Our school is very academically competitive with a lot of 4.0 WA and higher students.
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<p>There is not necessarily a correlation between the number of 4.0+ kids and how academically competitive the school is. As an extreme example, just for illustration, if 300 out of 400 kids in a school have a 4.0 (or higher if weighted), then it’s clearly not very competitive. As an extreme example in the opposite direction, at a school where no one has a 4.0 GPA, 3.5 may make a kid Harvard material.</p>
<p>^^^^ That’s why if I was doing it I’d look at high school academic rankings (like USNEWS), or AP/IB or SAT statistics to judge the school. Then I’d compare students using Rank instead of GPA (taking into account rigor of schedule).</p>
<p>Ayyyyyyy… time for elementary statistics again. The above statement is true if each coin flipping is completely independent of other flipping, and there is NO underlying factor that connect all the flippings, such as the shape of the coin is such that it was no fluke that the first time coin was flipped, it was tail because of the structural issues.</p>
<p>Likewise, if the kid is rejected due to a fatal flaw in the application (way below par GPA or SAT) in one Ivy, the chances are, that same flaw will come back to haunt him over and over again with other schools. </p>
<p>But then again, if you flip coins long enough, the odd will go up, just very slightly, due to the random variance that will occur. So, yes, if you have infinite time and energy, go ahead and try them all. But, how many applications will your son turn in? Though most of them use common app, still each school has supplementary essays and what not, and you just don’t have time to do all 20 applications with the top notch quality. Your choice.</p>
<p>Out of interest, I went back to the year I was rejected to check it out. That year was around 18% admission rate, around what it is for many T20 schools now (of course HYPSM is much stricter). </p>
<p>I’m from California. Turns out that the year of my rejection the school accepted a total of 73 kids from my state (California). Of those, based on a 17% legacy population, works out to around 60 non-legacy kids. It may be worse now. Of those, around 60% were public school students like me, meaning 36 public school kids accepted out of California. So, even discounting recruited athletes and other connections, was I one of the top 36 kids in California? No way. This is a pretty big state. Nowdays I’d have to be one of the top 10-15 in the state to get in probably.</p>
<p>Reason for all this? It just goes to show how incredibly competitive all this stuff is. The link is pretty interesting anyway. It’s amazing how much average SAT scores have risen.</p>
<p>“Surely the chances of me getting a head when I flip the coin 20 times is greater than that of flipping just once.”</p>
<p>Yes, that is true. But you have a 50% chance of getting a head each and every toss. </p>
<p>With the 15% admit schools, you have a 15% chance of getting admitted each and every application. Unless your stats are below their mid-range, in which case your chance is considerably lower. It’s not zero, but it’s low enough that applying to 8 schools like this instead of one doesn’t tip the odds in your favor. </p>
<p>This is why colleges HAVE 15% admit rates. Because people apply to a dozen or more schools in the hopes of getting into one or two. Which drives down the admit rate, which scares the next year’s kids, so they apply to even MORE schools. It’s a viscious cycle, driven in large part by the USNWR ratings. Ratings which exist primarily to make money for USNWR. </p>
<p>Please, don’t drink the Kool-Aid. Find the schools that are the best FIT for YOUR kid. Not the schools USNWR thinks have the right numbers.</p>
<p>My “bold statement” has obviously touch a nerve here. Better sound and fury than all peace and quiet, right?</p>
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<p>Let’s substitute JHU with school X to represent one of the schools I listed (I consciously did not include JHU). As I said upthread, school X will not get enough number the perfect superkids who are more likely to flock to the Ivies and other higher ups. So they may have no choice but to fill some seats with quirky kids who are more likely to say yes to them and help school X raise their overall SAT scores and continue their upward climb on the ranking ladder.</p>
<p>Hyeonjlee – I said upthread I won’t spend effort on probability theory. So I really don’t want to contradict myself. I’ll just say I agree with your fatal flaw statement, but my “bold statement” assumes no underlying fatal flaw, similar to my response to mantori’s qualification post. So hopefully, when we say there is 15% chance for a kid, we really mean 15% chance, not there is 85% chance they will find a “fatal flaw” common to all schools; otherwise, we can’t even use the term “crapshoot”. </p>
<p>All, please give me some slack for taking poetic license on my exaggerated coin flip analogy :).</p>
<p>What Travesty! That a Statistician, well-trayned in the ways of Mathematiks, should grant poetic License to any Endeavour so mushy and ethereal as Analogie, that literary Tricke—nay, Game!—that surely no admissions Counselor, no major college Official, should play with the Fates of our Progeny!</p>
<p>The one thing that should give you hope, paperchaserpop, is something I heard a former Dean at JHU say about admissions: </p>
<p>Admissions officers are not in the business of admitting individual students. They are in the business of assembling a CLASS. JHU could have taken an entire class of brilliant, qualified, wonderful kids who all wanted to major in Bio, but that wouldn’t have made for a good college experience for any of them. </p>
<p>Admissions is about assembling the pieces of a puzzle to make a good overall picture. The kids are the puzzle pieces. Your kid may just be the right shape to fit a certain spot at a certain school, even if your kid’s shape is a little odd.</p>
<p>I just don’t want to see parents and kids get their hopes up and waste tons of time and money focusing on schools that are huge statistical long-shots, instead of getting excited and putting energy into schools that are good fits for them.</p>
<p>I completely understand what you’re getting at, PCPop. The reason this thread exists is that applicants who have very high test scores and relatively low GPA’s just don’t fit in the predictability box. PCPop mentioned a bunch of schools that seem to value high test scores, and might take a gamble on a kid with less than perfect grades. Doesn’t it stand to reason that applying to a few or several of them gives a greater chance of exerting some sort of pull on a sympathetic admissions officer who is impressed by the scores and intrigued by the personality of the kid - as illustrated by essays, rec’s, choice of classes, activities - resulting in an admission? It’s a subjective process, and I don’t think the admissions rate of a given school tells the whole story for these lopsided applicants.</p>
<p>WashU (on PCPop’s list) apparently liked my 3.6-ish high-scoring D well enough to fly her out for a preview weekend. Accordingly, I’m convinced that they are not only willing to accept but are actively looking for this kind of applicant - one who is not clearly destined for a top 5 school, but who would be happy to attend a slightly lower ranked but still very selective school. I’m not suggesting we should hold out truly unrealistic hopes for our kids, or advocate schools that clearly don’t fit, but it would be crazy to eliminate top schools just because it’s statistically hard to predict the odds of admission.</p>
<p>Admittance rate does not equal chance. An applicant with a 5.0W GPA, 2400 SAT and recommendations from two senators has a much better “chance” than a student with a 2.0, 1050 and no recommendations, regardless of the admittance rate.</p>
<p>Chance implies that results are random, college acceptances are not; those with better profiles get accepted at a higher rate than those with poorer profiles. The odds of flipping 20 heads in a row is actually just over a million to 1, but the odds of flipping one coin any one time and having come up heads is 50/50. The results of any one coin flip HAS NO IMPACT on the next flip. The same is true between college apps. Harvard’s rejection doesn’t affect your JHU app in any way shape or form for better or worse.</p>
<p>vinceh, your view is true, needed, and welcome.</p>
<p>But for the sake of this thread, because I believe in it, I am going to restate the case of the parent with a 3.6-GPA kid:</p>
<p>We are here because we believe our children are special, and we believe that the details of their college applications will reveal their specialness.</p>
<p>We believe that their GPAs are not the best indication of their potential for success in college, and that their test scores, recommendations, interviews, and other factors will make clear their potential.</p>
<p>We support our children regardless of their actual futures, because we believe in their potential futures. Whatever they believe they are capable of, we wish to prove them capable of.</p>
<p>We believe that our children should attend the best possible colleges or universities that are good fits for their personalities, abilities, and interests.</p>
<p>No matter what they achieve, we will be proud of them.</p>
<p>You’re right - I agree that GPA alone isn’t a good indication of the quality of school or the students. But at our school, it happens to be true. The way you can tell is the average SAT is very high, the # of National Merit Semi-finalists and finalist is outstanding compared to the local public schools and all students taking AP classes are required to take the AP exam and we have a pass rate of around 90%. All of this is on our school profile.</p>
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<p>Yes - this describes our school. My son’s WA is a 91 and it looks like he would have a shot at Emory of all the Top 20 schools on his list (there’s only 3) based upon what I see on Naviance.</p>
<p>Well said mantori! Your list should be the “constitution” of this thread ;).</p>
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<p>MomLive – given the weighted scale your school uses, my guess is that a 4.5 on your system is roughly equal to a 3.7-3.8 on our unweighted system for kids with rigorous class load. Some of the top colleges only look at unweighted GPA’s of core subjects, but for our school the Naviance reports the overall GPA’s as they appear on the transcripts. Your school’s Naviance should be comparing your son’s GPA against prior students’ GPA’s with the same GPA calculation method.</p>
<p>While this may be true in your child’s case, colleges know that HS GPA is the best way to predict college performance.</p>
<p>Your thinking may work at less selective colleges, but top colleges are looking for previously fulfilled potential, not future potential. There are just too many kids with the whole package they can’t accept for them to start reading for who may be a late bloomer unfortunately.</p>
<p>My post #1111 on probabilities is a pet peeve of mine here on CC. I’m not bothered by people confusing the statistics, but I am troubled that people use the statistics improperly to give themselves false hope. Drop into the “What Are My Chances?” section and within two or three threads you’ll read something like “Yeah your stats are low for XYZ University but apply ED, it’ll double your chances of getting in”. No, no it won’t. From what I’ve seen, without a hook your stats need to be at least at the 50th%-tile to get in ED at any school.</p>
<p>It’s true, if you apply to 20 schools then you have a better chance of getting in than someone who doesn’t apply at all, but I just wanted to make clear that the probability of getting into any individual school on that list doesn’t change simply because of the number of apps you have out there. Please know I’m not slamming anyone who thinks that’s the case, I just don’t want people grasping at straws that aren’t even there.</p>
<p>I agree wholeheartedly with your “Constitution” in post #1113. In a perfect world colleges would be able to see through an individual grade, or make allowances for switching among multiple high schools. But the reality is that a college application is a two or three page summary of every applicant and the bigger colleges have to sift through thousands, if not tens of thousand of apps in order to fill a class. </p>
<p>All of us have developed systems to sort through tons of information, the college application is no different. Growing up, whenever I stumbled in school I would try and explain it away to my father, he’d patiently listen then look me dead in the eye and say “results don’t lie”. Those withering three words reminded me quite clearly that someone figured out how to get it done. I suspect most elite adcoms have the same attitude. They don’t care if you moved a lot, they don’t care if you found the class mindless busy work, they can just move down the pile to the next kid who figured out a way to handle it.</p>
<p>Obviously after 17 years we know our children better than any adcom looking over a 3 page app for 17 minutes. But I also know that I suffer from the affliction of Parental Blindness; I know that I minimize the flaws in my sons, but an elite college doesn’t want to or have to; I love them, the colleges don’t and never will.</p>
<p>The title of this thread is “Under 3.6 (GPA) and Applying Top 20”. I think it’s possible that some of our “<3.6ers” will get admitted to a top 20, but the reality is we should be constructing a personal realistic Top 10 list of schools for them to apply to, not one based on arbitrary rankings and reputations.</p>
<p>vinceh, I agree with all of the points you’ve made. And about the statistical arguments, I didn’t mean to say they are wrong; on the contrary, I am a former mathematics and realize just how right they are, and what a valuable tool they are for preventing unwarranted optimism. If I seem to argue against you, it’s only in the spirit of looking on the bright side of life. I’m actually really glad that someone bothers to do the rigorous analysis and explain it here, because I don’t have that kind of patience (and possibly, after many years, not the ability) myself. It’s appreciated!</p>
I’m actually really glad that someone bothers to do the rigorous analysis and explain it here, because I don’t have that kind of patience (and possibly, after many years, not the ability) myself. It’s appreciated!</p>