<p>My son got a 6 on SL French, and a 5 on the AP. The 6 would have gotten him nothing at his school, while that 5 got him out of the school’s placement test and into an advanced level course.</p>
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<p>Sorry, Dad’o’2, but that wasn’t me who posted that. It was YDS in #717. Nevertheless, I wasn’t quite sure what your point was.</p>
<p>Yes, it was me. I assume he was just injecting much-needed levity into the discussion.</p>
<p>Counting down, I wasn’t commenting on your kid who seems to have done the most rigorous coursework, I was just saying that when I worked in admissions, there we many schools checking boxes we knew didn’t really apply, and we knew what the most rigorous load was and recalculated.</p>
<p>Hunt – yup! That’s the way the game is played…</p>
<p>SL Math or Math Studies will get S2 nothing; AP credit for Calc AB and Stat are another story. At the very least, he will have a good foundation in each, and he already knows that he’ll be taking a couple of stat courses as part of his major (hence the decision to take stat instead of BC Calc).</p>
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<p>Makes sense. We could all use some laughs at this point. Ugh! The college process is stressful - or maybe we’re making it more stressful than it needs to be. They will all go to college, get a degree, get a job and have a productive life - just like all of us did. Those that are driven will succeed in whatever they do and no matter where they go to school and those who tend to ‘plod’ along will probably continue to do so no matter where they end up and will also do just fine.</p>
<p>I love hearing from parents who have been through the process and say that even though their kid didn’t end up getting into their reaches, they did end attending the perfect college for them.</p>
<p>After over 740 posts this is what I’ve learned:</p>
<ol>
<li>Getting into HYPMS or any other Top 20 is hard. (Am I the only one who finds the acronym Hy-P-M-S ironic?;))</li>
<li>If you want to have an admittedly slim chance at getting into HYPMS or any Top20, you need A Great GPA, Great Test Scores, Great ECs and Great Recs. A Hook wouldn’t hurt either.</li>
<li>If you have a “sub-standard” GPA (3.6) your already miniscule chances become downright infinitesimal.</li>
<li>But, occasionally, a 3.6 slips through the cracks and gets in, this is called the “even-a-blind-chicken-finds-corn-once-in-a-while” syndrome.</li>
<li>I’m making S2 apply to all the schools where he might be considered a legacy.</li>
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<p>Did I miss anything?</p>
<p>vinceh, I am LOL at all your posts today.</p>
<p>Yours should have been the first post, but hey, it only took 740 posts.</p>
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<p>Vinceh has officially won this thread.</p>
<p>Unless your S is a DA or URM or athletic recruit at one of the T20 colleges [ which comprise almost all of the 3.6 “chickens” ] then the legacy factor will be of little help[ I’m assuming that you or your family haven’t contributed millions $$ to a particular college]</p>
<p>Here’s hoping all our kids are blind chickens.</p>
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<p>I want my kids to be developmental admits courted for their parents’ pocketbooks. Badly. No such luck here!</p>
<p>OK.</p>
<p>Let’s put this “SAT is not important” myth to rest once an for all. There are still people who believe that the reason why the T20 schools have such high SAT distribution that also completely mirror the rank order of the schools on USNWR (HYP SAT 50% range higher than Columbia, U Penn, Chicago, which in turn higher than GT and JHU) is NOT because they deliberately pick kids based on SAT as one of the important factors but because they picked kids based on GPA, and SAT just happens to be very high correlation with GPA.</p>
<p>This is NOT possible from a statistical point of view for the kids who are accepted into these schools without hooks.</p>
<p>SAT and GPA have a near perfect correlation in GENERAL POPULATION, where both GPAs and SATs have a very normal, WIDE distribution with healthy variance. For instance, suppose we have Johnny with SAT 1700, GPA 3.1, Suzie with SAT 2000, GPA 3.5, and Tommy with SAT 2200 and GPA 3.9, then by rank ordering kids with GPA, you will come up with the perfect prediction of the rank order of the SATs also.</p>
<p>However, with the kids we are talking about (accepted into T10, etc), we are talking about kids with average SAT 2100, which is only 1 % of the total population. Their GPA also has a very serious range limitation (3.9+) - which again reflects only a tiny tiny minority among the total population. When both variables (GPA and SAT) have such a severe range limitation and cover only a tiny, tiny set of the total data set (in a statistical lingo, it’s severely restricted variance), the correlation between the two variables completely goes out of the whack. Their relationship is considered a “statistical random distribution”. In statistics, no statistically meaningful variance among variables, NO correlation.</p>
<p>Under this circumstance, there is practically zero chance that the schools picked kids based on GPA and course rigor as long as GPA falls within an “acceptable range” (like 2200) AND then the SAT middle 50% range of the top 10-20 schools so wonderfully reflect/mirror the same overall ranking of these schools on USNWR. The only possible explanation is, they DID picked kids based on SAT along with GPA. Without this deliberate selection, there is practically NO way the middle 50% SAT distribution among schools is what it is. </p>
<p>So, the moral of the story? This does not apply to the kids discussed on this thread (senior with high SAT and lower GPA). But if you have kids who are junior and below, and have the time to prepare for SAT, every 50 point increments definitely helps them, NO doubt about it. And, in a way, SAT may be the quickest and easiest fix. that’s why I am helping S2 with the SAT prep (I hope he takes it seriously: he very much dislikes SAT prep work, he loves his AP course works, but alas, for him SAT is his achilles heel).</p>
<p>Sorry to bore you all with the statistical stuff. I just had to dispel all this bs from the adcoms about how they do not really take SAT all that seriously while actual data tells me a completely different story). They may even believe what they say, and they may feel compelled to tell themselves that they mean what they say: ever hear of cognitive dissonance theory? if not, google it. You will know what I mean.</p>
<p>I don’t think the kids of anyone on this thread are aiming for HYPMS, but more for the Top 10-20, and also 20-50+.</p>
<p>Something I haven’t seen much mention of is the impact of being full-pay. What top schools aren’t need blind? At what schools would a full-pay with normal good ECs, high test scores, and barely Top 10% rank have a decent shot? And what impact would going ED have?</p>
<p>sacchi, you are correct, at least in our case.</p>
<p>This thread made me cranky, so I took a nap. When I came back, I realized all the talk was about HYP, and ds is not looking at HYP, so it doesn’t apply. Much less cranky now.</p>
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<p>This, IMO, is another myth that needs to be put to rest. Menloparkmon, I know your DS didn’t get into Stanford with great stats. But Stanford is truly the anomaly among top schools where legacy matters much less. Plus, he was competing as a local against an uber qualified pool with staff kids, development galore, kids of local entrepreneurs whose participation in the community they want and tons of other highly qualified legacies.</p>
<p>At most top 20, legacy is a huge boost. They are accepted at twice the rate of the non hooked at the very least, and Princeton accepts 40% of them!</p>
<p>I very much agree with the strategy of throwing in an application wherever your kid is a legacy. We wish we’d insisted with out oldest children, in hindsight it would have been a good idea.</p>
<p>in reply to oldfort’s comment, I too concluded that the most rigorous course load does not always help the student in admissions; The adcoms can not distinguish between the worklevel in APLIT versus Honors English, though in my DS1 case, that was a huge gap…in DS1’s school, the t-20 results for kids who opted out of the killer ap classes (LIT being one) largely were significantly better, leading me to conjecture that the GC gave out the most rigorous designation rather liberally…Rank too was a killer: grades outside top 10%, even in the hardest classes in the school, were the kiss of death…I watched DS be denied from several schools his peers were admitted to; in each case, the peer had a higher rank, and took classes that were known in the school to be of less difficulty, both in content, and in volume of work. </p>
<p>All in all, a tough pill to swallow last year…</p>
<p>You don’t think that at P, many of the legacies are not ALSO highly qualified, “local”[ East Coast] kids, and or “development’s” galore"? I beg to differ. If one were able to filter out the legacy factor alone from wealthy east coast based alumni , it would give a truer measure to the value of legacy at P.</p>
<p>I think there are many qualified legacies at all of the schools, but I also know schools have philosophies on legacy admission and quota accordingly.</p>
<p>And yes, I think Princeton has legacies galore, but not as many right in their backyard as Stanford does. So I believe applying from the pool around them is tougher. </p>
<p>You said your DS went to a good local private school. So if you look at schools like Menlo, there are many with bigger hooks than legacy he was directly competing against. For most of the others that would not be the case.</p>
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<p>This was an issue at my kids’ schools too. And while adcom get to know a lot about many schools, they don’t know who the killer teachers are. So if a kid takes honors lit when AP is available, it’s a black mark. Same if they get a B from a teacher that gives few A’s unless the school gives grade distributions for APs.</p>
<p>The only schools where I’ve seen kids benefit from taking some easier classes are formula driven state schools.</p>