I agree. The behind the scenes emails and stats that schools send to students and parents can be helpful.
DA began to address the wl issue the next year per a memo posted here a few months ago
Can you elaborate ?
DA has realized that itâs not a good practice to keep unqualified candidates as wlisters and decided to trim the the number. Thatâs what I remembered from that memo. In the same memo thereâs also an interesting piece of information. It listed number of acceptances by ssat scores. I was surprised to see about 5% of the students scored below 30th percentile.
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thank you for the valuable sharing.
Wow! Defensive. Chill out! I am just offering my perspective because I received a lot of good info on this site during the process. I was responding to @cateCAparent and agreeing. I was then adding my view. There are so many subjective lists/rankings. Which do you use? Do your due diligence and find the right fit. Thatâs all Iâm implying.
This thread is named Good, bad, and ugly. The ugly is, many kids on this site focus on the GLADCHEMMS, to an unhealthy level, only to be disappointed. They are all great schools, and many other excellent schools that are not on the GLADCHEMMS exist. My point on Taft, it is not a GLADCHEMMS, and we loved it. It was a good fit for our daughter, and she loved it. Maybe my insight might be helpful to someone! I am taking my time to help someone in their process possibly. To all the kids, donât focus on a list. Find the right fit.
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Here are some behind the scence stats. Taft had 1900 applicants for appox 170 spots. for Freshman boarding girls there were 470 apps for 43 beds. I hope you have a good day and good luck with everything! I got to go do some work now
To be fair about the list, there are like 20 schools on there I know nothing about. I see that as a good thing. As a total noob a few years ago, my approach was : find all the lists I could, see which schools were on multiple lists. Click through to the websites, and spend hours reading. Rankings didnât matter to me, I just needed a place to start.
Ranking is dumb. But lists arenât. Biased, yes, but helpful.
What made me laugh on this particular list was the price tags. If only!
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Our DD was accepted to her first choice BS - a school that is an excellent fit for her for academics, activities, and location. But, we are concerned parents in that her AO had ignored and didnât respond to any of our email questions after she was admitted. The three very brief emails we sent to our AO had easy questions to answer - but I would have to call the admissions office to ask for help, and then and only then would our AO respond to our questions (we were definitely not at all a priority to our assigned AO - guessing because our DD is not a sports recruit). Thus last week I finally emailed the Dean of Enrollment Management for help (mentioning also that we were not hearing back from our assigned AO), and the Dean responded that day, apologized for what was happening, and directed us to how we could have our questions answered. So my question is: should what we experienced with the AO be part of our decision making process? âŠanother school that our DD was admitted to has been so responsive - getting back to our questions, writing a personal letter to our DD when she was admitted, appreciating our DD. Thanks for any advice.
The same exact thing is happening to me. A teacher or AO would reach out then when I responded with a question they never got back to me. It was quite upsetting and frustrating. I mean why ask if I need any help if you donât actually mean it?
Interesting. I donât even know who our AO is. Is that weird? We had very few questions along the way and when we did I emailed the Admissions office. We have questions now about enrolling in classes, when will she be assigned her advisor, what sheâs required to take, when they have to be there for fall, how drop off works, what size is the dorm bed to buy sheets, a million and one questions but we are patiently waiting as I am sure they have some sort of timeline where they provide answers to most of my questions. Personally, I would not get hung up on the AO. And once admitted I would just email the office directly.
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Hockey has become crazy competitive and with hockey being virtually shutdown, a real difficult process. The problem is hockey parents hired consultants and the deeper pockets make big inroads especially this year. Because we sought FA, my son got boxed out of two more local schools by parents paying the full fare.
Also, because of pandemic, kids are staying post-grad to play one extra year which takes up beds and spots.
I am sorry that your AO is not responsive and like you, I would be frustrated by that. This is just my opinion but I feel like the nicest a school is ever going to treat you is when they are trying to get you/your child to commit because that is when their motivation is the highest. The only 2 decisions student/families control in this whole process is the decision to apply and the decision to enroll.
This would rub me personally the wrong way. I know AOs are busy and they have to prioritize - to me, I would read this as âyou are showing me your priorities and my child is not oneâ. That said, I am sure it is a fantastic school and your child may absolutely flourish there! I just would have a âbuyer bewareâ attitude myselfâŠ
âYour AOâ is typically the one who interviewed you, so you may already be exchanging emails with them and the person people may find natural to reach out to.
I didnât meet the interviewer. She only interviewed my kid, I was in a work meeting. And my kid sent her a thank you email, but that has been the extent of contact. I read all the posts on here and it makes me nervous we are not doing something right. We went to all of the informational zooms, had very few questions but appreciated all of the questions others asked during those sessions. Maybe there are things we should be asking but I have no idea. Is there a boarding school acceptance for dummies book that tells me what I should be asking 
? We are sending our kid to a school we have never visited and with people we have never met. 
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Do not stress over it. We didnât communicate with our AOs beyond a thank you either the first time. The next we had some questions about FA and they pointed us in the right direction.
If you attended zooms and virtual revisits and feel good about your choice there is no reason for it to not work out. While for domestic applicants it may feel like a huge leap of faith given the sight unseen thing, remember that international applicants do that all the time! I actually suggest to someone that they should watch the panel geared towards international applicants because they talked about that experience and making their choice from far away.
Given that it is A12, I assume you already committed somewhere. Donât feel afraid to call the school and ask to connect to another parent that can help answer your questions about everyday stuff. If you ask here to DM about a specific school someone is sure to reach out.
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Thatâs truly fascinating and Iâm not sure that I could credibly say that DA would be unique in this regard. Really makes you wonder - super wealthy? World class athlete or musician? Just a really bad test taker? 9th generation legacy? Someone who had an awful day?
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Patiently waiting is the right answer here. (Though for the academic questions you could try the course catalog which usually outlines requirements, etc.)
That would be my guess. However in an exchange of posts here earlier with a current Andover student, I heard that he personally knew multiple students with ssat in the 60s. They were not Lebrons or Bushes but just super nice ordinary people.
I was surprised by the acceptance of people scoring super low in ssat. I agree that scores donât reflect the real strength of the test takers, however I doubt those who only scored 30th percentile would be a good fit academically at these schools.
@DroidsLookingFor , the kid I know from DS school who was in that category is now a junior at Harvard. She was from a really disadvantaged background, had no test prep, but was a math whiz.
How do I know this? Her mom spoke at an admitted students event, citing how well the school had seen her kidâs potential and nurtured it, even in the absence of stats.
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