Ooops forgive my typo above. I meant to write there were plenty of top 50 colleges (not thousands) that this student could have considered.
There doesnât have to be something âtotally differentâ the second time around. Each application season is separate. At a mega-selective school, then every single year there are going to be hundreds of students who are competitive and could be admitted, but donât happen to make the cut that year. For whatever reason or no reason at all. Maybe a matter of a different set of admissions readers, or the time of day that the admissions reader reviews the file.
Do we know from the paperwork whether she applied ED to Penn during her gap year? I think Penn is well known for having a significant differential in admit rates between ED & RD. She couldnât apply to more than one school ED, but itâs theoretically possible that a student submits apps early on and then forgets to communicate the withdrawal to another school after admission to the ED school â thatâs bad form, but weâve seen it happen often enough on CC. Itâs also possible that a student might be deferred in the ED round, but still get something of a boost because of the ED application. (I donât think itâs a hook, but it is a factor that impacts yield)
Havenât heard anything about what Dayo did in her gap year. Cant find any official times on her from that year so she didnât run for any school/club. I read she was accepted to Penn in March 2015 for the 2015/2016 school year as a freshman.
Early decision results come out in Dec, regular decision came out March 30th that year so she was admitted RD (which had a very low admit rate).
I wouldnât make anything at all out of the fact that she only ran one year for Penn, besides the fact that Penn Engineering is an extremely difficult degree program, Penn Womenâs Track and their strength coaches had much turnover and many unhappy athletes during those years. The year before they even had a suicide. The current coach was in his 1st year as a volunteer assistant during 2015/2016 year and the strength and conditioning coaches for womenâs athletics have all been replaced. Lots of disgruntled women athletes in the Daily Penn over the last few years.
I thought I read that she applied to Princeton the year before and was deferred.
Lots of college athletes donât continue to participate for the full 4 years. I donât think anyone can read into dropping the sport after one year.
@deb922 â I thought I read that as well â which by definition would mean that she couldnât have applied ED to Penn during her Senior year. It really wouldnât make a lot of sense for her to forego trying ED at another school the following year.
Second round, she got admitted to both Penn and WilliamsâŠso I donât think she did ED.
Fwiw, her Penn running stats for that one year, are public. Iâm no expert, but another poster felt they were not strong. So, we donât know she was recruited to Penn or walked on. Nor whether it was her choice to stop running.
No, she doesnât have to have done smething âtotallyâ different during the gap. But if there were issues in her first app, something would need to be different/improved, the second go 'round.
No. We know she was accepted 3/31/2015. So she was accepted RD. Whether she applied ED and was deferred to RD and then accepted or whether she simply applied RD is not specified.
The prior year she applied to Princeton SCEA and was deferred, then rejected. So one has to assume that she applied to Penn RD the first time, since SCEA precludes ED to any school.
While possibly true, and again we can only speculate since none of us have read either application packet, but as Albert Einstein supposedly said, âThe definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results.â
But I donât think there is any reason to assume âissuesâ as the reason for lack of admission to an Ivy. I mean⊠if I buy a lottery ticket and donât win, that doesnât mean there was a problem with my ticket, other than it not being the winning number. The top schools turn away many more well-qualified applicants than they admit. They donât have to look for reasons to deny; more often they are looking for affirmative reasons to admit, especially in the RD round. Being a top student with great stats & ECs means that the student will be considered â not that they will be accepted.
Well, thatâs not true for competitive admissions â itâs fairly common that students get admission after a gap year to colleges that didnât accept them the previous year.
Of course there would be some changes in the application the second time around â a different essay, some info about what was being done in the gap year, etc. But my point is that the bigger change is that the entire applicant pool changed the next year â not the overall character of the applicant pool for each school, but the specific students in it, as well as the institutional needs and priorities of each school on a granular level. Maybe one year there is a glut of strong athletes on a schoolâs track team â but then their strongest players graduate and the next year someone with fairly good running times looks a little more attractive.
Itâs not as if all these top schools outright rejected her. The lawsuit complains of not getting âunconditionalâ admission, whatever that means - itâs quite possible that she was waitlisted at multiple schools
Difference between winning the lottery and writing an app that represents 3.5 years if hs plus your present thinking.
From the lawsuit:
âDayo had every expectation of being offered admission to one, or all three (3), of these universities as a college bound student athlete.â
Recruited athletes do not have expectations that they will be admitted to 3 universities. This nonsense is supposed to sway an unsophisticated reader⊠Most probably she was not recruited because her times were not good enough and she did not pass her âbackground checkâ.
However it is not clear why she did not apply to Williams or similar D3 schools as an athletic recruit first time around. They probably believed that Ivies were a lock.
Re #338, the family did not sue Sidwell Friends because the student had a chance at an Ivy and did not get in. The family sued the school on the basis of the adverse actions that were alleged in the lawsuit. I admit that the suit is a one-sided representation. The actual facts of the case will probably never be certain. I still think that the resignation of the headmaster in the same year that Day graduated was probably not a total coincidence, though I grant that it might have been.
We can speculate all we want.
The independent reviewers of the facts, the distinct court judge and appeals court panel, said the info presented was not compelling.
This is all just another thread that has become a place to voice our broader views on some of these topics.
She alleged. She did not prevail. Iâm sure the judges had plenty of info to review. They basically said Sidwell was not guilty.
The SJC will not hear the case.
Speculation and retrying the matter is a bit useless imho.
@QuantMech I appreciate (and have appreciated throughout this thread) your sense of fairness towards a child and a family none of us knows (or at least none of us has admitted to knowing), and your healthy skepticism of inferences people draw based on their own prejudices. That said, sometimes your sense of fairness, and your scientistâs literalism, can get away with you.
Filing and prosecuting a lawsuit, even in local courts for the District of Columbia, entails considerable effort and expense: tens of thousands of dollars of legal fees and costs. Sometimes the plaintiffâs lawyers will work on contingency, but they only do that where there is the prospect of significant monetary damages or a statute giving them the right to attorneyâs fees if they win. Neither was the case here, and without the college debacle there would have barely been any basis for monetary damages at all. Whatâs more, filing the suit imposes really significant costs â often much greater costs â on the defendant. Remember, in this case the defendant spent more than $30,000, not on attorneys, but on things like filing fees and copying documents to give to the plaintiff. With attorneyâs fees, Sidwell is certainly well into six figures on the cost of this lawsuit to it. The Adetu family canât be that far behind that number on their side.
With the possible exception of property-use issues between centimillionaire neighbors in the Hamptons or Malibu, people donât spend that kind of money on trivialities. And thatâs what the breach-of-settlement-agreement claims in this case are: trivialities. Sidwell missed a deadline for recalculating grades. On of the grades may not have been recalculated exactly right. Come on. Without the disappointment over college admission, there was no suit to bring here.
Your points are all well-taken, JHS, and thanks for all of your remarks. The situation as described, even assuming that the familyâs description is 100% correct, is not something that would cause our family to file a lawsuit, even if we had the financial resources that could make that conceivable.
However, I see a particular element of harm here, not connected with college admissions but rather with high school education itself, now that I have understood the math sequences at Sidwell Friends better. The student was not permitted to take Math III, due to her grades in Math II. It is at least doubtful whether the Math II grade was actual or fabricated. Sometimes, if a student misses a great deal of class for some reason or another (sports competitions, performances, ill health), a teacher or professor will give the student the average of scores on tests, quizzes, or problem sets that the student could complete in a timely fashion. I have done that myself on occasion, for students who have been illâbut always with the agreement of the student, which I do not believe would have been obtained in this case.
I think there are high odds that the Math II teacher thought that the student was missing too much due to athletic competitions, which as far as I can tell were not Sidwell varsity competitions (which might be accommodated), but rather travel-team competitions. I think the Math II teacher might have thought that the student could not handle Math III with the same travel schedule. This is not imputing any ill-will to the Math II teacherâjust a realistic, high probability of this reaction, based on the fairly large number of math teachers and math professors I have known.
I grant that the situation might have gone totally awry if the student had been permitted to continue into Math III and had continued the same competition schedule. I also recognize that it would not be realistic for most math teachers to offer the kinds of make-up instruction that might be needed to put a student who misses a number of classes on the same footing with those who donât.
However, I am very much opposed to excluding students from classes based on the presumption that they cannot handle them, particularly in mathematics. Exposure to challenging mathematics at an early age makes a student more capable of dealing with challenges later. I am not a neuroscientist, but I am of the opinion that new neural connections are formed when mathematical challenges are taken on. I also believe that there is a greater benefit when this happens at a younger age.
It has been argued that if the student was really that great at mathematics, she could have taught herself and done fine. (Well, maybe not, if a grade was assigned arbitrarily to a test that was not taken.) But in any case, I donât believe this:
To take an extreme case, if you examine the schools from which the USAMO competitors come, there is a whole lot of duplication, triplication, . . . heptuplication . . . on that list. The quality of preparation for USAMO competition varies wildly from school to school, from none to coaching by former International Math Olympiad Team coaches. It takes truly incredible genius to discover deep mathematics for oneselfâhence the timeline of mathematical discovery. It takes quite a lot of genius to perform well in the IMO. But if one is well coached, it does not take truly incredible genius. The same applies at a much lower level to challenging high school math classes: Discovery for oneself takes substantially more insight than figuring things out once an approach has been limned.
If I had been advising the Adetus, I would have suggested spending the lawsuit money instead on special tutoring to compensate for classes missedâand then donating the remained of the unspent lawsuit money to charity.
Finally, I would like to comment that the Supreme Court not taking the case does not mean that the claims were false or without meritâjust that given the full set of cases in petitions to the Supreme Court, this case did not rise to the level to be heard.
@QuantMech you are certainly right that the Supreme Court declining to take the case means nothing about the merits of the underlying claim. A constant slogan at the Supreme Court is that they are not there to correct errors. If the Supreme Court granted certiorari in every case appealed to it where the lower court had committed a clear error, its docket would be about three times as large as it is.
The trial court and the court of appeals, however, were making judgments on the merits. And the judgments they made were (a) even if all of the Adetusâ fact-based claims were proved, there was no valid legal claim to be pursued, and (b) the case was frivolous and abusive from the outset. Of course, that, too, does not mean that Sidwell Friendsâ conduct was blameless and correct, only that the errors were not something for which a remedy was available in litigation. There was never a trial about the claims, so we really have no idea what Sidwell Friendsâ behavior actually was.
Forget scientific literalism, though. Your last post is as great a romantic fantasy as, say, Titanic.
As I said, I had two kids at a very Sidwell Friends-like school. One hated math, and never did more work than necessary to get a B+. The other loved math, and always got As (and 800s on all of the math SATs, by the way). The school had no trouble at all figuring out that the first kid was meaningfully more able in math than the second . (The second kid hit an absolute wall in college, and even before, when the math got more advanced.) The school had very experienced, sophisticated math teachers â not all of them, but the decisionmakers, yes â and it saw a steady stream of actually very gifted math kids in a variety of guises. The issue of what to do with kids who were more gifted than their teachers was not a rare one; it was something the school dealt with daily, and successfully.
On that basis, I have a great deal of trouble buying the idea that the math teachers at Sidwell Friends misunderstood what a strong math student Dayo was and punished her in petty ways for missing classes for club travel-team sports. Or that they failed to pursue ways to help her keep up notwithstanding her absences. That doesnât ring true at all. She might have had one small-minded teacher, but two or three? No.
Assumes facts not in evidence. IME in HS, I was required to do all the work. Yes, there were accommodations due to team travel, but the work still had to get done. Whether itâs different at Sidwell is something most of us have no first-hand knowledge of.I certainly donât.
I agree with you, but there is no indication that Dayo was (or was not) on USAMO caliber level. And the point that many people seem to overlook is that she was not bounced down to the âMath for Dummiesâ class; instead of taking Math III,she had to take Calc 1, which leads to Calc 2 instead of Math IV. The end result of either sequence is preparation for the AP Calc BC exam. Yes, Math IV is teaches more proofs than is needed for BC, but thatâs not, IMO, the end of the world,and would not prevent her from taking more advanced classes in college.
And this is all without touching upon other facts we donât know, like class size maximums, course/teacher scheduling. etc. For a variety of reasons,many of us were unable to take a course we wanted in HS or college, but the sun still came up every day.
I am not claiming that Dayo was a great math student, just that excluding her from Math III most likely limited her mathematical growth. To succeed in engineering in college one needs to be a good math student, but there is no requirement to be a mathematical genius. So the actual impact as far as what she really wanted may have been small.
I am also not saying that Dayo was being punished for missing classes for sports. Rather, that the missed classes did actually affect how much she could learn without some compensatory instructionâtotally independent of whether she took the test that had an assigned grade of 79 or not. She could be a reasonably strong math student, just not Galois, and still have needed more instruction at the Math II stage than she was getting. Having time to mull over thisâit took me a whileâfinally led me to the conclusion that a math tutor probably would have been the answer in this case.
Re the importance that people may attach to early, challenging math: I had a Ph.D. student from China who had survived the Great Leap Forward. When his son was in school in the U.S., the son qualified for advanced Saturday math classes. My Ph.D. student remarked to his son, âThat is like more food for you.â I doubt that anyone on the courts saw access to Math III in that way. I also tend to doubt that the Adetus saw Math III in that way.
I am probably more sensitive than most to the exclusion issue, because my mother wanted to take physics in high school (in the U.S.), and she was not permitted to do so. Only boys were permitted to take physics at the school. Public school, small college town, she was valedictorian, and perfectly capable of handling high school physics.
As a practical matter, I would have to agree that there was nothing much that was legally remediable here.
âHowever, I see a particular element of harm here, not connected with college admissions but rather with high school education itself.â I donât think you âseeâ it. I think you worry it could happen. But thatâs not evident here. The thing that gets me about âscientificâ approach is itâs meant to be rational, facts as they are. Not the related emotions.
Same for, âIt is at least doubtful whether the Math II grade was actual or fabricated.â Or, âSometimes, if a student misses a great deal of class for some reason or anotherâŠâ
No evidence.
It is just as possible she was a middle of the pack math student. And since when is taking calculus a liability? Itâs not the highest SF track but not a loss.
We canât frame this based on her parents thinking she was gifted in math. Iâd suggest standing back and not making this so personal to us.