They would stand out at most colleges. But not at the super-selective colleges that many such students aim for.
@Lindagaf is right. Plenty of gifted kids who think outside the box, etc, don’t get into these schools. Some do. And … average excellent kids may or may not be gifted.
@ucbalumnus yes … exactly.
@lindagaf Okay, I am getting the intent of this term now and will comment accordingly.
@augustuscaesar27 “What’s the difference to you, as parents, between a kid who is ‘average excellent’ versus one who is ‘truly excellent’?”
In the end, I think the official arbiters of who is better in this college admissions world are the top 10 -15 Adcoms. If you get multiple top 10 -15 admissions you are probably better than average excellent.
The parents posting here are giving you great guidelines, but honestly, when they are applied to a specific kid, it often gets much much murkier. You are confused because experts are confused. The goalposts never seem to quite stay still. There are a few kids who are clearly better than “Average Excellent.” The kind of kid who announces they are only going to apply to Harvard or only to Stanford, and you respond that “That is fine”, and have no concern. Personally I have only known one of these.
For the rest of these students and parents, it is very difficult to discern the level of school they will be admitted to in advance. Have been through this issue extensively with D1. From 8th grade on, we had lots of discussion with multiple “experts” who were very, very divided on her in real time. Once the results came back, everyone said it was obvious, but in real time, they were divided. Many things are obvious after the fact.
I think it is important to point out that the discussion was not about her ability. To a person, the counselors and consultants how reviewed her achievements read her essays, and interviewed her thought she was solidly top quartile student even at Harvard, MIT, and Stanford, and that she would continue to be a standout and be well above average at any school in the country. They were right about that too.
Still, by the above definition it isn’t clear to me whether she is average excellent or a little bit better. The discussion was really around how her application would be perceived and accepted or rejected by adcoms, not really about her as a person. She lacked one signature definitive thing to point to, but also had an unusual number of achievements that were notable.
A summary of her achievements:
-All honors or AP classes in HS and all A’s in the most rigorous course available.
-SATs were Reading 800, Math 800, Writing 730.
-National Merit scholar PSAT 230.
-Subject tests Math 790, Physics 770. National AP scholar (a 4 or 5 on 8 or more AP exams) including 5’s on both AP English exams and BC calc.
-US Presidential scholar candidate.
-MV calc in high school.
-Varsity team captain, State Meet Qualifier, and recruited swimmer for DIII, but not DI.
-National Latin Exam Gold Medal X4.
-IL State Latin completion top 5 finisher 3 out of 4 years.
-MIT Women’s Technology Program. Additional reference from MIT math professor.
-Addition coursework at Northwestern U.
I still don’t know where she fits by this definition, but she is graduating this year and it has all worked out very well.
“Average excellent” students are also “truly excellent” students. There are just a lot of them.
My truly excellent student was different from the day he was born. My son walked into a pre-K class and the teacher told me when I picked him up the first day,“You know your son is highly gifted.” Interestingly, I just thought he was like the rest of dh’s family - an early reader and good at math. (My side of the family aren’t slouches either, but we were not by and large precocious.) It wasn’t really until the CTY charts came home that I it really dawned on me why he had never met any one like him in elementary or middle school. His scores were way over on the right hand side of a bell curve that was already made up of kids who had been identified by their schools as smart. Since he was a kid who marched to his own drummer, the question was always whether he would play the game and do what his teachers wanted (for the most part he did) and whether his EC’s would add up to something more than average excellent.
Younger son was much more of the average excellent type. GPA in the top 5%, SAT scores in the the 5 to 10%. His school based ECs were fine, but he wasn’t concertmaster of the orchestra, he didn’t have tippy top medals at the State Science Olympiad (but I think he got 5th place a couple of times). He had one unusual activity that he made the most of, and one not so unusual activity that he turned into a really top notch essay. By the numbers he’s not as smart as older brother, but he has much better people skills.
They both ended up at appropriate schools - and for the most part I think the colleges do a pretty good job at sorting things out.
With respect, I disagree with the 2 points you posted above.
3. Conventional students according to the above definition are in my observation and those of relatives/colleagues from other high schools/areas found that rule followers are actually much more likely to end up at Ivy/peer elite colleges than rule breakers precisely because they often get better LORs....or at least teachers/admins willing to write them on behalf of such students. Rule breakers...not so much.
This also follows into #5 as likeable people are also the ones who tend to get the better LORs or at least teachers/admins willing to write them.
That’s not to say rule breakers and challenging kids can’t find any LOR writers…just that they’re far less likely to find nearly as many teachers/admins willing to write LORs unless the latter are unusually tolerant of rule breakers/challenging kids* or those kids meet a much higher academic/level of co-curricular/EC achievements than would be the case for their rule-following counterparts.
Incidentally, this is one reason why some HS dropouts are actually high stats and genuinely strong students. They found themselves constrained and even bullied by HS teachers/admins/classmate parents who are exceedingly conventional rule followers to an extreme fault. Funny part is once they end up attending colleges…including some respectable ones which admitted them on a provisional basis…they tend to excel to the point of leapfrogging over most of the “average excellent” students academically(college GPA) and in the post-college world (Provided they don’t enter fields which value rule following to a fault).
- Not too many as in my observations, most who enter the teaching or moreso....educational admin fields tend to be rule followers...sometimes to extreme mindlessness and fault IMO.
IME the really gifted kids can do enough to get the A’s and will wow one or two teachers in their area of interest. I remember talking to my son’s AP Bio teacher at some point who said from time to time he’d offer extra labs or projects for extra credit and most kids would take advantage of the opportunity. My kid would look at his grade and say, I’m already getting a A and would read whatever theoretical computer science book he was immersed in. The bio teacher, BTW, a Phd himself, was not insulted, more amused. My kid got his recommendations from a physics teacher and a Latin teacher and then a university professor he’d done some work for and the head of a digital media company he’d done programming work for. My kid wasn’t the most likable kid in the world, but he was likable enough.
Harvard and the rest have a mix of both kinds of students. There’s a sizable contingent of average excellent kids there. Or at least average excellent kids with something that pushes them over the edge (sports, URM, legacy can all help.)
^^My S is “really gifted” (confirmed by testing) but still “average excellent”. He doesn’t coast, by any means, but he also hasn’t accumulated any of the leadership positions, standout national awards (ISEF, etc), or standout athletic or artistic achievement that would make his application shine among the thousands at Ivies, Stanford, MIT, CalTech, etc. Definitely there are plenty of kids who are truly gifted but are still average excellent.
This fetishization of giftedness gets tiresome after a while.
There are parts of the country where the surge in G&T programs is a cynical and not very well hidden effort for affluent parents to send their kids to public schools but "insulate’ their children from racial minorities and new immigrants. There are school systems where G&T programs are so politicized that the children of the classroom parents, bake sale mom’s, book sale dads seem to be overpopulated.
Likeability, following rules- this is all noise and has nothing to do with intellectual capability.
But carry on with your own theories. It’s highly entertaining even though much of this stuff really has no grounding in reality, except as it may pertain to your own HS and your own kid.
I mean really- rule breaking kids can’t find teachers to write LOR’s? Where does this come from?
Probably depends on what one means by “rule breaking”.
Doing something unexpected and innovative, but completely above board and honest and showing some sort of above-and-beyond level of skill and achievement, may be “rule breaking” in that conventional thinkers may have never thought of it. Such would be a positive type of “rule breaking”.
But doing something like cheating or trying to game the system to appear to achieve higher than one actually does would be a negative type of “rule breaking”.
Average excellent is top 1% of HS graduates, maybe top 0.5%.
3.5 million kids graduate HS in the U.S. each year. So 1% is 35,000 kids.
That alone will get into a 20-50 school. But above that, you’ll probably need something else – URM, athlete, legacy, major donor family, extra-ordinary EC accomplishments, etc.
Unfortunately, there are too many conventional rule following K-12 teachers who would find the above to be an annoying “deviation” from their “lesson plan” or even feel threatened/jealous of a K-12 student who did the above. A few may even perceive it as a direct insult to their own person/intelligence.
Lost count of how many HS classmates recounted such encounters with their K-8 teachers or some of the genuine genius type college classmates recounting such encounters with their K-12 teachers.
There’s far less of this behavior among college/university Profs IME and while a few do exist…they’re much more easy to avoid if desired.
I think this is another one of those terms that we all know what it means and we know it when we see it but it can be harder to give it a definitive definition. I like to think of it terms of basketball. All professional players are excellent and for the most part play at a pretty even level. Every now and then someone transcends that. You see Michael Jordan, Lebron James, Larry Bird etc. play and you know they’re special. Unique among all of the excellent players. I think it’s like that with many students. They are bright and capable of performing at the highest level academically. Occasionally though someone comes along and you know they are just a level above. Defining when that takes place is hard. Identifying it when you see it is much easier.
Average to me implies no hooks(URM, legacy, donors, first gen, recruited athlete, famous/celebrity or powerful/politician connections).
But note that those “something elses” are not equal to each other in effect. Probably on average at super-selective schools:
relation to huge donor > recruited athlete > extraordinary EC accomplishments >> legacy or URM
Of course, the essays and recommendations also have to be good, but these are difficult for outsiders to observe and compare, so their effect tends to be largely ignored or treated as random effect in discussions about admissions (which is a mistake, since they do have some non-random effect, even if outsiders cannot tell what the effect is for a given applicant).
I don’t know where you live but here that “cynical” effort would backfire.
I recall when a new coworker (who I do like very much) told me about her children and whispered, “They’re PG.” I had no idea what she meant. She then clarified: “profoundly gifted.”
Ugh… Who talks that way? #-o
You see average-excellent students with great GPAs and test scores post here all the time with a list of only top 20 schools as targets because their rock star status in HS led them to believe these schools would be clamoring to let them in, but can’t grasp that there’s a big world outside their bubble with more than enough to students just like them to fill most freshman classes on their list several times over. If you suggest they add some safeties and matches, I’ve seen them go off the deep end attacking people who don’t understand how brilliant they are and how lucky HYPS will be to have them because they won a specific math award.
They may be brilliant, but some of the most selective colleges are looking for an “it” factor that indicates the potential to be a future leader, not just the best test taker with the most awards. It is one thing to be a brilliant surgeon who is highly skilled at the methods of surgery he/she has been taught, but another to be a brilliant surgeon who invents a new and revolutionary method of surgery that changes the game.
Here’s a recent article on a study tracking HS valedictorians.
A few caveats about the headlines:
- The Karen Arnold study was based on students who graduated high school in 1981. A lot could have changed in the past 36 years.
- The Karen Arnold study only followed students for 14 years after high school graduation, so they stop following people after 32-33. How many people change the world by 33?
- The Karen Arnold study only included 33 schools in Illinois. Those schools may not represent the full range of schools in Illinois or the US. The sample could be biased and under-powered in statistical terms.
It’s undoubtedly true, there’s a lot more to success in life than HS or college GPA, but we shouldn’t read too much into a study that’s more than two decades old at this point.