<p>This will probably be a topic of interest for all the recent applicants and parents of recent applicants.</p>
<p>Hard to believe that essays are more important than teacher recs.</p>
<p>^My thoughts exactly, but I think there are a lot of not very useful teacher recommendations out there that just make everyone sound the same.</p>
<p>Essays are more important because it is the students’ voice. A recommendation is a teacher’s voice and usually it is an unoriginal copy of the recommendation the teacher gave to all 500 of his/her students.</p>
<p>I actually think it only right that essays count for more than teacher recs. Look at kids who attend large public hs - their teachers will use a hs form - check a few boxes in various categories - and then write a paragraph. And I’m not faulting the teachers - when they have 650 kids in a graduating class - what else do they have time to do? Contrast that with students at a private hs - who might get a 2-page narrative letter from their teacher. It’s just not a level playing field.</p>
<p>The essay gives each applicant an equal chance to express themselves and who they are. Yes, I know that some parents will hire an essay coach for their student - it’s not perfect - but I like the idea that after submitting the dry credentials - GPA and test scores - the students have the opportunity to make themselves come alive and reveal their hopes, dreams, quirks, etc. I would agree with the college admissions person quoted in the article that reading the essay would be the most enjoyable aspect of reviewing the file.</p>
<p>Over at the Washington Post a few months ago, CC was discussing this article, which gives a different point of view:</p>
<p>[To</a> get the real star students, college admissions should look beyond SATs](<a href=“http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/11/19/AR2010111902997.html?hpid=sec-education]To”>http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/11/19/AR2010111902997.html?hpid=sec-education)</p>
<p>From the article linked to in the OP:
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<p>I would disagree – I think that Mr. Humility, Slimmed-Down Boy and Tofu Girl may be having great college careers precisely because of the level of personal insight they have and happened to demonstrate with their essays. The one thing their essays had in common was that they were <em>not</em> focused on trying to impress the ad coms by their accomplishments, but instead revealing some aspect of how they handled a challenge or processed information around them.</p>
<p>Given the uniformly high GPAs & stellar tests scores that ad coms see, it’s hard to know which are the young people who will make the best additions to the college community, not only for their own abilities, but for the contribution they will bring to their classes and to the campus. It’s no wonder, in my mind, that the ad coms at those top colleges seem to remember most fondly the revelatory or self-deprecatory essays – it gave them a picture of the applicant as human being that was otherwise lost among the numbers and the accolades. </p>
<p>Obviously, that sort of thing can be faked as well – but I don’t know by what other measure the author would expect, given that the he concedes that “elite colleges are flooded with qualified applicants [with] A averages and test scores in the 98th percentile.” </p>
<p>I do think that the author is revealing his own insecurity – that is, he is feeling intimidated by the anecdotes at the college information session, uncertain if his smart but sometimes inarticulate 11th graders will be able to pass that hurdle. But I think he’s missing the message – hopefully his kids will get it. The ad coms really just want to see the applicants relax and have a little fun with the essays, to not be afraid of candor. They aren’t looking for the perfect essay, they are just offering up the opportunity for the kid to share something about themselves.</p>
<p>“Essays are more important because it is the students’ voice.”</p>
<p>^^ Yeah - - but with editing (or other assistance) from parents or an admissions coach/counselor. I have stopped requestnig writing samples from job applicants in large part b/c there’s no way to know whether (or to what extend) the submission is actually the candidate’s work, or whether it hasbeen heavily it was edited (or otherwise improved by assistance from professor, ta, peer tutor or the campus writing center staff).</p>
<p>I have had the impression for years that the essay is the most important part of your application. Everything else (GPA, recs, ECs) is similarly spectacular across the board!
I agree with almost everything in the article, EXCEPT for the proposition that high school students have not been taught to write in the first person.</p>
<p>The vast majority of my writing assignments up until 11th grade were personal narratives (“write about a time when you faced a challenge.”) Then I got into AP English and even then, we wrote some personal narratives. At least in my experience, students very well prepared to write a first-person college essay.</p>
<p>One group of students who may be poorly prepared to write a personal essay is those who have gone through the IB program.</p>
<p>IB students write extensively, but they are carefully trained not to incorporate anything personal into their writing. Everything they write is very academic and formal. Heaven help the IB student who puts something into an English essay about how a piece of literature was particularly meaningful to him/her because it related in some way to the student’s own life. That sort of thing is strictly forbidden.</p>
<p>For an IB student, writing in one’s own voice about one’s own experiences goes against everything they’ve been taught.</p>
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<p>I agree completely. Teacher recs are not very useful, IMO. </p>
<p>My kids both got into top 20 schools and I am <em>firmly</em> convinced it was all about the essay, as their stats and EC’s were in range but not earth-shattering. The essay is where you stand out from the crowd, IMO.</p>
<p>I’m pretty sure it was the essays that got my son into Tufts. One of his essays was a very lighthearted description of his work helping to archive our neighborhood association’s papers. He wrote a very funny description of the fight of the neighborhood parents to keep open classrooms in the elementary and how the incomplete information he got from this one sided look at local history made him feel like a real historian. Then he really had fun with an optional essay where he was asked to re-imagine US history if the US had lost at Yorktown. Those two essays really gave the admissions officers a chance to see that this particular mostly B+ student did have the potential to be more when he got excited about a subject. He’d never had to write a personal essay before, or at least not in years, but he did understand exactly what the game was. (Better than his older brother who is on the surface smarter, but has fewer people skills.)</p>
<p>I thought the admissions officers we heard on the subject of the essay were pretty reassuring. What we heard was that most essays are pretty boring, but that if you write a good one it can make a difference. My son felt the essay was the one part of the application he really had control over and that it wasn’t too late too fix.</p>
<p>I’m also fairly sure that my kids’ essays got them into their colleges (highly ranked LAC and ivy). There was nothing about them to make them stand out otherwise; high SATs but uneven SAT 2’s, high GPAs from a non-competitive high school, few APs, no extraordinary EC’s, though they liked the things they did a lot. I think that teacher recs and essays were the deciding factors for them. Both are good writers, I think because both are ravenous readers so they know what good writing should sound like.</p>
<p>At large public hs, are all the teachers necessarily good enough writers to write a meaningful recommendation esp for an elite college? I don’t think so. I think you’ll get a lot of the “Billy is an excellent student, very motivated, participates in class and would be a strong addition to your fine university, I heartily recommend him” vague type of reco.</p>
<p>One of my D’s teachers read his rec letter to me (did not ask him to). It was clearly written on behalf of this particular student. So while there are many teachers who do the same letter over and over—there are those who do not. </p>
<p>In fact, he had written two different letters on her behalf – one for two of the schools, and the other for the rest. He felt these two particular schools would respond better to the things he said in their letter.</p>
<p>I would just say to the kids, choose your teacher for these things very carefully.</p>
<p>Perhaps, Pizzagirl. But by all reports, that’s not the kind of letters my students got. S had a math teacher who teared up when she talked about how much she enjoyed having him in class. D’s experiences were similar. When she transfered, the head of guidance (who was never her guidance counselor, but hers had left) wrote one that referenced very specific things about her (like though she never played drums in school, she had a set of drums in our attic (only place they fit) where she taught herself how to play.) I have no doubt that they got dream recs from their instructors, despite how large and “ordinary” the school was.</p>
<p>Now my H teaches there, and he interviews every student for at least an hour, no matter how much he knows them in class, to be sure that he writes far more than “Billy is an excellent student.”</p>
<p>Edit: to add, I agree with JRZmom–choose your recommenders carefully.</p>
<p>Haha, my S’s French teacher showed me her reco for him (I hadn’t asked, she volunteered) and it was all about what a hard worker he was and I thought, well, that’s the kiss of death, and asked her to provide some specifics she had observed to illustrate the points she was making about him. Don’t forget that for many schools, the teacher reco can indeed be more boilerplate (“Billy is a fine student”), but I felt quite aware that S was competing with a heavy-duty pool including lots of private school students whose teachers were very aware of how to craft recommendations and work the process.</p>
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<p>I think that’s key – he presumably had some insight that College A and B would respond to a message of X, and Colleges C - F wouldn’t. I’m not sure I believe my kids’ teachers would have that level of sophistication. The teachers, for the most part, came from the local directional state schools with degrees in education. They didn’t come from or ever live on the east coast, for example. They weren’t going to have enough familiarity with different colleges to make those educated guesses that this one would respond to that message. To them, these were all “oh, a bunch of good schools.”</p>
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<p>With a combination of SAT Writing and Essay, it very much shows the real or the fake student’s Essay. If adcom has any suspicious cloud, they can check it out. With the way Tufts and Chicago practices Essay Strategy, Essay is very good tool</p>
<p>PG–we could’ve been lucky that way. though low-ranked, Title 1 school, ours has a number of teachers with heavy hitting degrees (guidance counselor head did her grad work at Harvard, an MD and a PHD in the bio department, S’s English prof senior year had a PHD in Psych and english degrees, band director was PHD in music, etc). I think even the local state ed school grads, if they were smart in general, figured out what was necessary to do those kinds of recs right. Of course, some of them never would, but my kids were very good at discerning who had a clue.</p>