<p>marite, Model-A profile is close to your definition of “superstar” profile. It is for someone who should be accepted to ALL tippy-tops. I didn’t use the word “auotmatic” because I don’t want to say Model-A students are guaranteed admits to ALL tippy-tops. As many posters have pointed out, there is no “guarantee”. Schools send out “likely letters” not “guaranteed letters”.</p>
<p>Model-B fits your definition of “Ivy caliber” better.</p>
<p>Duplicate.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I don’t think you need to be a cancer curing, olympic medalist to be a superstar.
There are real life superstars and you can find them by putting some number to quantitative measures.</p>
<p>The list assume the candidates have everything till the number, i.e. applicant with 2 has 1 also.</p>
<ol>
<li><p>NMSF/NMF - 16000/15000 applicant
Excellent shot at top 25 US News colleges - Consider these as superstars for rest of the colleges</p></li>
<li><p>Presidential Scholar Candidates – 1600/36 on SAT1/ACT from large states
~ 4000 applicants
Excellent shot at top 15 US News colleges including Ivies.
Consider these as superstars for rest of the colleges</p></li>
<li><p>AP National Scholar – 8 APs by Junior year with 4/5 on each
Along with strong GPA from a top public/private high school
~ 800 applicants
Excellent shot at top 10 US News colleges
Consider these as superstars for rest of the colleges</p></li>
<li><p>A National level award for an EC, Intel in Research etc…
~ 300 for Intel adding 200 for other a total of 500
Excellent shot at HMSPY
Superstar for all other colleges</p></li>
<li><p>A valedictorian at the top 50 public/private High Schools</p>
<ul>
<li>50
Superstars for all colleges.</li>
</ul></li>
</ol>
<p>These ~ 50 applicants are automatic admit to all colleges where ever they apply</p>
<p>^^^
This list doesn’t even mention high school grades/rank until the fifith bullet point. Almost all colleges claim that is an important factor. Numbers 1-3 are all based on standardized tests alone. I don’t believe any school would make it’s decision on this alone, excpet maybe Oxford.</p>
<p>Of course high grades and high test scores are usually at least somewhat correlated. But this “model” is really misleading. Unless you took out NMSF from the first point and limited it to NMF, because that does include an evaluation of grades.</p>
<p>bovertine: The assumption to begin with is that the applicant is a strong student at any high school to begin with.
We are filtering after that.</p>
<p>^^^
Okay. Didn’t see that assumption anywhere. That makes more sense.</p>
<p>Again, my S only meets #1. But he got into the only two top schools to which he applied, and I would bet the house that had he applied to more, he would have gotten into more–though not necessarily all.</p>
<p>The list is far too rigid (as I keep explaining).</p>
<p>There is a definite distinction to be made here. People are conflating Ivy caliber with HYPMS caliber and they are not the same thing. It is alot easier to get into Cornell, Dartmouth, Penn (CAS not Wharton) than to get into Brown, Columbia, HYP, Wharton. </p>
<p>Moreover, the list only presents what would make a candidate a shoo-in. The VAST majority of people at Yale did not have those distinctions, they had one or two, but a VERY, VERY small number of people have multiple.</p>
<p>This seems far more like a p-e-n-i-s measuring for something that doesn’t matter at all. And something that is probably based far more on speculation than any actually knowledge of those who attend Ivy league schools. If someone wanted a realistic idea of what it takes to get into Ivy league schools then they should just look at the results threads of Ivy’s on here. They are an accurate reflection of what it takes.</p>
<p>they’re nice to their mothers; they clean their room, unasked.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Marite & Dbate: The list indeed is rigid but that is what PCP is looking for.</p>
<p>US culture have always been to stress the importance of freedom and have applied it to even children upbringing. The culture outside of the US is a bit different and schools and parent are more disciplinary and would prefer to know or have a system where success can be predicted.</p>
<p>In older times the unpredictable nature of the US college admissions were appealing to everyone as they don’t have to interfere in children education and let them be what they want to be and still get into top schools solely on the basis of passion, IQ etc.</p>
<p>Now with US becoming more and more diverse the parent of any high school graduating class don’t think alike. There are lot more parent now who wants to make sure that their children are successful not only as an adult citizen but to what they themselves perceive as success. Hence the stress on the HMSPY or HMSPY + C or Ivies or Ivies+ or top 20/25/50.</p>
<p>The model came into life to prove to those who negate that there is any predictability to college admissions at top schools. This model just provide one particular way to prove that there is predictability in the college admission process and nothing else.</p>
<p>You can come to a robust system based on your own children high school as each one will have a slightly different system.</p>
<p>The model is rigid and too narrow but seldom fail.</p>
<p>How one uses it to apply to their children is up to them? You can’t force children to follow the model. It is more to know what the applicant chances will be at a particular school after the applications have been done.</p>
<p>duplicate.</p>
<p>If it’s too rigid to capture the reality of admissions, its utility is far too limited to be of any use.</p>
<p>For the record, I could have predicted that S would be admitted to many of the schools to which he applied (had he applied to more than 2) despite the fact that he only meets criterion #1 on the latest list. Why? because I know that adcoms look at more than the attributes listed. So the list is of no utility for his case. Nor is it of great utility to the majority of students who are admitted every year into top schools despite not being superstars by the definitions laid down here. It stands to reason that not everybody can be a superstar, otherwise the word loses meaning.
But if one is a superstar, then one is an automatic admit. No need for a list of criteria.</p>
<p>^^^:marite the superstars are relative as you can see the superstar for UC Davis for example are not superstar for UC Berkeley.</p>
<p>Hence, it is up to you the parent to find out what a superstar means for you with respect to your child college choices.</p>
<p>Agree with Marite. That list includes a number of badges of honor, but none alone is either a necessary nor a sufficient qualification for being admitted to an Ivy. But it’s likely that anyone who does get one of those badges will have some other strong attributes or achievements (including high grades, awards in other endeavors including athletics, debate, the arts, etc.) that make them attractive to adcoms at many very selective schools, including the Ivies.</p>
<p>I would add a note to the use of the “Ivy caliber” term. A lot of kids whom we might think are “Ivy caliber” aren’t particularly interested in attending an Ivy. They may or may not apply to one. They may or may not apply to several. (And some won’t apply to one as an undergraduate but attend one as a graduate student.) Some of my nieces and nephews were Ivy focused, and one ended up at Princeton, one at Brown, and one at Stanford (all siblings). My kids didn’t have that aspiration, nor perhaps the “perfect” credentials that they might have been encouraged to develop at a prep school or highly focused magnet school. In fact they each were perhaps “Ivy caliber” but they also had an “anti-Ivy” mentality, which, however, left them a pretty large number (dozens) of excellent colleges to apply to; and they are distinguishing themselves in their early careers today. What produces such outcomes is a combination of an excellent foundational education, creativity, passion, and hard work.</p>
<p>Wait a minute. I thought we were talking of superstars for top schools. There’s a difference, surely between Berkeley and UC-Davis?</p>
<p>I find that National AP Scholar is not necessarily a marker for a tippy-top candidate. At some schools, the post-AP options are far more compelling than another AP course. S1 never took more than three per year, and chose instead to take math, CS and physics beyond AP level instead.</p>
<p>OTOH, my younger son, who meets several of the eight categories, was National AP Scholar after junior year. Being in full IB makes it hard for students to pursue more advanced subject acceleration.</p>
<p>collegealum14 – Waitlist from Caltech here.</p>
<p>POIH (and others) which USNWR top ten, fifteen, etc are you referring to? The national universities? I thought top LACs (SWAP) were harder to get into than all but HYPMS?</p>
<p>“The culture outside of the US is a bit different and schools and parent are more disciplinary and would prefer to know or have a system where success can be predicted.”
And the catch is that many Asians parents, including PCP and POIH, are trying to apply Asian cultural and statistically based parameters on to AMERICAN college admissions! College admissions are based entirely on test scores and numerical rankings in Asia. But that is NOT the way college admissions are handled by American Colleges. US colleges admissions are much more holistic, and the admissions decisions are made by humans, not computers, which is why there is no “guarantee” that a statistically superior student will be accepted at a particular college. Selective US colleges, especially privates, are not JUST looking for the students with the statistically HIGHEST “measurable” accomplishments [ MIT AND CALTECH are possible exceptions]. If they only wanted students with the highest test scores, highest number of AP classes, highest GPA’s, etc, etc, then they would not ALSO ask for essays and recommendations letters as well, because the “numbers” would speak for themselves. That is the gist of what marite and others are telling you when they say the “model” is too rigid[ imho]. If you want to understand why selective US colleges decide to take one student and reject another, then you need to accept that they are looking for more than just statistically impressive students.</p>
<p>To defend poih’s model, I think his last post is correct - if you have those qualifications, then statistically your admissions results will be those poih predicts. But lots of other kids will have same results without checking those particular boxes.</p>
<p>“In older times”’
In older times there were far fewer students from either the US or abroad applying to US colleges. THAT is why it is harder to get into US colleges these days, not because students in “older days” weren’t as driven by their parents as they are today. It is a function of 1]the increasing numbers of US kids applying to colleges, 2]the worldwide population increase and commensurate increase in worldwide college applications, 3] the fact that many private US colleges have not increased the size of their incoming freshman class for decades, so there are more students applying for the same number of openings years as there were years ago, 4] an increase in the number of women applying to colleges and 5] a recognition within the US that a HS diploma does not give students the skills or knowledge necessary to support themselves these days.</p>