nj1818, you should absolutely send the improved grades update, and make sure it gets to the admissions committee. The last thing you should be concerned about is that you will be thought of as “out of line”. Admissions is a matching process with a buy/sell nature. You are not in line to go to Heaven, waiting on the Lord. You are considering them just like they consider you. If you found a more attractive option, you would be off to something better. Send a note to the admit email, and include in your email, alongside the grades, a note to ask for confirmation that it has been received by the admissions committee. Also ask your guidance counselor to send a note and the grades on your behalf. Note that the message that comes from YOU is what will give you credit for “enterprising”, not the one from your guidance counselor. Other key: “I would like my recent trajectory to be considered on your deliberations”. Not over the top, but with clear intent. This coming from someone who has done recruiting at multiple levels for over a decade.
dcalb1, I can’t imagine any school would defer students because they simply didn’t have time to review applications. Sending a note to students informing them that they are running behind and will get to their application as soon as possible is far more acceptable. I simply don’t believe that admissions of any school would defer as a time saving strategy. It has too much potential for imposing hardship on too many students. A student who has Binghamton as a first choice would have to start sending out a ton of applications when an acceptance would mean the search was over after one application or at least a student can relax a bit after getting into one school. No admissions dept would do that! I hope you are incorrect.
I will also disagree with you about the strength of students. Harpur College students used to be stronger. I would say that Harpur college stats are bolstered markedly by other schools at the university. Students at some of the schools may be as strong as students of Harpur college used to be but those at Harpur now are considerably weaker as a group. So maybe there is now a bimodal distribution of students with those at other schools way above but Harpur students way below. But there continues to be some strong students at Harpur.
The idea that the large number of deferrals are due to yield protection is not inconsistent with the observations that some very strong students have offers. The school may be willing to take a chance on some students with credentials they absolutely don’t want to miss out on-if there is even a remote chance they’d come…those with unique skills, athletes, and for other special reasons…legacies. (Preferential legacy treatment is probably illegal for a state school so they may not do it here-but other schools probably do.). But for those that don’t fit an irreplaceable slot-students stronger than the average might be deferred with out compelling evidence that Binghamton isn’t a safety. And those with credentials falling well below attending students may also be deferred. I don’t know this for sure but it is similar to many other schools. I’ve never heard of a school deferring because they couldn’t make time to review EA applications.
Lostaccount, I agree with you on this question, and your view that it is highly unlikely that applicants got deferred because the admissions committee fell behind. I will also observe that some of the “evidence”, like everybody at a particular high school getting deferred is either incomplete (I.e., you do not know everyone’s experience), or even more unlikely, is a school where nobody would have the credentials to get into Bing. The reports on this board are still consistent with the scenario that all EA applications were considered and answered, with a certain number deferred until full stock could be taken of all RD applications, including stragglers. Once that picture is clear, action on deferred applications can be made. There are also differing levels of competitiveness in different programs that account for some strong applications not getting in yet. The notion that a college would engage in picking and choosing who to admit based on who they thought would accept, on a speculative basis, is questionable. Just a few thoughts.
I just got accepted into stonybrooks physics program so im assuming that Ill be fine for binghamtons reg decision pool
According to Binghamton’s website, the average SAT score for Harpur is 1275 and 1325 for SOM. There was an article on the site that said 1236 for Watson, but I think that was some year’s ago. I couldn’t find anything for Decker.
At the school where I work, Binghamton admitted the strongest students and deferred the weaker students. Binghamton certainly did not defer the best candidates, figuring that they wouldn’t enroll anyway. What puzzles me is that some of the stats presented here by deferred students or their parents are just as strong as those who were admitted to Harpur,SOM and Watson.
Lostaccount, when was this supposed golden age of Harpur? It certainly wasn’t when I attended in the 80’s! I think that my classmates and I were solid students, but when I see the high quality of students who are admitted to and attend Binghamton these days, I honestly don’t think that as a whole we were as good.
I was deferred and the whole admissions thing seems BS and sketchy
They waitlist a lot of strong students due to the fact they believe they will get into better schools and use binghamton for a safety.
Keep a bit of perspective regarding criticism of the process. Remember that only the EA bit has been completed, and necessarily, some of the decisions were going to be “non-final”. If you really have questions, take a look at the detailed stats on satscores.us, look at where you stand within the applicant pool, noting that the admission percentage is about 40%, and some departments are more competitive than others, and there is RD to come. Bing may be more selective than you think.
Put another way, until you start seeing the case where applicants with clearly lower credentials are being admitted ahead of applicants with stronger credentials, the notion that stronger students are being deferred (not waitlisted - which means something different, waitlist means “if others do not accept you are in”, deferred means “we cannot tell yet”) because they are under suspicion of not accepting, has little basis in fact.
Give the admission folks a bit of credit, this is a critically important part of their lives, they get this wrong and they suffer big time. This is the lifeblood of the college.
Note that the colleges need to be sure that they have their offers out before the students start making their decisions, and most students who applied EA have offers already, and colleges that have made offers are going to be courting applicants to decide in their favor. If they are late they risk losing an edge with the most attractive applicants: someone who had college 1 initially as their top choice, can get swayed by another high quality college, or just realize, as their knowledge improves, that the relative strengths are different than their initial perception.
One thing I think Bing could do better is to communicate better, to educate applicants a bit about the process, and it’s dynamics, so that people are not surprised, and then get confused, or upset, or agitated because things seem not to be making sense. Also note that the colleges do not own this forum. Give it a month, there should be much higher clarity.
For the record, I have no connection with any college. I am a parent of a deferred student.
Nisky1, I believe people have already complained that friends from their high schools with lower credentials are getting in and they are deferred or haven’t heard. Naturally there may be something about their application compared to their friends that make them less desirable to the school. Yet I’ve read about the credentials of some deferred students and they seem quite a bit higher than the usual average Harpur College student.
@lostaccount A lot of the deferred students on this thread,including my daughter, are applicants to the School of Management (SOM). My daughter had a 1360 (2040) SAT and 3.75 gpa from a competitive high school. She did not take AP courses until senior year but about half of all her courses were honors. It appears that the SOM has a more stringent admissions standard than Harpur College. I believe the academic credentials/profile of the SOM entering class is higher than academic profile of Harpur students. Perhaps the reason is less space available at SOM than Harpur, so the admissions can only admit the upper echelon of applicants to SOM. I know in past posts you have questioned the quality of Binghamton (I believe you mostly referred to Harpur) but there is no doubt the school is the most difficult to get accepted to out of all the SUNYs. The school --whether Harpur, SOM, Watson, Decker must be good quality or else why do the best and brightest students from NY state apply there year after year?
I don’t say that the school is not of good quality. I have said it is not an Ivy League school and I have said it was stronger in the past. The previous president focused on basketball instead of academics and that is where she put the resources. There was corruption and problems which, hopefully, left with her. There are over 60 SUNY schools and no flagship. That means there are 60 English Depts and 60 Sociology Depts. Resources are stretched in a way that is not necessary in states that have flagship universities and a few others. But that does not mean Binghamton is a bad university. Harpur’s current reputation is based on how it was decades ago. You are correct about the differences between Harpur and the other schools but there was a time when harpur attract strong humanities students. Binghamton markets itself in a way that does not accurately reflect the school. I think that is a disservice to students. It isn’t like an Ivy League school and it isn’t Cornell. It is a medium to large public university with some good programs and strengths and weaknesses. A strength is its price and for students wanting to proceed through relatively quickly and easily, it allows for that. It isn’t a “public Ivy”. The current sales pitch that they play while people are on hold underscores the fact that its PR efforts and sound bites don’t align with the reality of the school.
Lostaccount, as I noted, we are only at the EA point, RD to come. So for me there, is nothing amiss yet that there would be students with credentials better than the overall average that historically gets in, that would be deferred at the EA stage. There are all kinds of observations that are so easily misleading: not accounting for applying to different programs and directly comparing results and expectations, or not looking critically at the strength of the credentials. Some posts have been much clearer (e.g., recent post by rgr717, providing some insight into the deferral, although one would have thought a 2040 SAT would have settled any questions).
My basic point is that one should think very hard before allowing yourself to believe that 1. The admission folks lack a well-founded basis for these decisions, or 2. The incomplete data on this site is accurately representative of the reality (for example, how many people say that they are still waiting, then get an offer, go silent at that point, and potentially leave the impression that they were deferred?).
Also note that many of the people who explicitly said they were deferred also seemed to be able to rationalize it, able to put things in context.
SOM has always been somewhat more difficult to get into than the others. As indicated on Binghamton website, the average SAT score of entering students at SOM was 1325 vs. 1275 for Harpur (by contrast Geneseo’s is 1251, according to their website). Binghamton’s overall admission criteria are largely reflective of Harpur students as 70% of Binghamton’s undergrads are in Harpur. Comparing current statistics to older statistics available on the web, the number of applications and admission requirements have risen in recent years.
In looking at GPA, I believe that the rigor of coursework is very important. Someone had posted that Binghamton only considers core courses and then recalculates GPA adding in a weighing for AP/college level courses. I don’t know if this is true, but I do remember that a number of years ago a co-worker had taken his son to visit Binghamton and was told by an admissions officer that no matter what your GPA is, you will not be admitted if your high school offers these advanced courses and you haven’t mainly taken them.
I was deferred on Wednesday. OOS (from NJ), 2.7 UW GPA, 2000 SAT, 1 AP, decent ECs, great CA essay. Applied to SOM. I’ve gained acceptances from schools that are quite a bit higher on my list, so I’m looking elsewhere. Good luck to the RD applicants.
Is status checker down for anyone else?
When will we find out for RD if we got deferred
@jdjm1313 defer is only a decision for early action applicants. There is no such thing as being deferred RD; you’ll either be accepted, denied, or wait listed.
Students in the EA round who are deferred get added into the RD round, jdjm1313. Nj1818 is correct that RD applicants are either rejected, accepted, or wait listed. Students who are wait listed should check the school’s Common Data Set to find out how many students are accepted off the wait list each year. If the number is not very high, make sure you have a really good back up.
Good luck to all of you.
Does everyone’s deferred email include the line, “Your application demonstrated significant accomplishments, strengths and talents,” But…blah blah blah? Wondering if this is reason to be hopeful, or just a standard line.