Yes, probability laws do not include the subjectivity of AO’s 
But I do imagine 10 rejections feels a lot worse than one or two.
This is why I hate seeing kids who have one safety and then 10+ reaches. That isn’t a balanced list. The model we followed was 25% safeties, 50% targets, 25% reaches. And we were super clear with our D to just assume rejection from the reaches and to never take it personally. Colleges are balancing out a class, nothing less, nothing more.
And, Ivy day is a long standing tradition and no one should be surprised to learn about that after the fact.
Know your own psyche and that of your kids. If you/they can’t handle rejection, have the list be mostly safeties.
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I think you’re taking your experience in your area and extrapolating it without hard evidence that its representatively broadly. It sounds like you live and your wife works in a district where someone can helicopter parent bully their kid’s way was into a gifted program, but that doesn’t mean that’s the norm everywhere or most places. Where my kids go to school the gifted program is much harder to qualify for than my experience decades ago, and the program is smaller. When I was in HS it was exceptional to know kids with over 1500 on their SAT’s. Now my kids public high schools has at least 50+ kids a year at that level (often getting that score by Sophomore year) and 15+ National Merit Semi-finalists a year. My HS’s gifted program topped out at Calc and Physics (and a few kids took local community college classes their senior year). My kids public HS has kids get through AP Calc BC sometimes in sophomore year and occasionally after freshman year, move onto the HS’s multivariable calc and linear algebra classes, then classes at a major university. Almost half the kids in AP Physics C are Juniors, who also sometimes head to university physics after. All of which requires 5’s on all their AP’s. So unless your thesis is that the SAT and AP scores and the rigor of the nearby elite universities college science courses are also massively watered down, these kids aren’t getting artificially inflated by our “everyone’s a winner” society. They are legitimately in a competitive environment.
I’ll give you grade inflation, at HS and college. That’s a statistical fact, though there are schools that don’t play that game.
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I thought everyone knew the SAT scores have been watered down. The College Board publicly announced they had to “re-center” scores several times.
High performing students are indeed competing at higher levels than ever, but massive numbers of kids now think they are high performing when they really are not, due to grade and score inflation.
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Many parents don’t realize that the “exceptional” scores and GPA are the result of re-centering and are in fact pretty common.
And this is part of the reason so many think their kids should be getting admitted to any number of schools.
And hence the disappointment…
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Ok, ok, I have solved the problem of Ivy Day and college admissions. 
This is what needs to happen:
- Schools provide stats for accepted and rejected students.
- If schools admit by major, they provide admit rate info by range of student stats, as per California publics
- Schools state admission and rejection rates. For instance: 18% of applicants are accepted; 82% are waitlisted or rejected.
I’m ambivalent about which of the two options below I prefer for how college admissions would happen. Perhaps the colleges will take a vote?
One Deadline Option
• Rolling admissions schools render decisions (with financial aid) within two months of application submission
• One application deadline of November 1, and all decisions released (with financial aid) by March 1. Enrollment decisions by May 1.
• All merit aid is disclosed by March 1. Students may be told that they are alternates for a scholarship (i.e. if a student offered a scholarship turns down the school, the scholarship may be given to an alternate).
• Schools have the option to accept applications after November 1 with students understanding they may not receive their results by March 1.
Two Rounds Option
• There are two time-sensitive decision options.
• Fall Decision would allow students to submit a limited number of applications (max of 6-10?) by September 1. Schools would release their decisions (no deferrals) with financial & merit aid by November 1. Students would have until January 1 to accept or reject an admission.
• Spring Decision would not have a limit on the number of applications. Applications would need to be submitted by January 15 (by which point colleges would know how their freshman class is currently looking) with decisions (waitlists allowed) & financial aid released by March 15. Students would have until May 1 to accept or reject an admission.
• Schools have the option to accept applications after January 15 with students understanding that they may not receive their results by March 15.
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There are two reasons for this. One is obviously the preparation students do for the test. The other though is that the scoring has gotten easier.
Oops: just saw @roycroftmom addressed the scoring issue.
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I agree with Rickle. I saw this in my kids district and I see it at my current school. It’s out of control.
Parents get lawyers to get their kids into GT.
Parents override teacher recommendations and get their kids into AP, and then complain that the class is too difficult and the teacher is bad.
Parents override teacher recommendations and rather than put their child in regular classes in 8th grade, they put them in honors. Then… they complain that it’s being taught on a level that is too high for honors and blame the teacher.
Junior year parents get mad at the guidance counselor for not recommending higher ranked schools to apply to. I know several kids who wanted to apply to Ivy League schools and were given a list of schools such as Elon, etc. Some of these kids walked out in tears because the guidance counselor was being honest.
These kids apply to Ivy League schools (and other high ranking schools) and are rejected.
The problem begins long before Ivy day, as I noted earlier.
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How exactly does that work? What do the lawyers do? Sue GT?
They threaten to sue the district, and the GT teachers are told to accept the students.
Some parents continue to complain until the school gives in.
The SAT has changed over time and this Wikipedia article details many of the changes (please let me know if you find a better source). But to provide some context to the discussion of how scores have increased:
1995 recentering: The mean in the early 90s was around 900, and it was designed to be 1000. Also, there were gaps at the high end where a perfect raw score didn’t necessarily get an 800. Also, about 1.5% of test-takers would have scored below a 200 on the verbal section, but the SAT indicated that 200 was the floor. This calculator shows what the original SAT scores and what the recentered scores would be.
Certain educational organizations viewed the SAT re-centering initiative as an attempt to stave off international embarrassment in regards to continuously declining test scores, even among top students. As evidence, it was presented that the number of pupils who scored above 600 on the verbal portion of the test had fallen from a peak of 112,530 in 1972 to 73,080 in 1993, a 36% backslide, despite the fact that the total number of test-takers had risen by over 500,000.[217]
2005-2016 was when a writing section was added and the SAT was out of a 2400 point total.
When the test returned to the 1600 point model there were some changes which many might consider as making it an “easier” test.
2016 changes, including the return to a 1600-point score
Some of the major changes were: an emphasis on the use of evidence to support answers, a shift away from obscure vocabulary to words that students are more likely to encounter in college and career, an optional essay, questions having four rather than five answer options, and the removal of penalty for wrong answers (rights-only scoring).[239][240] …The scope of mathematics content was narrowed to include fewer topics, including linear equations, ratios, and other precalculus topics. … As the test no longer deducts points for wrong answers, the numerical scores and the percentiles appeared to have increased after the new SAT was unveiled in 2016.
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“I also second the opinion that there should be a national RD college decision day on March 1 for those schools that don’t participate in rolling admissions. Kids will have 2 months to figure out where they want to go.”
Seems to work for boarding schools. We knew when we’d know and could plan around it.
I also think it would encourage many schools to have rolling admissions which I find very attractive when adding them to our list of potential schools. My son’s first choice school has rolling admissions which would allow us to withdraw our applications from other schools if he gets in before their decisions are released. Win/win for schools that play games to try to protect their yield and choose to release on a national decision day.
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Wow…how is that possible?!
I am not much of a stats person, either. But my best guess is to look at any citations in the Wikipedia article that was linked above.
SAT also used to:
- Have 5 choices instead of 4 for every question.
- Penalize the test-taker a fraction of a point for each incorrect answer to discourage guessing.
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Yep, thanks for highlighting that for those who missed it in my longer post.
Though I agreed with what you said. I observed anxiety among middle class parents as well. Those parents will discourage passions which especially not lead to decent paying jobs. Consider the potential student debt, many families will strive for the merits and schools with career prospect. And those schools tend to be the tippy top schools (or at least according to the rankings website)
If there are ways to justify this “mythology” or marketing. Especially from career, jobs perspective. Even here in CC, you still get the messages that certain jobs only hiring within their “alma mater network”. (i.e. the selective ones)
Oops. Didn’t catch that you already mentioned these.
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But the same can be said about MANY schools, not just the Ivy League. The myth is that these are the only schools where that happens. They aren’t. Students can be successful by taking all sorts of paths. It’s WAY more about the individual than it is about the institution.
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A lot of decisions can be driven by the fears. Fear of not finding any job, fear of bearing debt for long time and unable to find a decent job to pay back…
What I am saying is, hopefully no matter what schools they choose, they won’t end up stuck with debt and no job. I believe one of the mythology is you can only sustain after graduation if you get into tippy top school (for the network) or certain majors.
At least when I am hiring, I don’t really look at the school names. But some of the CC posts says the opposite.
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