<p>PayFor - great ECs are given, and it’s on top of 4.0 and 2200+ with most rigorous courses. The reason not all of those asian kids with great stats are admited is there are too many of them, similar to why URM is a hook.</p>
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<p>Actually, what colleges want is a well rounded class. To get that, in CC lingo, they want a lot of well lopsided kids.</p>
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<p>Grades and rank are king. Period. Without the stats, ECs short of the Olympics are not going to get you into a top college.</p>
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<p>It’s all about the positioning of the student through the application in the end, this is the end game. A HS essay writing exercise is a nice start, but it does not give an expert eye to how to get a student to stand out from the pack. I feel like a lobby for the private counseling industry, but in our house learning how to truly play this game only happened when we hired one.</p>
<p>All of these kids, like mine, feel they have great essays, but most are totally missing the boat. Just read through the essay section here, it gives me shivers about how my oldest two approached it with the help of school counselors far more sophisticated and with lower counselor/student ratios than most. We had read every book, but translating the advice to an effective couple of thousand words, when we were just not experts, was another matter.</p>
<p>And we were naive about the info we gave on the applications–our kids ended up reading like so many others. The well crafted application is an art form, from the essays to how the ECs are positioned and presented. There are ways to guide teacher and counselor recs. There are thoughtful supplementary recs. </p>
<p>It is the exception to turn out a crisp, strategic, effective application, even among the most sophisticated families. And this is where you get in the game.</p>
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<p>My reading on this from hearing lots of admission officers speak is:</p>
<p>1) The Top 20 want both the numbers and the great ECs, etc.</p>
<p>2) If you don’t have the numbers but have a compelling EC - then they will consider admitting you.</p>
<p>3)There are plenty of students applying to these schools with both the numbers and the compelling ECs, so your compelling EC should be extremely compelling if you don’t have the numbers.</p>
<p>Personally, I have never seen anyone in real life who didn’t have the numbers nor a compelling EC activity get into a Top20 school. In fact, all the kids I have known have had both.</p>
<p>In addition, large #'s of students with both the numbers and lots of great ECs are turned away at every Top20 school every year. So if you have a child (like mine) who is a good student, has a great test score but a GPA of 3.6 and only average ECs, getting in is a major long shot.</p>
<p>I’ve heard all the ‘we want a well-rounded kid’ and ‘we take a holistic approach’ stuff but, at the end of the day, they also want the numbers and they have enough applicants that they can get those high numbers and the great ECs.</p>
<p>Just curious: Colleges say they want rigor. But would you advise a student to take a lower-level class in order to get a higher grade? Yes, yes, I know that it’s best to take the hardest level and get a 100, but if you had to choose between the highest level and a 90 and a lower level and a 98, which is the better option, from a college gaming standpoint?</p>
<p>RE: Numbers - </p>
<p>I think that a crucial number for unhooked students applying to HYPSM is whether they are in the top 5 students, assuming a 2300 + SAT. For those applying to other T20 schools, and some a bit below, the crucial number for students with 2250+ SAT’s seems to be top 10%, IF their school provides ranks. Large numbers of schools no longer rank… If there is no rank and an unhooked student has mostly A’s or even half A’s in a rigorous program, then it seems that other factors kick in, from the student’s side and the adcom’s side (desire to have a “balanced” class) as well.</p>
<p>Still, many of us are left scratching our heads after this last admissions round, as andison’s situation (well-qualified student not getting into any of a number of schools that would have been regarded as matches) has become more common.</p>
<p>Our own guidance department now advises students in this range (2200 or 2250 +, several B’s on transcript) to apply early to a safety (generally in our state that would be Penn State University Park or UPitt or both) and then apply to a large number of matches and reaches.</p>
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Hmom5:</p>
<p>Interesting…we also have a private college counselor. He’s never talked about ‘positioning’ the application in one way or another. I think I need to print out your post and have a talk with him. We didn’t hire him with the intention of trying to get our son into a ‘reach’ school but rather we felt son needed someone very familiar with the process to help him decide which schools would be a good fit. However, we are paying him a pretty penny for his services. Might as well pick his brain on this. In fairness to him, son hasn’t started filling out the application(s) yet, so he hasn’t had an opportunity to guide son through that process. I know he gave som some tips on his essay but it wouln’t hurt to ask his opinion on how to best position the ECs. Thanks for the tip.</p>
<p>Brown was weird, they had accetances below 2100 and above 2300. So I conclude the missing numbers are just because there isn’t enough data. It was just really clear that below 98GPA no chance, while the SAT spread is much wider - there’s usually an occasional student with lower SAT scores, there’s almost never one with a lower GPA.</p>
<p>I don’t think it’s just a numbers game, I think the kids who’ve done all the holistic stuff also have the numbers. But if you don’t have the numbers your chances are getting in are slim. It’s like a horse race. You can’t win if you don’t jump over all the hurdles (scores and GPA), but you also have to be fast (bring other stuff to the table). I do think anyone with a score over 2200 has a decent chance of getting in - and at least at our school (which is just a big public school) you have a better than 1 in 10 chance if you are one of the top kids in the class. Of course more valedictorians get in than number 8 (but my son was number 8 and got in), of course more 2400s get in than 2200s, I just think there’s a bar you have to pass - if you are above it - you’ve got decent chances. At least at our school someone with a B+ weighted average has a miniscule chance of getting into a top 20 school, assuming unweighted averages are 6-8 points lower than weighted, an A- is pretty much the minimum unweighted average that has a chance.</p>
<p>The bar is not top 10% at our school by the way, it’s much closer to top 2% for HYPMC and perhaps 5% for the rest of the top 20 or so.</p>
<p>YDS - I don’t know if I believe them, but every admissions officer I’ve heard swears you don’t have to take every AP offered. Neither of my sons would take AP English though both qualified. I think if you are selling yourself as a science person you should have AP Calc (preferably BC), a couple of AP sciences and at least one AP from social science or humanities as a minimum. A humanities or social science person might reverse the proportion. On balance I think an A- in an AP is better than an A+ in a regular course, but a B+ not so much.</p>
<p>When the importance of GPA hit me (last winter when my D’s deferrals and rejections started coming in) I had a talk with my then-soph son. He needed to get his GPA up or he would be limited in his choice of his desired schools. It worked, he will now likely have a rising GPA, which admissions staff like, and a better GPA at application time than he would have. </p>
<p>It also came into play when choosing his junior-year classes. We could have pushed to get him into honors pre-calc. However, our school gives no GPA bump for honors classes so why bother. He’ll cruise and get an A+ in reg pre-calc (allowing more time to spend on his harder classes) instead of working hard to get an A- in honors. We kept our ammunition dry and will insist he be placed in AP calc his senior year. All steps intended to “game” the GPA issue and get that AP on his senoir-year transcript.</p>
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<p>I think this is another myth. When you parse the stats, you see that a huge percentage of the kids getting into the T20 are the top few in the class. Top 10% if the HS is highly selective and/or competitive, but at the vast majority of high schools, I think just top 10% doesn’t do it for most.</p>
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<p>This is a whole different exercise than hiring someone for just the application. We tried two types of counselors–a more comprehensive one to help with the list and approach and then one just to help with the application–that’s all the latter folks do. The value was really in the application people in hindsight. Creating a good list was no problem reading the books and reading here. The application folks are more marketing people than college counselors!</p>
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<p>Absolutely not. They won’t even look at a kid who doesn’t get the ‘most rigorous’ box checked at most top schools.</p>
<p>But you would get that box checked if a kid is taking BC Calculus and not necessary multivariable. You could also get that box checked if you didn’t take both AP Physics and AP Chemistry. I do believe there could be an apparence of taking most rigorous, and not necessary taking the hardest. Some kids made the mistake of taking the tippy top hardest courses at my daughter’s school and ended up getting B and C, and it definitely hurt them in the college process.</p>
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<p>This implies racial quota that schools vehemently deny. I get the feeling that qualified asian kids, especially males, need to go an extra mile to demonstrate that they are not stereotypical.</p>
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<p>I’m almost convinced that for most of the top 10 schools, the deliberation process for unhooked kids is akin to first running a filter on high GPA’s with class rigor without regard to other things, then running a filter on test scores. If a kid makes this far, then the other factors kick in. May be right before tossing away all the apps that didn’t make the cut, someone will go through the pile again to see if they’ve missed any Olympic athletes. They can still claim to have a holistic process, because at least for the kids that make the final cut, all their stats have been looked at. So yes, GPA reigns supreme.</p>
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<p>Not really true (or true to a much much lesser extent than we’d like) for the tippy-top. See above.</p>
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<p>No, if you are gunning for T20’s. Also see above.</p>
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<p>Let’s be frank. An unhooked kid as described has ZERO chance of making HYPSM or any of the other top 10’s, and close to zero chance for the next 10, unless the word “average” is self-deprecating.</p>
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<p>It’s like applying for competitive scholarships or summer programs. When the brochure says a minimum GPA of 3.5 or a PSAT score of 210, you know you’d better have at least a 3.9 or a 230.</p>
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[QUOTE=hmom5]
When you parse the stats, you see that a huge percentage of the kids getting into the T20 are the top few in the class. Top 10% if the HS is highly selective and/or competitive, but at the vast majority of high schools, I think just top 10% doesn’t do it for most.
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<p>Mos def. At my son’s very rigorous and selective high school, I would say that about 10 of the kids, out of about 100 in the class, are capable of the highest-level collegiate work. On the other hand, in my standard, urban, public high school class of 450, to think that 45 of those kids were Ivy League material is laughable. Maybe two of them were, and I think those two did indeed end up at top-ranked schools. Neither of them was the valedictorian, by the way, but they were certainly in the top 10, grade-wise.</p>
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<p>I can offer a counterexample. The good-but-not-great suburban Chicago high school that my son attended as a Freshman sent six to eight students a year to Northwestern and UChicago. Most of them were good, solid students but not superstars. Many were Asian (i.e., overrepresented). They all took the most challenging course load, however, and I believe they all had very good test scores. Seeing this is probably what first got me thinking that sending my 3.6-GPA son to a T20 school might not be so far-fetched.</p>
<p>So, I agree with PaperChaserPop that the chances are still small, but I disagree that they’re zero or even near-zero, especially as you get down to the 15-to-20 range. Notre Dame, Vanderbilt, and Emory are prestigious and selective, but they’re no HYPSM.</p>
<p>At S2’s school, being in the full IB program automatically gets one a “most rigorous courseload” designation. Within IB, there are many options for course difficulty, in terms of the math track taken, SL or HL foreign language, A2 diploma, whether the sixth subject is a science, music/art/drama, social science, etc. S2 opted for SL Math Studies (the lowest IB math exam), but his rationale is: a) SL Math got him no additional credit and b) he will have AP Calc and AP Stat on the transcript. He also opted for a seventh IB course in a third social science area. He will also have 12 AP exams.</p>
<p>Noone’s going to accuse him of slacking. OTOH, some adcomms may wonder if he took on too much at the expense of some grades. Hard to parse how it will play.</p>
<p>M.S. Chicago is one of the focus schools for DS. Please give some definition of “very good test scores”. As you know, while I would think 2100+ is very good and other may think only 2350+ is very good. Thank you.</p>
<p>Very good = above 75th percentile for the college under consideration.</p>
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<p>Some schools are loose with how they rate most rigorous, but a top college is not going to believe a most rigorous rank accompanied by SL rather than HL classes. The colleges do deconstruct the transcripts and recalculate GPAs their way in the same way they disregard schools’ weighting systems.</p>
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<p>“Any fool can make a rule, and any fool will mind it.”
Henry David Thoreau</p>
<p>“Rules are not necessarily sacred, principles are.”
Franklin D. Roosevelt</p>
<p>“If you don’t like their rules, whose would you use?”
Charlie Brown</p>
<p>“The first rule of Fight Club is: you do not talk about Fight Club.
The second rule of Fight Club is: you DO NOT talk about Fight Club!”
from Fight Club</p>
<p>“Rules? In a knife fight?”
from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid</p>
<p>It was looking at Naviance that gave my D the idea that she could have a chance at several T20 schools, although not HYPSM, without straight A’s and with SAT’s at or above the 75%. While admissions rates were higher for the top students at most of these schools, students in the top 10% but still probably not top 5% seemed to have about a 50% chance at most of these schools. Our high school is a regular public high school in a suburban area, with around 10% of each class qualifying as NMSF or commended each year. It is not at all uncommon for students to struggle to get a B in an AP class and then score a 5 on the exam with little effort, so my guess is that colleges know that there is little grade inflation.</p>
<p>We did notice that the schools that did not accept her were ones where she did not spend lots of time or effort on the application supplements, leading me to believe that the applications were read carefully after they passed a certain “bar.” And, there are a few schools in the T20(evident on Naviance) that seem not to accept more than an occasional student from our high school unless they are recruited athletes or URM’s.</p>
<p>Hmom5,
IB doesn’t allow students to take only HL exams. They are allowed a maximum of 3 or 4 HL exams out of 7. HLs at S2’s school are harder than the equivalent AP. The school posts some of the highest average subject scores in the world. That said, S2 took AP/SL Spanish Lang and scored well enough to exempt out of four semesters of foreign language requirement just about everywhere on his list.</p>
<p>The strategy a lot of kids at his school use is to take the accompanying AP exam with the SL exam so that one gets credit. It makes for more testing insanity, but not many colleges give SL credit. This at least gives the kids options/placement wherever they ultimately attend.</p>
<p>As I mentioned, the kid will have 12 APs on top of the full IB diploma.</p>