<p>Marite, your son had the “genius” hook, that also trumps other stuff, just like other hooks do. Colleges need some truly academically brilliant kids and most of them don’t have the ECs etc. </p>
<p>“It does not sound like much unless one takes into account that S took BC-Calc and AP-Physics C as an 8th grader and scored 5s on all parts; had 9 college classes by the time he graduated at the end of junior year and wrote a paper (not of publishable quality) that would ordinarily be required of juniors majoring in his field while in his high school sophomore year.”</p>
<p>I deleted that part, but not quickly enough!
He had pretty much the same profile as Countingdown’ S. But the point is that his strengths are not so easily captured by the list; while his weaknesses are all too apparent.
I was willing to play, but it seems to me the list is not particularly helpful.</p>
<p>Agree, the list focuses too much on well roundedness without “weighing” appropriately how extreme strength in one of the areas will obviate the need to be strong in others. If you are serious re creating a model (and I remain very skeptical but am nerdy enough to be intrigued) you would need weighing so that, say, academic strength of 3 made up for EC strength of 1 or 0.</p>
<p>^I agree. This model does not apply to kids who have something so strong and rare that it just “trumps other stuff”. May be we’ll have an exceptional or alternative path for these geniuses. Examples:</p>
<p>Olympic athlete
Calculus & 120+ on AMC 12 by 8th grade
Author of best sellers
Publication in Nature/Science
Gold medal winner in two separate International Acadmic Olympiads
World champion in something popular
Earning over a million dollars
etc.</p>
<p>“Top” high schools usually mean those that are magnet or private schools. They already have a talent pool similar to ivies, so being at the top of the heap there means something more than at a typically public school. Also, because of the talent pool, they generally are more rigorous. However, these types of schools typically don’t have honors like valedictorian in order to discourage hypercompetitiveness.</p>
<p>Concerning POIH’s model, I’ve known people that had hits in every criteria and didn’t get accepted to some top schools. I had hits in every category, except maybe “Demonstrated Creativity” which is sort of vague. All of us did well, but most did not get in everywhere, myself included. </p>
<p>Crushing your classes in a place like TJ and having a wide variety of state and national distinctions doesn’t make you automatic for Harvard. It makes you automatic for Caltech and makes it likely you will get into one or a few of the other top 5. This is why the term “crapshoot” was invented. Just about the only academic distinction I can think of that would make you automatic anywhere would be to make the traveling team for the Math Olympics.</p>
<p>Ahem. Ivy caliber should mean only Ivy League schools. Also Ivy caliber should not mean that an applicant would be accepted at every and all schools to which s/he applied.
So an automatic for Caltech is definitely “Ivy caliber.”</p>
<p>“I’m all for it. Who wants to take a shot at assigning weights?”
well this is how many top colleges weighted factors OTHER THAN GPA and SAT scores in a 2006 survey.I don’t think things have changed much since then-</p>
<p>“On what basis do admissions committees anoint the chosen? The question has preoccupied generations of applicants. “There is no magic formula,” says Gila Reinstein, a Yale spokeswoman. “It’s just not an exact thing.” Nonetheless, the College Board’s annual survey of colleges and universities does ask them to rank admissions criteria. No surprise: high school academic record is consistently rated “very important,” as are standardized test scores (Harvard contends they’re only “important”). But what about all that other stuff? Institutions below admit the country’s best students: 25 percent of their freshman classes, fall 2004, scored 700 or more on the math or verbal SAT and placed in the top 10 percent of their high school graduating classes. But academics alone won’t get you in. Here’s what else matters.” </p>
<p>^^^:MPM:
At the end of the day; the biggest chunk of applicants to any college gets in thru academics.
The top colleges take applicants in every possible academic or SAT score range just to encourage everyone to apply which help colleges.
Increase application
Decrease accpetance rate
Increase Ranking</p>
<p>Otherwise if you look at the probability of accpetance just using the SAT1 range</p>
<br>
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<p>So model works; for some schools the probability might touch 100% to some it will be about 50% depending upon the extent of data available.
If you look at the probability of acceptance in each category; you will be surprised that the applicant which has all the checks will have a reasonable probability > 90%.</p>
<p>"At the end of the day; the biggest chunk of applicants to any college gets in thru academics.
Well yeah, duh. That’s what this states:
“No surprise: high school academic record is consistently rated “very important,” as are standardized test scores”
and that’s why I copied it to the top of the post:.</p>
<p>collegealum314, I’m interested in your admissions results. Which schools did you not get in? For the school(s) that turned you down, do you have classmates who got in? If so, where did they do better than you?</p>
<p>menloparkmom, thanks for the link to the article.</p>
<p>The article only gives relative importance, not quantitative weights. I’m envisioning a weighting system where as long as you exceed X number of points out of a total of Y points, you are considered a Model-A student.</p>
<p>PCP, How students are rated by the admissions offices at "ivy "caliber colleges is a “black box” that many want to peer into. Occasionally word leaks out [ from someone who used to work in the admissions office at a particular college] that if a student gets a 1 [ out of a 7 point scale], that pretty much means a thick envelope, but then the lid slams shut again and no further info leaks out for years. And until the college admissions offices actually give out information as to how students are evaluated and weighted [ and they will NEVER release that information] , all that can be done by those who want to know is guess, conjecture, assume, interpret, extrapolate, etc. etc.</p>
<p>I really should not be issuing diktats! I left out the all important “not.” The sentence should read: “Ivy caliber should NOT mean only Ivy League schools.”</p>
<p>You know, it’s easy to predict whether a superstar will get into a top school, even though it may not be possible to predict whether s/he will get into ALL top schools to which s/he applied. And for superstars, the exercise is not particularly helpful. It’s for the excellent but not superstar level applicants that it should be helpful. And yet, it is precisely at that level that it cannot be predicted. Why did an applicant get into Yale but not Harvard? It’s a mystery and not necessarily easily explained by the adcoms themselves.</p>
<p>That’s what I was thinking earlier today also, marite. I thought we agreed early in this thread that there are some students who naturally operate at a very high level and they will be accepted to some Ivys. The model is only going to predict who they are. The model isn’t going to predict the other students because their acceptance was unpredictable.</p>
<p>Indeed. And “we can only admit 2,000 for an entering class of 1600, because that’s how many beds we have, but really, 16,000 out of the 20,000 who applied could do the work” is not very helpful in predicting who among the 16,000 will end up among the 2,000.</p>
<p>^I completely agree with “it’s easy to predict whether a superstar will get into a top school.” However, with Model-A, I’m trying to lower the bar for a minimum “superstar” profile. This is not an slam dunk easy task. 4.0-2400-cancer-curing-Olympic-athlete is definitely a super superstar, but would someone still be considered a superstar with less, sure. How much less without losing the superstar label is the exercise of Model-A.</p>
<p>Do you mean to say that superstar is the same thing as “Ivy-caliber”? That would not be my definition nor my experience. Someone who is “Ivy-caliber” is, in my opinion, someone who has the qualifications to be admitted into a top school, whether or not this is the actual outcome, keeping in mind that top schools get more applications from qualified applicants than they have room for, individually and collectively.</p>
<p>A superstar would be an automatic admit, if not at all then at most top schools. And to reach that status, a student would have to be well above “Ivy caliber” level. Again, it’s easy to decide who is superstar, Olympic medalist cancer-curing, perfect stats applicant or not. It’s the Ivy caliber kids that are more difficult to identify. So we need to be clear what is being discussed here.</p>