<p>well they don’t say it as ‘here’s an ordered list of what’s important to us" it’s more like ’ this is what matters most and helps us get to know you the best when we read apps’ so basically your hs record matters most bc it shows how dedicated a student you are throughout 4 years of school. the essay matters bc it’s your personal way of letting the adcoms get to know you. Recommendations show what other people see in you and if you’re a promising student. ECs show how you spend your time outside of school and if you’re “well rounded”. the interview is the only personal encounter between you and the school and SATs/ACTs measure you up w/ the rest of the applicants. </p>
<p>I think the only reason she said interview before SATs/ACTs is to emphasize that all of the other factors show who you are as a person, while SATs/ACTs show how smart you are. I guess i shouldn’t have said list of importance b/c obviously all factors are important but in terms of wanting to know who each applicant is, SATs/ACTs would come last because getting a 2400 doesn’t really say much about a person besides (s)he’s smart.</p>
<p>Sounds like aniram and the OP spent an evening the same representative. </p>
<p>Yale’s published policy with respect to filing concurrent early apps has been basically the same since Yale instituted SCEA. It is not quite as narrow as the rep made it out to be. From this year’s Yale Admissions website: </p>
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<p>And interviews are not even required at Yale. How can an element that’s optional be more important than one that’s required?</p>
<p>Sounds like Yale needs to prepare its road show reps a bit better.</p>
<p>About this “SAT is the least important” claim:</p>
<p>1) I think this may be true once a student has crossed a certain pretty high threshold. In other words, when comparing two applicants, one of whom has a 2390 SAT and the other has a 2310 SAT, the adcoms will likely disregard the differences in their SAT scores completely when making their final evaluations. All other things being equal, if the 2310 student had a stellar interview and the 2390 was not too impressive, the interview may well matter more than the 80 point difference in their SATs.</p>
<p>2) This public posture may be driven by a desire to discourage applicants from taking the exam multiple times beyond a certain point. For example, my D has a friend who is a senior who got a single sitting 2340 score in March of junior year. This friend is planning to retake the exam. Bad idea. It would help this person to attend such an info session.</p>
<p>Maybe 2390 and 2310 SAT make no difference for admission, which doesn’t mean SAT is less important than interview. We can argue along the same line: if your interview impression has crossed a certian threshold, then interview may not be a factor in admission process.</p>
<p>as another poster said, interview is optional at Yale. SAT or ACT score should be much more important than interview. In my opinion, Yale is an ACADEMIC institution and should emphasize more on academic performance than other factors. In this regard, SAT may be more important than ECs. It is hard to imagine Yale will admit a student with SAT below 2000 even he/she got the highest possible score 9 on interview (based on 0 - 9 score scale for interview).</p>
<p>The current Y website under SCEA FAQs looks slightly different from what wjb gives, but still looks like you can apply to your in state public OR any rolling public:</p>
<p>As far as the UMichigan exception, they may be making that distinction because a few years ago UM switched from a regular rolling to what they call “early response”, which has deadlines for submitting but is still non-binding and gives decisions on a rolling basis.</p>
<p>Having done interviews for Yale, I’d say they’re not particularly important. Example, I received a hand-written note from an admissions officer telling me that write-up I’d sent in - pre-internet days - gave such a wonderful picture of the applicant, etc. He didn’t get in and really deserved to. </p>
<p>I also interviewed in two very different geographic areas and found the quality of kids who got in from the one far from Yale was lower. This was a while ago.</p>
<p>I stopped interviewing when the admissions rate dropped to chance levels. Bottom line was that I started to feel that if an applicant didn’t fit a specific category - significant legacy (notably $$$), recruited athlete, certain minority - then getting in was rolling dice. I began to believe - and still believe - the school tries to pick kids but they’d do just as well establishing a statistical cutoff and then drawing at random. They don’t know a kid and the idea that they can adequately evaluate based on tiny slivers of data is kind of silly.</p>
<p>And frankly, most alumni of all but the recent past realize the odds are they would not get in today because it is just chance and the applicant pool has become ridiculously large.</p>
<p>^^^Agree wjb. I just wanted to post the one from the SCEA FAQs because it mentions the part about “home state” publics, I don’t think I’ve ever seen that before.</p>
<p>The interview could become the most important factor if you physically attack the interviewer, show up with no clothes on, etc. Otherwise, it’s highly unlikely to make much difference.</p>
<p>There are many factors to pay in admission process. Don’t know why Yale’s info sessions keep giving false info for the order of importance. I don’t believe Yale has such an order of importance in the first place. Anyway, I can generate my own order of importance list: </p>
<p>In my experience, I concur with jack. However, rather than a sequential “order of importance” I see it more as relative weightiness – pie slices rather than a list.</p>
<p>We can all have our opinions, but I think that there are three elements of the application that are unlikely to make much difference, unless they are bad: essays, recommendations, and interview. I think this because it is difficult to interpret good examples of any of these. If a teacher at some high school I’ve never heard of says you’re the most impressive student he’s ever had, how do I evaluate that compared to a recommendation of another student, from another unknown teacher, saying that student is “a fine student?” If your essay is well-written, I can’t tell how much help you had writing it.
But if your recommendation includes specific negative info about you (“this student is bright but lazy” “this student has performed well except for the plagiarism incident”), or if your essay does, then I think they can really hurt you.</p>
<p>Let me just add that when we’re talking about highly selective schools like Yale, what helps you the most (after excellent grades and scores)the most are impressive achievements, especially outside the school. Those are objective, while recs, essays and interviews are much more subjective. “He had a novel published” is going to trump “he wrote a great essay,” in my opinion.</p>
<p>Hmmm. I don’t know that I agree (except for the interview part). If the HS is well-known to Yale, and a teacher who has been at that school for a long time says “this is the most extraordinary student I’ve ever had”, or words to that effect, I think it can count for a lot. I also think that really good essays can definitely help the application. I base this both on my D (who didn’t have exceptional EC’s, and all were school-related) and on her classmates who were admitted to HYP. They all had the grades and scores, of course. A couple were athletes, but the rest were just really, really smart, well-rounded kids, the kind who are ‘crap-shoot’ admits. None of them had written a novel, won Intel, or started an AIDS clinic in Africa. I’ve got to believe that their recs and essays carried a fair amount of weight in the process.</p>
<p>I think the essays must carry a decent amount of weight, because they are actual performance by the applicants, not other peoples’ characterization of performance (grades, recommendations), or objective ratings that fail to make meaningful distinctions among serious candidates (test scores). Not that those aren’t important, too, but essays are the thing itself, not second-hand accounts, and that’s powerful. (I also think that, rightly or wrongly, admissions people believe they can sniff out essays that have been “helped” too much.)</p>
<p>Essays are probably treated somewhat differently for students who look like humanities or social science types and for those who look like hard scientists/engineers. For the former, a pedestrian essay may be a near-killer. Why take someone who can’t write when there are so many people who can? For the latter, the hurdle is probably lower. Functional may be OK, but great would be a big plus.</p>
<p>The Naviance graph for my D’s school for Yale (and Harvard, for that matter) shows that there were more acceptances in the 2100-2200 range than in the 2300-2400 range. Not sure what that means (because the numbers are very small) but it does make me think that SAT scores don’t make a big impact for students applying from our school.</p>
<p>Do you really think ECs have such little weight?</p>
<p>I’m attending an information session on Saturday. I’ll post about afterwards if any mention was made of the relative importance of the different application components. I live in Canada, so perhaps this will provide some international perspective, because applications are probably looked at from a slightly different angle for students outside of the US…</p>
<p>At my info session yesterday, my admissions officer also said that transcripts are the most important part of the application. She said test scores are the least important (especially because she says that Canadian/International students often do worse on the SAT simply because they aren’t as rigorously prepared as US students). She also stated that, to her, the essays and recommendations are extremely important and that she spends lots of time reading them. This could be just her, though.</p>
<p>It is simply beyond my understanding why Yale’s road show is trying to minimize the importance of test scores. The median test scores of the Class of 2013 (750 on all three sections) belie the admissions officer’s statement. So does Yale’s CDS, which ranks standardized test scores as “Very Important” (the highest possible ranking) in making admissions decisions.</p>