<p>Interesting article from the WP. I think prospective applicants and parents should have as accurate as possible a sense of where they stand in the admissions process of any given school. </p>
<p>Counting incomplete applications when reporting acceptance rates paints a very inaccurate picture of how competitive the pool of applicants is. </p>
<p>Discuss. Do you think this is unethical or is it fair?</p>
<p>This doesn’t surprise me. I would like to know how incomplete an application can be and still be counted. My D was interested in W&L early in the process so we had her ACT’s sent. Is that enough to count as an application?</p>
<p>I would think an application would be valid if the Common App or school specific application were sent.</p>
<p>Ethical or not, W&L is definitely not the only school to do this. Either way you slice it; W&L is still a top notch selective LAC.</p>
<p>I have a student who started her common app with a number of schools, but did not send payment, rec letters, transcripts, etc. (because she got in to Georgetown SFS early). She was startled to receive denial letters and/or wait list offers from a few of these schools in the spring. So…I think this is pretty common. And I agree that it is sketchy, unless everyone does the same. The only way to compare apples to apples is to have everyone use the same standards for reporting.</p>
<p>If they paid the fee it counts</p>
<p>If they paid the fee, but never sent transcript or scores, it would seem that it would still count.</p>
<p>However, the “acceptance rate” would be “off” since those students weren’t “accepted” but they may have been if they had sent everything in.</p>
<p>It’s more likely that if those two students were accepted they would displace two others in the pool so the %age would not change.</p>
<p>The percentage may or may not change.</p>
<p>Why would a student pay the app fee but not complete the app? The most obvious reason I can think of is an ED applicant who withdraws other applications, as mentioned by MirableDictu. This student is usually applying to a more selective school ED. The adcoms at the less selective school likely realize that they don’t have a great shot at having the applicant matriculate, so they admit more students to ensure the class is filled.</p>
<p>The base for the acceptance rate should be the number of students voluntarily applied, disregarding they have submitted all materials or not. I don’t think there is any ethic issue unless they fake some applications. There are schools that even send out invited application that waived the application fee and require no essay or recommendation. You may also argue if that is ethical or not. In the former case, at least the school did not attempt to increase the application pool size.</p>
<p>While I understand that there isn’t anything technically unethical for a school to count a ‘started’ application in it’s acceptance rate, it does, however, create a misleading picture of just how selective a school is. If I submit an application for a school that gets 5,000 applicants in a year and 1,000 of those applications for that school are incomplete, I should be able to know that. It would save me some worry and also help me assess whether a school should be considered a safety or not. </p>
<p>Obviously W&L doesn’t believe in transparency – at least until this article was published.</p>
<p>I find it hard to believe that there are so many incomplete applications that including them would skew the statistics in a meaningful way (though apparently it skews them enough to make this sort of calculation appealing to the school), but I do think that including incomplete applications is entirely unethical–because an incomplete application is not an application at all. Someone who initiates the process but doesn’t follow through completely has decided to NOT apply. The admissions office will not review an incomplete application nor make a decision on it, so including it in the statistics is indefensible.</p>
<p>These posts sound a bit harsh to me. The article lists some of the reasons that applications are considered incomplete: missing teacher recommendations, and test scores. Teacher recommendations are largely beyond the control of the applicant; test score policies vary so much from school to school that it would be reasonable to miss submittal of the exact combination requested.</p>
<p>I have known students who were accepted to colleges without LOR submitted. In one case, the teacher became ill and was forced to take a leave of absence. In the other, the applicant simply could not get the teacher who had agreed to write it to actually submit the LOR. It was too late in the process to reasonably ask another teacher to write one.</p>
<p>I cannot cite any examples, but I would imagine an outstanding applicant could be admitted if test scores were submitted that did not fully conform to a school’s policy (perhaps ACT submitted but without Writing; or only one SAT II score submitted when two are required).</p>
<p>If a student forgets to include a phone number on the application, should it be considered incomplete? What if the school’s transcript is missing a cover sheet that must be included?</p>
<p>If the intent of the application, as interpreted by adcoms, is to be fully considered for admission, then the application should be counted, even if incomplete. </p>
<p>The only evidence in the article that W&L adcoms acted unethically is the incomplete applicant share for a single year was unusually large and the adcoms have a motive for fudging the numbers. This is highly circumstantial.</p>