<p>After having two kids go through the process, I’ve come to think that many overstate the importance of grades and scores for elite schools. They get people in the pool to be considered but that’s it.</p>
<p>This year in DS’s high school, the val and sal did not get into the very elite schools to which they applied early. Both had great grades, great test scores. But though they had positions that NHS president, neither, frankly, is that engaging. A college admissions officer might not be convinced that they would add that much to the college communities. </p>
<p>Of course both are great kids and will land at a strong school and go on to have wonderful careers and good lives. But, while they and their parents probably think they didn’t get in early because “it’s a crapshoot,” it’s probably not so. Of course this could be me thinking that those intangibles really matter, but I’ve come to believe they do.</p>
<p>From the applicant view, the tops schools are like a “lottery”. You can’t predict much per stats because there are MANY high stats, highly qualified students. It is supply/demand quandary.</p>
<p>^ but that would ruin the " it" factor. Look at all the community service kids do now…many half-heartedly, and all the clubs kids sign up for because it " looks good on a college application."</p>
<p>I don’t think colleges are looking for the standard laundry lists that students and parents try to exploit. They are looking for true passion…something that can’t easily be quantified but something they know when they see it. Once a student passes a certain GPA and SAT cutoff, passion is looked for. People often mistakenly think a 2400 is better ( for admissions odds) than a 2200… And then get “angry” when a kid with " lower" stats than junior get in.</p>
<p>What possible business is it of yours what your children’s classmates got on their SATs? How do you even know that information? Do you also keep tabs on what your neighbors drive or how much they make? Other than being generically happy for them, it’s not attractive to keep tabs.</p>
<p>There have been some great points made in this thread by a lot of well informed people and I am thankful for your thoughts and opinions. Obviously there are people with a lot more experience than I have in this whole college process.</p>
<p>Pizza girl - you are jumping to conclusions. I am using the stats that kids are posting themselves, published scores etc and not somehow snooping or stalking to figure out someone else’s information. Stop being so sanctimonious - I am not interested in your comments</p>
<p>At my kids’ HS we can get all that info from Naviance. Not this kid got X but kids from this HS who got X were accepted, rejected or waitlisted. I believe the OP indicated he and his D also used Naviance to craft the list.</p>
<p>If your school has Naviance it’s easy to see if kids with higher or lower scores get into schools. It’s quite obvious that just having the top scores and grades isn’t the only consideration, but that there is usually some lower limit of grades and scores that will get one in the range of being considered. Maybe if all schools had Naviance, people would finally get that it’s not all about stats. I don’t think it’s all about passion either. My younger son wasn’t exactly passionate about the two activities he wrote about in his essays, but he was funny, engaging and talked about them intelligently.</p>
<p>Sometimes it really IS a mystery. D2 was admitted to two reach schools (one EA, one ED) this cycle, but was deferred from a school that I really thought would be close to a sure thing (last year, a 75% admissions rate for EA). Her stats were very much in line with the school’s profile. She’d visited, been very enthused, had an interview that she thought went very well, wrote enthusiastically about why she wanted to attend the school. She wasn’t applying for need-based aid. Like I said, a mystery! But kudos to the adcoms for making the right decision from their point of view. :)</p>
<p>Ummm, isn’t that what Naviance is for (although just their grades and test scores, not their names)? It exists so that high school students can get a realistic idea of whether each college is a reach, match, or safety.</p>
<p>Of course, grades and test scores do not tell the whole story, but a Naviance graph will look “fuzzy” if other criteria are heavily considered, rather than showing a sharp border between admit and reject if admission were just by a grade/rank and test score formula.</p>
<p>But you KNOW that already. You KNOW that top schools don’t just rack and stack scores and GPA and take from the top down. One minute on websites and two minutes on CC and it’s abundantly clear. So why is everyone always so “surprised” and “shocked” that someone with lower scores / GPA got in over their kid, and then act like its “not fully transparent”? </p>
<p>Look, the only way to make it fully transparent is to have a formula, and weight ECs (student council president counts for x points, newspaper editor for y). If colleges wanted to do that, they would. But they don’t.</p>
<p>You picked your spouse and friends holistically. What’s the “formula” for that? Should anyone be able to apply for your friendship and be guaranteed admittance?</p>
<p>“Ummm, isn’t that what Naviance is for (although just their grades and test scores, not their names)? It exists so that high school students can get a realistic idea of whether each college is a reach, match, or safety.”</p>
<p>I think Naviance is great in theory, but it feeds the CC arrogance that with 30.000 high schools in this country, one’s own high school is a microcosm of anything, and leads to such inane conclusions as “HYP has a grudge against my high school” or “HYP clearly favors x over y since someone with x got in and I, a y, didn’t.”</p>
<p>Maybe we need a compromise, in which state universities would make their admissions criteria fully transparent (in many cases, they already come close), but private schools could do as they please. Those who prefer transparency could stick to the state universities – which is no great loss since we have many fine state universities in this country. Those who are willing to be considered holistically could apply to the privates.</p>
<p>Re Naviance:</p>
<p>You can learn some useful things from Naviance, such as that vast numbers of kids from your high school apply to the nearby selective college (Georgetown, in our case) but almost none get in, while fewer apply to more distant colleges of comparable selectivity (Northwestern and Cornell, among others, in our case), and quite a few get in.</p>
<p>Sometimes, a willingness to drive six or seven hours (or deal with the annoyances of flying) can serve you well.</p>
<p>^^Yes and no on the publics. If that were to occur Michigan, for instance, would accept many of the higher GPA/higher stats kids they now reject or defer into nothingness in lieu of kids that meet their institutional needs. I’m not saying I agree, just that there are publics that “pick and chose” with just as equal whim as privates.</p>
I think this is the key point that people need to understand: the decision only appears to be random because we can’t see into the black box where it is being made. (Of course, there could be some random elements as well, just as there are in most other aspects of life.)</p>
<p>While I understand the philosophy of not caring about what others think, do, or score on the SATs, I think information on admissions trends at various schools is important in creating a realistic list of reaches, matches, and safeties. That’s where Naviance can come in handy. And if you’ve used all those resources, and created a sensible list, it’s human nature to be perplexed when the results don’t match up to what you expected.</p>
<p>I only understand the perplexity to an extent. We call them reaches, matches and safeties (or whatever other words you prefer) for a reason. Matches aren’t a sure thing, you apply to reaches hoping to get in against the odds. So why are people surprised when some of their matches reject or waitlist them and some of their reaches accept them? That’s the way it’s supposed to work! Occasionally someone gets rejected from a safety - and then you do wonder what happened - did you have the school in the wrong category? Do they care about yield management more than you thought? Did your kid phone in the application? The year my son applied to RPI I considered it a safety because no one in six years with his stats had ever been rejected. It was declared a “New Ivy” by Newsweek that year and it’s acceptance rate was about half what it had been the year before. My son still got in, but it was a lesson in the power of outside forces to change the odds unexpectedly.</p>
<p>I only understand the perplexity to an extent as well. They are reaches for a reason. Personally, I think anyone applying to any school with an acceptance rate of (say) 25% or less had better think of it as a reach. Getting into a reach is something you do against the odds, and you had best be prepared that not getting in is the most likely outcome.</p>
<p>I’d love to spend a week as a fly on the wall in an admissions office - I think it would be so interesting.</p>
<p>I think back to a year ago when my younger son was applying to colleges. We attended a family holiday party. Three of my son’s friends were there. All wonderful young men with excellent grades and all had earned third degree black belts in taekwondo, involved community service, etc. All four of them had been deferred or rejected from their ED schools of choice. The four eventually ended up at Princeton, Oberlin and two at Bates. You just never know! To the untrained eye, we had to wonder who in the world their ED schools did take because we considered all four to be rock stars. There’s so much behind the curtain that we don’t know.</p>