multiple admissions officers and directors, and there are elements of chance involved. At Stanford, for example, applications from regular applicants (not legacies) are guaranteed a read by only one person, who then has to act as advocate for that person to the admissions committee. So an applicant’s admission could come down to who reads their file and whether they resonate with that person.

The Stanford admissions office is no longer a small group of officers discussing each applicant. In the last academic year, the University employed a staff of 52—dean, assistant deans, admissions officers and part-time readers—to cull through all those applications, each of which includes several essays, recommendations and a transcript. That averages to slightly more than 746 applications per reader. Officers are responsible for territories defined by state boundaries, countries or zip codes. (Los Angeles, for example, has five admissions officers dedicated to it, in addition to officers working in Ventura and Orange counties.)

If you ever have doubts about the future of mankind, apply for a job reading applications to the Farm. You will be awash in intelligent, directed teenagers doing outstanding work. [Dean of Admissions Richard] Shaw estimates that 80 percent of the applicants are capable of handling the academic load on the Farm.

Assuming 15 minutes for a standard application review, admissions readers collectively spend a minimum of 9,700 hours evaluating 38,800 student hopefuls. Add 30 minutes or more to absorb each of the most complex files. It used to be that every application would be read twice. Now, only one reading is guaranteed, although—thanks, Mom and Dad—every legacy application still gets two sets of eyes. “In the Fred days,” says assistant dean of admission Debra von Bargen referring to Hargadon, “one person could read everything or at least read it after everyone else had gone through. You can’t do that anymore. It’s impossible.”

The process is the same in each of the two admissions cycles—restrictive early-action (November 1-December 15), and regular (January 1-April 1). Admissions officers do their reading, making notes in the time-tested Stanford method of mnemonics; CPE, for instance, means “See Personal Essay.” In the latter half of the cycle, reading gives way to decision making. Committees composed of admissions officers (typically three or more) and either the dean or an assistant dean, who serves as chair, convene to hear officers present their candidates and field questions. Then there’s a vote. If a majority agrees, the candidate is admitted; otherwise he or she is denied, put on the waitlist or moved to a larger committee for further review.

The committee system is a means of quality control, Shaw says, a hedge against bias that may creep into individual officers’ perspectives. “I don’t massage the results,” he says. “Our people do the important work on the front end to really understand who these kids are, and at the end of the day I feel very strongly that the kids we identify are really exceptional.”

The typical university today is “not really able to think about what the class is like,” says Ralph Figueroa, '87, director of college guidance at Albuquerque Academy. “It has to be thinking about what the class appears to be like statistically.” But Shaw says differentiating among thousands of high achievers is more nuanced than looking at numbers and correlating ability.

“I go all over the country and the world and everybody wants to know the formula,” Shaw says. “Especially in other parts of the world. Their systems are very formulaic. If you do this, if you get this national score, the odds are really extraordinary [that you will be accepted].”

Here is where the black and white melds into gray. Here is where Shaw uses phrases such as “intellectual vitality” when describing what Stanford looks for in an applicant. “It’s a holistic evaluation,” Shaw says. "Of course academic credentials are important, but we’re also looking for evidence that this young person has a passion, that he or she will bring something to our community that is unique. We want to hear a ‘voice’—that’s a critical component.

“There is no formula,” Shaw says. For the alumni of a school that resides on the forward boundary of the digital frontier, where arrays of 1s and 0s have transformed life as we know it, this is unsettling. Even perfect test scores don’t guarantee admission. Far from it: 69 percent of Stanford’s applicants over the past five years with SATs of 2400—the highest score possible—didn’t get in.

Moreover, applicants aren’t just competing against other stellar scholars. They’re also competing against circumstances. “Whether or not one young person gets in is not necessarily determined by what they’ve done and what their characteristics are and their abilities and so on," says Provost John Etchemendy, to whom Shaw reports. "It also depends on the overall mix of people who have applied that year and bubbled to the top. So one year, being a tuba player might be really important. And another year, well, there are already these five even better tuba players and we don’t need another.”

Shaw acknowledges that part of the evaluation is subjective, which makes a denial of a superior candidate all the harder to accept. “We leave behind extraordinary young people. There’s not a constituency that isn’t upset. That’s not only true for alumni children. My consolation prize is that I know those kids are going to be fine. They may be disappointed for a while, but they will wind up at very good schools and do very well.”

https://alumni.stanford.edu/get/page/magazine/article/?article_id=66225

Don’t you think the outcome deciding between equally qualified applicants might potentially vary depending on which admissions officers make up the committee reviewing a file on any given day?

Sorry if the lack of more detailed “research” disappoints you.

[col2cal]

was it supposed to be helpful? or were you attempting to make him be more critical and objective? You sound mean.

[ballerina16]

Thank you @renaissanced

[JustOneDad]

@renaissancedad

You can disagree without being derogatory about it.

Why do you perceive it to be so derogatory? It’s certainly not intended that way. At some point, if you have an opinion, you may be asked (“you”) to support that opinion. I realize that can make people who are accustomed to the anonymity of the Internet feel attacked, but the facts are that is the way of life in any discipline in which you want to present an opinion.

[renaissancedad]

Really? Is this your original research?

There are a lot more polite ways to ask someone to support or clarify a statement. Yours comes across as being deliberately offensive, and I don’t think I’m the only one who interpreted it that way.

[Falcon1]

^^ I saw it as a snarky comment as well.