<p>Does anyone have any stories of kids who somehow got into big reach school or was surprised by a college acceptance?</p>
<p>Thanks.</p>
<p>I'd love to hear some of these, too. I also hope I can be one of them...</p>
<p>My first regular-action college decision was an acceptance to MIT. I honestly did not believe that I had a snowball's chance in hell of being accepted to MIT and was applying on a whim - I liked science and research, it had been recommended that I apply to 10 schools and I only had 9, I wanted a school with a big name in the science world (at the time I wanted to go to med school and thought it would help me get in). So I figured I might as well give it a shot. </p>
<p>I have rarely been as surprised in my life. :)</p>
<p>If anyone does have a surprise acceptance story, and if the student accepted the offer of enrollment at the extreme reach school, I would also like to hear what it was like to attend a college where your credentials were well below those of the average student.</p>
<p>It seems to me that for some people, this could be a very difficult experience.</p>
<p>DD1 applied ED to NYU. No one thought she had a chance. Grades and scores were definitely on the low side. No real ECs. </p>
<p>She graduated in 4 years with double major in Journalism and Fine Arts and a minor in Irish Studies with a 3.4. She had very good internships in publishing and was hired before graduation at a major publishing house.</p>
<p>There were very few meltdowns over the difficulty of the work. She complained more about being poor.</p>
<p>I was waitlisted by Amherst, Williams, Swarthmore, and Middlebury, and rejected by Princeton and the University of Chicago. Imagine my surprise when I received not only an acceptance letter from Dartmouth, but also a "need-based endowed scholarship":
[quote]
Based on your outstanding record, accomplishments, and promise, you are one of a select group of entering students assigned to one of Dartmouth's need-based endowed scholarships. While Dartmouth College does not award merit-based aid, the more generous packaging of these endowed scholarship awards represents our modest attempt to recognize the significant achievements of those most highly recommended by the Admissions Office. These funds are made possible through the generosity of individual alumni, Dartmouth Clubs, and other friends of the College, many of whom take a keen personal interest in the students designated for this honor.</p>
<p>As a result, your need-based award has been packaged with $450 less self-help (job and/or subsidized loan) and $450 more scholarship assistance. Your self-help may be further reduced by other achievement related outside scholarships which you may receive. This more favorable packaging will continue througout your Dartmouth undergraduate career, assuming you maintain your anticipated high level of academic achievement and continue to demonstrate financial need. You will be notified of your specific scholarship assignment at a later date. Read the enclosed materials for other details and conditions of your award.</p>
<p>Please accept my warmest congratulations<img src="Stats%20are%20%5Burl=%22http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/princeton-university/302463-tomorrow-we-will-run-faster-stretch-out-our-arms-further-one-fine-morning.html%22%5Dhere%5B/url%5D,%20if%20anyone's%20interested.%20I%20was%20far%20from%20spectacular." alt="/quote"></p>
<p>My friend's D had a similar story - she had OK SAT's - mid 1200's for CR/M. Took challenging courses in HS (honors, AP). I am not sure of GPA/Rank, but she was accepted with scholarship to Cornell, waitlisted or rejected at the other schools she applied to - Villanova, SUNY Geneseo, Syracuse and accepted to SUNY/Buffalo. So her absolute reach school was the one she was accepted at and one that made the most sense financially. Go figure........</p>
<p>cameliasinensis' SAT scores: 800 CR, 760 M, 710 W -- not too shabby....</p>
<p>fendrock: True, but my extracurriculars were hardly Ivy-caliber (or at least I didn't think so at the time), and most of my writing was incredibly self-indulgent.</p>
<p>D applied Yale SCEA and was outright rejected from the get-go. She figured that she didn't have the "IT factor" for admission to a super-selective IVY. We were all surprised when she was accepted by Harvard on the RD round with basically the same application. Go figure...</p>
<p>Based on her stats and her writing ability/thought processes as demonstrated here, if cameliasinensis was "far from spectacular", she was about equally far (in the other direction) from "merely great". The surprise in that story is all the other schools. Dartmouth got it right.</p>
<p>Can I share a story of a literal surprise admission?</p>
<p>There was a talk show in the 90s called The Jenny Jones Show that once did a special on college admission. They had two students from California there talking about how much they wanted to go to USC. Suddenly, out came the USC marching band followed by Duncan Murdoch, then Dean of Admission. Duncan presented each with an acceptance letter (and I think a scholarship, but I don't remember that detail). </p>
<p>Pretty interesting way to get the news, isn't it?</p>
<p>After hearing that story, I scoured the web to find video without luck. I hope it makes its way to Youtube someday.</p>
1 Like
<p>"Need based endowed scholarship" sure sounds like a merit scholarship to me. Is that their way of skirting the Ivy League requirements?</p>
<p>Probably more "surprise rejection" stories than "surprise acceptances," but those don't publicized to quite the same degree.... ;)</p>
<p>Well some "surprise rejections" no doubt are the consequence of the "strategic admissions" strategy in which a college decides that an applicant is, for some reason or other, not likely to enroll if admitted. The research paper on "revealed preference rankings" shows how even some top name schools (including ivies) seem to employ strategic admissions.</p>
<p>"I would also like to hear what it was like to attend a college where your credentials were well below those of the average student."</p>
<p>When I went to Bryn Mawr, my credentials were very far below the average student there -- good scores, but mostly F's my last two years of high school. </p>
<p>Although BMC was not a good fit in some ways, I ended up near the top of my class academically during my time there. So I think you have to look at WHY the student's credentials are lower than average, as colleges do. Some C students aren't that bright; others are very bright and their credentials don't reflect it for one reason or another.</p>
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So I think you have to look at WHY the student's credentials are lower than average, as colleges do. Some C students aren't that bright; others are very bright and their credentials don't reflect it for one reason or another.
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<p>That's a very good point, Hanna. A student who received poor grades or poor test scores in high school for reasons that are unlikely to affect success in college -- such as a personal or medical problem that has since been resolved -- is in a different situation from one who was performing at his or her best in high school but still earning credentials well below the college's average.</p>
<p>I was talking to a pharmacy student today. His class had 700 plus students. There are only 125 left ( add another 150 who came in mid-stream for their second degree). He had a sub 1100 SAT and a so-so HS GPA. In HS he was into cycling, but not his school work. Now he's near the top of his class, while those with the great credentials flunked out. This story is not directly related to the initial post, but it is a data point that suports the old adage that the purpose of the 25th HS reunion is to confirm that HS GPA and SAT/ACT scores are not great predictors, though many have wrongly accepied and internalized the conclusions of these measures; that they do not have what it takes. I have seen plenty of marginal HS students bury those with the great credentials in the classroom. I say this as someone who never broke 1100 on the SAT and was in the bottom fifth of my HS class. I was into baseball, football, and reading what I wanted to read - not what I was told to read. None of the universities or colleges that I have been a prof at would have accepted me out of HS. My S is a marginal HS student, as he gets up at 5:30 to lift for football and gets home at 8PM from theater practice. He also fences and maintains a political blog; little energy left to do the more tedious homework assignments (zero) and certainly no time left to study for the SAT (the SAT is just a run-of-the-mill aptitude test - to study for it is antithetical to its intended purpose). But I have no doubt that he could handle any college. He is certainly more interesting than all the dime-a-dozen 'distinguished honors' students that were in my classroom today. All that he needs to do is schedule more time for studying when he goes to college. Another story: the only college that my wife could get into was a two-year college. She went on to out-publish most of her associates at a major big-ten university. How does the old Bob Dylan verse go? "we all meet again on the way down".</p>
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I would also like to hear what it was like to attend a college where your credentials were well below those of the average student.
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I'm sure people on the board are tired of hearing this, but my D (SATs: 580 M, 620 CR) was accepted to Barnard & U. of Chicago; is at Barnard taking about half her courses at Columbia, and is doing fine, with a GPA well above 3.8</p>
<p>Her biggest surprise? The realization, early on in her first semester, that she was probably somewhere in the top third in terms of ability -- that is, she was having an easier time grasping concepts than most of her classmates. </p>
<p>I have to say that I agree with briansteffy about SAT scores -- I think that they have very little value and reflect artificial test-taking skills more than anything else, and it has virtually nothing to do with the type of deep level thinking and analysis required at the college level. </p>
<p>If anything its probably an advantage for a student to go into college thinking that they have a challenge ahead -- those students probably put in more effort from the start, and so they don't make the mistakes that may over-confident students to stumble.</p>
<p>Before he entered Presidential politics, Ralph Nader wa zeroing-in on the SAT. I wish he would have sustained the work. As I have joked elsewhere, 100 years from now people will chuckle at our obsession with such pseudo-science, much the same way that we now chuckle at those, a century ago, who thought that they could predict intelligence by the contour of the skull. The SAT has little predictive validity; it, however, has 'utility' (as this term is used by both economists and psychometricians). The family pays for it, and colleges have a near no-cost device to rationalize and justify decisions. But this does not mean that the decisions are correct. Not only are there issues re: who can afford to take the prep classes or who has the time to study for it, but it presumes a very narrow construct definition of aptitude. That career decisions are made with this device borders on corruption. Further, as you state, the extent to which it correlates with college GPA may be largely explained away as 'common methods variance'; some perform well on tests and some do not, which begs the obvious question, to what exactly do the tests constructed by profs, upon which the GPA is derived, adequately measure knowledge acquisition. The 'science' is dismal. But it's better than random selection - that's it, a bit better than random selection. And, of course, it is a very efficient, low-cost selection tool, required by an institution not blessed with slack resources. The more radical voice in my head argues that the collective work of the SAT, GRE, LSAT, etc. has done much to systematically sort-out the 'best and brightest' (if defined as multi-dimensional - tacit sense, leadership, wisdom, interdisciplinary thinking, etc.) from the professions, partially explaining the dismal state of legal, medical, and business practice today. This is not to condemn those who test well and 'make the grades', but to condemn a dismal science of selection that produces so many false-negative decisions.<br>
Imagine a college that sincerely pursues rigorous education (I mean seriously) with high expectations regarding everyday residential life. The college is small, or it is a large university disagregated into small collegiate sub-institutions (though on the same campus) Say the college RANDOMLY accepts students, with some minimal criteria (SAT=1000; 2.5 GPA; passion in one EC). I would rather send my kid to this school, rather than one crowded with 1400-plus SAT's and 3.85 GPAs, but where the profs are largely focused on their research (lots of it a waste of intellectual capital, but required to get a promotion and a decent merit adjustment in pay), and 'student life' is largely ignored, which is often the case (the lowest priority and the lowest paid salaries on campus). I would hope that employers would gravitate to this hypothetical college.</p>