It seems to people here that it’s unthinkable that students wouldn’t know how this works. My kid attends a Title 1 school that houses a magnet program for gifted students. His guidance counselor sees 450 kids. Students have to make an appointment at least two weeks in advance to get a 10 minute appointment. They are lucky if they manage to get two of those in a year. Many of the students are first generation college students, so this is the first time the parents have ever navigated the process at all. The kids and parents are getting the letters from the schools and believing what they see “1) Anybody can afford to go to XYZ college, 2) We think you’d be a great fit for XYZ college, etc.” When it’s time to apply, they send everything in and they are shocked when they find out that none of them were successful and they end up here, perhaps for that first post. We all know how that ends up.
Be grateful that you knew how to do all of this. Be grateful that your child went to a school where there was access to tools that would help in the process. Be grateful the school was staffed adequately to give the students and parents advice on how to select colleges. Say a little prayer of thanksgiving that you weren’t dealt the same cards as the kids in the first paragraph.
It’s not applicable everywhere, but I do think the people sometimes fail to focus on exactly how highly qualified the admitted students at the super elite schools are.
Yale’s website notes that if you’re on campus last fall as a freshman, and your Math SAT was 700, you rank between the 11th and 12th percentile within your class. About nine out of ten of the people around you scored higher.
For the verbal section, the same 700 gets you to about the 14th percentile.
Even if you scored 790 and 770, you’re still only at the 75th percentile.
What doesn’t come through on the website is that, after you look at the scores, the kids who are admitted and attend all have off-the-charts non-academic talents and achievements.
So I think a lot of the griping just comes from not grasping how truly competitive the admissions process is. That, plus human nature in resolving cognitive dissonance. It is true that the system is rigged, but not the way that most people infer when they hear that comment.
@dadx I think you are right, and I think a lot of the problem stems from people not understanding statistics (or more specifically, the facts behind them). Students seem to think “I’m in the top 1% of my HS class” or “I’m in the 99th percentile on the SAT” = automatically getting accepted at MIT or a similar school with a low acceptance rate. But the fact is that the populations are different – for instance, you could be 99th percentile among all people taking the SAT but 25th percentile among people applying to MIT. There’s a lot of self-selection here, which some students seem not to comprehend. (See also the score distribution for the AP test for Calc BC – there’s a reason why more than 40% of takers get a 5, and it’s not because the test is easy.)
And, while MIT may not be looking only at SAT scores, if it’s only accepting 6% or 7% of applicants and your SAT puts you in the 25th percentile… you are probably not getting accepted.
Honestly IRL I’ve never heard anything like these excuses. Rejection is always disappointing, and maybe even hurtful, but…IRL, we have to pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and move on. If rejection from a so-called dream school is the worst rejection our kids will experience in life, well, I consider that a blessing!
I agree that I almost never see kids use these excuses. And some of them are very valid.
Internationals who need tremendous amounts of fin aid or merit to attend a decent college do indeed face massively bad odds.
I feel sorry for them and am thankful that I and my kids weren’t and will not be in their situation.
I’m not sure what type of human being you are if you sneer at kids in that plight.
^^ Agree - not sure the intention of the thread but it feels like mocking the students/parents. BTW many of the “excuses”/blaming has an element of truth. Everyone recognizes the difficulty of getting in tippy tops and have safeties to fallback. “Blame game” is a way for many of these talented teenagers to deal with disappointment - I see that all most all (at least most) of them quickly get over it and thrive where they go - they even learn a few life lessons along the way. But in the first few days after the results - if they take some comfort in ‘blame game’ cut them some slack.
Also by dismissing some of these as blame game or excuses (viz. buying seats; paying college coaches etc) it even sounds like we should just accept these malpractices.
There are both reasons and excuses on the list - the OP invited “explanations”, which could be either. No one is arguing that there aren’t fully legitimate explanations on the list.
The only ones being poked fun at are those who bribed their way in, and I don’t have much in the way of sympathy for them.
@ccprofandmomof2 I’m not offended - it’s difficult to laugh and cry at the same time, so let’s have a little levity when talking about what has become an often inscrutable and sometimes soul-crushing process.
I guess I shouldn't have answered the "If you were a plant, what kind of plant would you be?" question with, "A mushroom, living in the dark and feeding on refuse"
@hs2020dad “not sure the intention of the thread but it feels like mocking the students/parents.”
How is listing the most commonly referenced explanations (you used the term excuses) mocking? Are you suggesting these assertions aren’t made frequently? My intention was to consolidate them in one place to provide a perspective on both the grain of truth in each and the often mutual exclusivity of several coexisting with some levity sprinkled in.
FYI This was posted on the parents forum as it is exclusively parents I hear express these views. I can’t think of one instance where a kid “explained” their results at the expense of another group of people or say in retrospect “the system is broken”. That is an adult conclusion and coping mechanism in my experience. Kids tend to be more introspective and understandably emotional in expressing their disappointment. Parents however seem to seek a reason, explanation, logic or scapegoat on behalf of their kids.
It is true that the system is rigged, but not the way that most people infer when they hear that comment.