Hey, I was just wondering what you all would think my chances are to get into BC. Here is my information.
Race- white
SAT-2100
M:750
R:660
W:690
Very involved in community. Run tutoring at local lib and much more. Don’t think that part of my application would help nor hurt.
Subject Test: M1-720, M2-750
In all of the advanced classes. AP Calc, AP Bio, AP Gov
On Varsity basketball (3 years), baseball (4 years), and soccer (2 years)
Legacy at BC. Parent, siblings, and extended family.
Essays I would say are good, not sure how recs are but I was more wondering about the scores and legacy factor
anything?
@st0rm723:
Anyone who offers you a chance reply is only showing naivety.
Read through the acceptance threads on this BC forum for this and past years. You’ll see many with seemingly stronger profiles who did not get accepted, and then you’ll see many others with weaker profiles who did get accepted.
Even admission counselors say they can’t tell you until it’s time for your application to be discussed at their reviews.
Aside from all the above, we don’t even see your class rank, your essay, letters of recommendation. We don’t know the track record of students from your high school who attended BC. We don’t know your demographics and how you fit into the mosaic that BC is trying to create for its incoming class (e.g. did they already accept enough female violin players from California).
As to your questions:
Legacy at BC doesn’t help.
According to the BC Factbook, the middle 50% of admitted freshman for the class of 2017 had SAT scores of 1960-2150.
Many with your stats do get accepted. Keep your hope up, but do keep your safeties in place.
All the best.
Grades/rank and strength of schedule are the two/three most important factors in admissiions. Scores follow.
@jpm50 I am from New York which does not help for sure. Thanks for the honesty, but I’m not sure I agree with the legacy piece. I have heard that applications for legacy are read completely separately and help at BC
@st0rm723:
Just curious. What is your source of information for legacy helping with BC applications?
You got this blood. Its a wrap cause u getting in with these stats cuh
Facts #3hunna
did you get in?
@jpm50 and @st0rm723 - We do not answer “chance me” threads, but there are two important admission-related practices that are important for us to clarify:
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Geography does not matter. Students from Massachusetts are evaluated in the same manner and have an equal chance of being admitted as a student from New York, as a student from California, as a student from North Dakota.
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We are proactive for legacy applicants, with legacy being defined as the applicant’s mother and/or father having graduated from BC.
–Boston College Undergraduate Admission
[QUOTE=""]
We are proactive for legacy applicants
[/QUOTE]
@DevlinHall208:
This can mean anything. Are you at liberty help the readers of your post understand the criteria you use when evaluating a legacy candidate?
@jpm50 - The evaluation and decision-making process is exactly the same. Similar to the vast majority of universities, our proactivity indicates a higher acceptance rate. We do not calculate or publish separate, quantitative criteria specific to legacy applicants.
–Boston College Undergraduate Admission
@DevlinHall208:
I realize you cannot provide specifics. That’s understandable.
The concern is you may be giving false hope to legacy applicants - leading them to believe that BC treats legacy like some other universities do.
If you look through the past years of decision threads in this BC CC forum, you’ll find many legacy parents who are furious that BC didn’t admit their child, saying they will no longer be giving their $100-$500/year to BC. And there are plenty of threads where applicants had high hopes of admission due to legacy, only to be left disappointed in the end. There’s also non-CC data to support this as well.
Saying legacy has a higher acceptance rate could mean anything (like the prevailing notion that it only helps if you’ve given big money to BC over the years.)
Just please be clear to your audience when sharing this kind of information.
Thank you.
@jpm50 - The purpose of stating overtly we are proactive for legacy students, to contradict your statement that “legacy does not help,” was to introduce that it does, in fact, help. This does not mean that every applicant with legacy status is admitted. This also does not mean that only applicants with legacy status need to be big donors in order to gain admission. What it means is that legacy increases a student’s chances of admission.
A byproduct of highly selective admission across the U.S. is that many applicants – legacy or not – are disappointed with their admission decision. What we can do is provide insight into what we are looking for within academics, standardized tests, essays, and extracurricular involvement with hope that students, even ones with alumni affiliation, use this as a way to interpret their own student profile; however, we are unable to control a student building up hope or a parent creating expectation a certain decision will occur.
–Boston College Undergraduate Admission
Should we ask the moderator to delete these legacy posts?
I respect that any word from the admissions office has to say that legacy helps. If the legacy message were qualified in any way, the damage to BC would be quite costly.
For the average legacy applicant, whose parents gave little to nothing to BC over the years (other than $100-$500/year), there’s nothing new to indicate being legacy will help give those applicants a lift.
It may be better to have these posts removed. I’d have no problem with that.
Why would you want a thread deleted just because different opinions are offered? Prospective students can read through all of the responses and come to their own conclusion as to if / how much legacy would help. If you’re concerned that prospective students are somehow being misled by what they read in a thread on cc, the whole site would need to be shut down, LOL!
@mjrube94:
I made the offer to delete the legacy posts because BC has no choice but to say that legacy helps. And understandably it cannot offer any details about what that means.
Then, by me trying to question what their vague replies meant, the conversation put the admissions office in an awkward spot, because they can’t reveal details for if, when, and how legacy might help.
I have seen moderators remove messy sub-threads like this in the past.
If legacy helps: Yes it does, without any knowledge of frequency or amount of alumni giving. (This is managed by entirely separate office, who keep records to which we have no access.)
When it helps: During both Early Action and Regular Decision.
How it helps: Legacy applicants are admitted at a higher rate than students without legacy status. By definition, if an acceptance rate is higher for a subset of the pool, the objective measures such as median place in graduating class (if a school ranks), GPA and rigor of program within the context of that high school, SAT or ACT scores, etc., will be lower on average when compared to those measures of non-legacy applicants.
We do not calculate or publish specific rank or testing averages for legacy applicants. Thus, we do not believe we can make it any more clear than this.
–Boston College Undergraduate Admission
All the above says is when you look at the stats of those whom you accepted, the legacy applicants had a better overall academic profile than non-legacy applicants. That’s the back end of the process.
It says nothing about the decision process on the front end. E.G. Do you look at an applicant and say: “This person’s parent attended BC. Therefore the chances we will accept this person are now increased.”?
MODERATOR’S NOTE:
We do not delete posts just because someone gives differing information; we only delete for violations of Terms of Service.