Fine, you don’t want any comments you think dismiss her. You’ve said that several times. But I just reskimmed the thread and see no instance of calling her dumb. One said having a list with no safeties was dumb. A few others discussed an apparent sense of entitlement on the parents’ part. Some feel the suit is stupid.
Who said she’s dumb?
This thread is about the lawsuit. Some feel it’s dumb.
And waitlist says nothing.
Getting into Penn later requires a giant leap of faith to say, see, she really was qualified in senior year. No one here knows any more of her record than what the parents out in the suit. Swiss cheese, full of holes.
First of all, I seriously doubt that either the parents of this girl or her are reading any of these posts.
Secondly, if she or her parents had when she was applying, she would have heard exactly what the posters are saying now. If anyone read the fortune article linked earlier in this thread, I would have guessed the writer read our posts as it echoed what so many have said.
I’m sorry but what the parents did, is everything that is wrong with college admissions today. A ivy or bust attitude and if you don’t get what you want, sue. These parents deserve everything they are getting as far as public criticism to bring such a frivolous lawsuit. It’s just another entitled, whining, I’m going to get what I want at any cost.
It seems to me that their entire case is that the admissions counselor at Sidwell wanted this kid to have an acceptance when it was looking as if she was not going to have any acceptances, that late in the applying cycle, checked a box higher than she had earlier in her counselor reports. To have an acceptance at the very last minute, so that her student would have a place to go next year. For that, the parents and the student withdrew the application and sued the school.
We have no idea what happened to receive an acceptance the next year. We can speculate but no idea, for all we know, the parents donated a building to Penn.
After reading the court docs and 17 pages of this thread, I’ve come to the conclusion that I do believe the school did her a disservice. Should she have had some “safeties” on her list? Absolutely. But, as mentioned before, she was waitlisted at several top schools, eventually graduating from one, so she obviously had what it takes to succeed. At our school, our principal and counselor would have been on the phone with those schools from the first days of the waitlist letters advocating for the student and trying to talk the admissions offices into getting acceptances. I doubt SF did that because it seems they already considered the parents PITAs. But, trying to prove that in a court of law would be difficult, and since there is no national reason as to how the outcome of this case would affect others, I can see why SCOTUS declined to hear it. Regarding the comment by the Brown coach, I imagine they (and the other coaches) dropped her because SF had relayed information about the parents and they just didn’t want to deal with that. In a nutshell, people tend to go out of their ways to help people who don’t rock boats while not providing the same benefits to people who do.
" At our school, our principal and counselor would have been on the phone with those schools from the first days of the waitlist letters advocating for the student and trying to talk the admissions offices into getting acceptances."
You don’t know that they didn’t. You also don’t know how many other SF students were waitlisted at those colleges as well and if they were better candidates.
I understand your point, tutu mom, but you make a lot of assumptions, none of which are in the court docs or 17 pages of this thread.
The fact that she graduated from Penn is irrelevant, since the vast majority of kids who apply to top colleges could graduate, so they had what it takes to 'succeed', but are rejected.
We have no idea what the Sidwell GC did or did not do on her behalf.
There are no facts in evidence and we have do idea why the athletic recruiters stopped calling.
I wonder if she pulled her Spelman application so that Sidwell could no longer say they get 100% of their students into 4 year colleges (and apparently she got some conditional acceptances, though we don’t know what that entailed, as that’s the verbiage in their suit - that she didnt get any unconditional acceptances) ,and if she’d gotten into Spelman but declined to go, they would have no grounds for a suit. Her pulling her application (albeit late, but SF probably could have advocated for her, and perhaps did check to see if they’d take a late application) smells fishy to me.
^^ @thumper1 , it is an acceptance that requires the student to do something as a condition of matriculation. At our school, I have seen it mostly for students accepted at European universities who condition acceptance on getting their IB Fiploma with a score of 38 or higher (for example.)
A desirable athlete might have to pass a summer class they’d failed senior year.
I have not followed this case enough to know the context here.
I interpreted conditional acceptance be something like - you can come but you can’t start until spring semester, or you can come but you need to spend the first semester at our program overseas or you can come but you need to attend our summer program. I know Cornell offers the spring admission, not sure what the other schools on her list might have that is similar.
Technically, most acceptances to selective colleges for high school seniors are conditional on completing in-progress course work with high enough grades or GPA. Some students do get rescinded, usually due to D or F grades or similar academic slacking, but occasionally due to behavioral incidents.
But that may not necessarily be the meaning that the plaintiffs wrote in the lawsuit papers.
I don’t think that post #240 got my point. It’s not a question of not wanting comments that I think dismiss the student. It’s a question of not wanting comments that are dumping on her, even those modified by “perhaps.”
While I hesitate to repeat the comments that I think are “dumping,” rather than merely dismissive, it seems necessary to do so in order to explain what I am reacting to. Some of the comments included the suggestions that her academics were mediocre (not scoring at the very top on the PSAT or an SAT II is not the equivalent of mediocre–I am not arguing that it is sufficient qualification for an Ivy), the statement that “perhaps she wasn’t the nicest classmate or great to be around” (that one based on zero evidence), the comment “another racial rabble rouser,” the comment that this is a “big clown show,” the comment that she was “too confident/stupid to have a safety school” (that one borders on calling her “dumb,” though perhaps it’s covered by “too confident” instead), and the comments by people who would not hire her on the basis of the lawsuit. Then there are comments about her parents, rather than the student per se: repeated descriptions of the parents using “PITA,” the comment that they are vexatious litigants, the comment that the parents were “trying to swindle Sidwell,” and the suggestion that her parents would intervene in her employment if she received a less than stellar rating. Both student and parents were covered in the comment that the family “must be a nightmare.” I apologize for repeating these, but they are all in the thread.
These are all hurtful comments. It doesn’t matter if no one in the family is reading this thread. I think most of these comments are unwarranted “dumping.”
The tenor of the commentary on the thread seems to suggest that one should not rock the boat in schools (public or private), that one needs to accept unfairness by teachers and move on, and that it is unwise to “poke the bear.” Perhaps all true, but I find it lamentable that it should be so. I don’t think the CC community should really be encouraging knuckling under to unfairness.
The statement that the student felt “entitled” might be true, though I have seen the word “entitled” slung around a lot to described very hard-working students who happen to enjoy socioeconomic advantages that most do not, and I question its applicability in general.
No --but there is mismatch between the magnitude of the complaints and the need for litigation.
The assertions in this case were pretty low-level slights – the type of things that most students are going to experience somewhere along the line. Example: a gpa calculated so as to miss the cutoff for an A; disputes about grades on individual exams.
That’s very different than the level of problems that would provide grounds for rocking the boat or challenging unfairness.
Life isn’t “fair” in any case, and in this particular case the student doesn’t want “fair” – the lawsuit complains that she didn’t come out on top with no evidence at all that she was more qualified or a better student than the ones who did come out on top. “Fair” very often means that someone else gets whatever it was the person complaining was hoping to get.
This thread is now 18 pages and counting of assumptions, mostly against the family. You’re assuming that the school did everything in its power to help the student. Knowing human nature, I don’t believe we can make that assumption.
