<p>so...my sats are kinda sub-par..2070...i intend to apply to places like penn, chicago. i know know, they are not good enough, so please don't tell me they aren't...</p>
<p>im 4/424 students, approx..my sat IIs are 740,760.
and my ecs are pretty good.</p>
<p>IF IF IF i write REALLy good essays, do you think they will get me into the colleges i want to go to? a lot of people have told me essays are so important, but i just wanna know to what extent...</p>
<p>For UChi, a very strong essay will help some, but I don´t know about every school. Furthermore, I certainly hope you don’t write or spell like this on your ‘strong’ essay. I don’t mean to be rude, but when you type with that sort of grammar/spelling structures, people are less likely to give you positive responses for your posts, because they doubt your ability to write that well.</p>
<p>lol^…don’t worry, i don’t spell or write like this in my essays…im just kinda a fast paced kinda of person, especially in the cyber world…i just get what i need to get typed and then posted.</p>
<p>oh oops, just realized my post title is wrong. should be “will killer essays do the trick” please don’t bash…haha thanks</p>
<p>You’ve asked not to get the truth so what are you expecting?</p>
<p>so you are saying…no…? it won’t help me? sorry, i’m quite bad at detecting sarcasm, in all honesty. :(</p>
<p>2070!?! HA
lol, but really</p>
<p>write good essays and see what happens. if they’re good enough, you may get in. if not, you probably won’t.</p>
<p>I wasn’t being sarcastic, right up front you say not to tell you your scores are too low. You can look at common data sets and pretty much determine your chances as long as you factor in that 40% are hooked and they can have lower scores.</p>
<p>Maybe I’m not that smart but I see a student in the top 1% of the class with SAT scores in the top 5% of the country. The question isn’t whether you’re good enough. You are. But being good enough for the top schools is only half of the question. The other half is why would they want YOU as opposed to the other similarly qualified applicants.</p>
<p>So to answer your question, assuming you’re not a legacy, recruited athlete, etc., unless you play a killer piccolo or have some other skill that the school particularly needs this coming year, your essay will need to demonstrate why you instead of some other applicant.</p>
<p>Side note - the test score is certainly not great but it’s not a deal breaker either. There are a lot of people who like to chuckle at sub 2200 scores but if you look at the data, there are a significant number of people at both UC and Penn that have lower scores every year.</p>
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<p>Seriously? Did you even read what he’s asking for? He’s not asking it explicitly, but he’s pretty much asking whether he can gain admission at Penn and Chicago with a strong essay to compensate for his sub-par SAT1s &2s. I don’t see anywhere in his post where he’s asking you to give him false hope or anything. I think he, unlike you, is assuming that the admission processes at the schools he’s applying to are concerned with more than simply test scores, class rank, and GPA. </p>
<p>Stay on topic, (or rather, try harder to understand the question before you attempt to answer.)</p>
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<p>And therein lies the mistake. Unless of course he’s hooked. When you look at stats for these schools you have to account for the minimum 40% of every class that are recruited athletes, URMs, legacies and development. And 40% is the official party line, a recent book based on Pulitzer Prize winning work, The Price Of Admission, by Golden, puts the hooked at 60% of every elite college class: </p>
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<p>Here’s the whole article:</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/17/books/review/Wolff2.t.html[/url]”>http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/17/books/review/Wolff2.t.html</a></p>
<p>You will hopefully now understand that the majority of the unhooked have to be at or above the 75th percentile.</p>
<p>Essays can not make up for stats. Period. Essays begin to matter after you have the stats. Every year adcom have to reject many of their favorite essay writers. I’ve been there, in fact, at Penn, one of the schools the OP asks about. Penn and the other top colleges are hell bent on great stats for the unhooked. Someone needs to bring up the overall stats.</p>
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<p>Is that on topic enough for you? A lot of myths float around these boards. Now you have some facts to work with.</p>
<p>hmom5 is correct. I attend an Ivy League school. I have worked in the admissions office and the published statistics don’t tell the real story. If a school states that it accepts 15% of its applications, this number includes students who are “hooked,” have connections to the school, are well-known, are great athletes, etc. The percentage for unhooked applicants accepted to the school is much lower. </p>
<p>Also keep in mind that not all “unhooked” applicants are viewed the same. For example, if you’re from a state that is not represented by the current student body, or if your home situation is unusual, or if you accomplished something interesting, then you may get the nod for the committee when someone with better scores is rejected. </p>
<p>My advice is to seek the path less travelled. So many high school students look identical on paper. Each has hundreds of EC hours, EC leadership, good grades, and good test scores. Many of their essays sound similar as well (and so few are “killer”). For the most part, the vast majority of these “cookie-cutter” applicants are rejected in favor of applicants who are a bit different from the norm. Colleges like interesting applicants. If I were “unhooked,” I would do my best in school and on standardized tests, but then I would pursue a single interest, something uncommon that I truly enjoy doing. I would then pursue that interest with passion throughout high school. I would forget being a leader in the Key Club, NHS, the Debate Club, Moot Court, etc. and focus on my unusual passion. You’d be surprised how much you would stick out.</p>
<p>@hmom5: How were we to glean all of that from a seemingly irrelevant post such as your first one? (And I know I’m not alone, the thread starter himself was confused at your post.)</p>
<p>If you read these boards, you’ll see that my posts are on point. But the OP started the thread with this:</p>
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<p>Otherwise I would have been on point and told him his scores are too low. But that he has a good rank, so with 100 or so more SAT points the picture gets a lot better, and that might be totally doable with the test dates still left.</p>
<p>I am curious about why the OP needs our input. The OP has nothing to lose by applying to those dream schools, and by writing the best essay possible. Whether we think the OP will get in doesn’t matter. What matters is what the admissions officers do.</p>
<p>From the article that hmom5 linked to:</p>
<p>" A son of Bill Frist, the Senate majority leader, got into Princeton because the Frist family “had lavished tens of millions of dollars on a new student center” there. Margaret Bass, daughter of the oil magnate Robert Bass, got into Stanford after her old man gave the university $25 million. Jessica Zofnass’s Harvard-educated father endowed a scholarship in environmental studies around the time of her admission. Charles Kushner, a real estate developer who went to jail for witness tampering and illegal campaign contributions, pledged $2.5 million to Harvard — Kushner himself went to N.Y.U. — which did the trick for his son Jared (who recently bought The New York Observer). Golden is distressed by the notion that his book might become a buyer’s guide, but his answer to the question “What’s it cost to buy your kid into Harvard?” seems to be $2.5 mil, plus what you’ve contributed to politicians, legally or not, so they’ll make a follow-up call for you.</p>
<p>Golden tells us that the admissions process, at least at the 100 top colleges and universities, is not a meritocracy — and exactly who thought it was? — but a marketplace. Every spot is up for bid. Some people bid with intelligence, which has obvious worth to the institution; some with cold cash, with its certain value; and others with the currency of connections and influence and relationships that serve the institution’s interests. The ultimate result of trading limited spaces for ever increasing value is Harvard’s preposterous endowment of $26 billion. Golden, apparently quite the innocent, is hopping mad about this. If there were any doubt, Golden’s muckraking investigation — he’s the Ida Tarbell of college admissions — reveals that almost every word uttered by representatives of the top colleges about the care and nuance and science of the much vaunted admissions process is bunk.</p>
<p>Harvard may say it accepts 1 in 10 applicants, but, Golden writes, as many as 60 percent of the places in a top school are already spoken for by higher bidders, hence reducing, in the parlance, the “unhooked” applicant’s chances to . . . well, you do the math. "</p>
<p>And don’t forget about the children of politicians. Al Gore’s son – who by all accounts is a complete misfit – went to Harvard with shockingly low SAT scores and then embarrassed the University by getting arrested for drugs while there. The Bushes went to Yale with less than stellar grades. The list is very long. Although most Americans like to think that we a fairly egalitarian nation, we certainly do have an elite class in this country that lives by a different set of rules.</p>
<p>Sorry I’ve sparked some, let’s just say differences, in all of our beliefs. Thanks to those who are encouraging…and to those who are more cynical, your input is also appreciated.</p>
<p>Well, in response to the poster who said something about playing “killer piccolo”…i do play, to an extent, “killer piano.” Of course, this is another Asian stereotype…but I believe, few are at the conservatory level as I am. (Again, not trying to brag…there are certainly a lot more people probably better than I…but I’d consider myself a good amount better than those average pianists who also put on their app: play piano for 11 years)</p>
<p>Your scores place you in the bottom 25% of every Ivy League school. Your essays will not make up for your scores.</p>
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<p>You actually sparked a good discussion of the facts. Assessing chances of college admission is about facts, not beliefs. All the facts are there yet these chances threads get silly.</p>
<p>Lest anyone fail to understand my piccolo comment: if the band needs a piccolo due to graduation, i.e. if they have an empty seat in the band, then that MIGHT make a difference. You can substitute tuba for piccolo as it’s only an illustration. Further to that point, instruments like violin or piano, well, less so because there will be dozens of competent (and better) violinists and pianists in any Ivy incoming class. It goes to my original point: your rank is great, your scores are acceptable so they need a reason, a highly convincing one at that, to say yes. Could your essays provide that reason? I suppose so but the essays would have to be off the chart great IMO. What would help you more would be if you had some skill or attribute that a particular school, in their eyes, NEEDS in their incoming class. It could be a particular musician, a long distance runner, a sprinter, a field hockey goalie, or any number of things. But in reality, the list of things these schools don’t need is far more exhaustive that those they do and that’s largely due to two factors: 1) they’ll recruit the runner or goalie; and 2) they might find the musician in the group that they will be selecting anyway. Put another way, it’s a long shot.</p>
<p>As for the “facts” issue, and I say this with all respect, there are applicants every year who get accepted with less that optimal stats, and some of those are unhooked. It’s just a very small percentage of applicants in highly selective school admissions. Some people seem to think the OP’s chances are zero and it is with that absoluteness that I disagree.</p>