First, I was passing along what a parent from the Class of 2025 gathered from an information session with an AO.
Second, “course rigor” is marked as “very important” in the CDS and the final sentence in your link is the one that’s more important, at least to me, because it’ll help distinguish between applicants:
That’s the more important “review,” in terms of GPA to me, which I’m sure is some sort of GPA weighting calculation that’s internal to Michigan. And it takes into account the relative offerings of every HS in its database.
According to a friend who is a university president, admission departments cull applications based on a metric like GPA or standardized test score. Applications that make the initial cut get reviewed, and those that fall short do not. Stanford and Harvard AOs are not reviewing ECs and reading essays from applicants with 1200 SATs.
That would be a lot of work? input everyone’s grade into their home high school’s database then convert it to a Umich set of gpa? I thought AOs compare each applicant to the applicants from the same highs school, less to applicants from other high schools
Don’t know how that works but it’s not hard to imagine Common App doing the processing work based on Umich rules and sending a data feed with all the GPAs and modified GPAs for each applicant ID.
My S22 submitted the LOCI under Action Items. After submission, we have not received any acknowledgment. We only see that ‘No action required at this time.’ I wonder, is the same for everyone who submitted LOCI, without any email confirmation, etc.
PAcollege, My son is in the same boat as yours. He was postponed for engineering, and he has already written his LOCI, which he will finalize once his fall semester transcript becomes available. Luckily, his school breaks up full-year AP classes into two separate semesters, with grades for fall and spring. Hopefully, straight "A"s in the fall semester, including AP Bio, Chem and Statistics will get him across the finish line.
Yes, exactly the same. As soon as son clicked on “submit”, the option to send more information was gone. No confirmation, but given that it was entered directly on the portal, and was not an upload we are not worried about that.
Obviously. Quite honestly, I left that out of the calculation for fear of being too harsh. But if you only review 60% of the applications you get a lot more time to finish on the others.
if GPA was not normalized, C students on a 6.0 weighting would be admitted over A students under a 4.0 or 4.5 scale.
I am sure students within the same districts are compared as a means to estimate ranking given many schools no longer publish them, but there has to be a standard way to judge all applicants ( even though grading is far from uniform).
During one of the panels of admissions directors at my daughters school they talked about how big data has changed the admissions process. Now they not only have the ability to normalize the gpa data, they also look at how past students from your school have performed once admitted. I’m sure they all do things a bit different but I imagine most can analyze any which way they want now!
When did I say the 1500 wasn’t important? I said it certainly did not guarantee admission. I simply stated that getting 5’s an AP exams will factor very little into your admission.
That’s very interesting. Putting 2 and 2 together, I now wonder if that’s a source or cause of why various HS’s appear to be “reporting” more deferrals than in the past. And not because there’s simply more apps or more deferrals.
It would be hilarious if schools are willing to be test optional to ensure equity yet use AI to normalize and predict future success. The whole idea is just absurd. It would simply reinforce past trends at a school without regard to changes in curriculum or demographics or any of the myriad of factors that affect performance over time.
I never said demographics or curriculum wouldn’t or couldn’t be included. I’m sure there are a myriad of other factors as well that can be loaded into algorithms and analyzed.
Schools can and do change curriculum and/or profiles. AP courses are added and dropped by HS’s all the time. Our local HS is now adding or just added AP Mandarin and I think one other new AP. AP Psychology was only added during D21’s tenure at her HS. The course wasn’t offered when D18 went there.
And demographics can and do change at a HS over time. The other thing is we’re always talking about fit. What if a HS has matriculated more students to Michigan that then transfer out of Michigan, wouldn’t that be cause for concern for Michigan?
Data is mined to predict future patterns, or in this case, success at various schools.
I just think using AI to make decisions where you can predict whether someone will.l be successful is not dissimilar to saying I can predict who might be a criminal by using data signals. Both are fraught and disadvantaged people will continue to suffer. This was the intent of SAT - to provide a unified metric which can be used to predict college success. To say SAT is not equitable and then say I’m going to use AI doesn’t seem consistent.
The fit part and the yield part - isn’t that what essays are meant to do?
My D18 took a sport leadership (elective) course in HS. She’s a sports nut. Could “Michigan Data” have figured mined that, predicting she would be a 4-year season ticket holder to the Big 3 sports at Michigan and knew she would storm the field after the big win against OSU this past season. Hmmm. (I’m kidding, sorta)
(I’m kidding, sorta)