<p>I got "A is for Admission" by Michele Hernandez for Christmas and I'm almost finished it. According to the book, I have an academic index of 228 which places me in the 8 out of 9 category. Now, Hernandez says that 92% of Academic 8s are accepted to Dartmouth, yet I don't feel that my chances are that good. Is the academic index still a really important factor in admissions decisions?</p>
<p>“A is for Admissions” is dated. It came out in 1997 and was about Hernandez’s experiences several years earlier at Dartmouth. There is a lot of basically useless stuff about the AI in the book which is an “Academic Index” that Ivies use to decide whether or not they can accept an athlete for the team even though he has less stellar academics. (The only input to the AI are SAT I, SAT II, and class rank.) She says in “A is for Admissions” that you should never use the Common App, but she modifies this in “Acing the College Application”. I have other problems with “A is for Admissions”. In chapter 1, she complains that most members of Ivy adcoms do not have Ivy degrees and so you will be judged by people who are not as smart as you are (or her). Her attitude in a lot of places is that Ivy adcoms are the guardian of Social Darwinism and that nobody can have a better goal than getting into an Ivy. She also tends to ignore the fact that there are only so many slots open and that there isn’t room for all of the qualified applicants. On the other hand, I like “Acing the College Application” a lot. I particularly like advice about using an activity-list in the same format as the chart in the application instead of attaching a resume. In short, “Acing the College Application” is good and “A is for Admissions” is dated (and in my own opinion, bad).</p>
<p>Human chancers on CC are better than “A is for Admissions” or “Acing the College Application”… simply because they are dated.</p>