It never ceases to amaze me why these chance me threads exist. We are not Admission Officers. We have no hard numbers on EA/ED/ED2/RD. We are guessing in the dark as much as everyone. For a very competitive school like U of C, my guess (or anyone on CC) on anyone’s chance of admission is no better than a flip of coin. I would hate to give false hope or discouragement to any prospective student. So why does any applicant ask for it? More importantly, why does any parent feel that they can think like Nondorf and his staff and give a concrete answer to the applicant?
I am not trying to be mean to the CC parents or in this particular forum our fellow U of C alumni/parents who genuinely want to help the applicants. However, logically I just don’t see how we alumni/parents can answer the chance of admission question with a high degree of confidence.
OP-You are correct. And I always wonder if some poor kid has been persuaded not to apply to a school they like. I also wonder if any of the kids sharing their essays on this forum ever have them copied and submitted by someone else, to the same college, jeopardizing their chances of admission because then it looks like they plaguarized the essay they actually wrote!
I think a lot of it is nerves on the students’ parts. I don’t know if the waiting is killing them, or if they want reassurance. But it never ceases to amuse me that someone will post stellar stats and spectacular ECs and respondents say, “your GPA/ACT is low, try to raise it or you probably will not get into X” or whatever.
Parents who have been through it a couple of times and are very familiar with some schools have an idea. And they often know how to read the Common Data Set, for example. But fellow HS students, not so much.
As a former neurotic senior, I find it very easy to understand why people post these threads. A school with a sub-20% acceptance rate is a roll of the dice at best anyway, and holistic admissions make the process so opaque that extremely good students still have no idea where they stand. Now that early applications have drawn the process out to span 6-7 months, just sitting tight isn’t the easiest thing.
I personally like the Oxbridge/UK approach far more. Send in a common application and a single personal statement in October, interview (if called to interview) in December, and receive a final decision by early January. Some colleges also ask for an additional essay, but I typed up a few vague bromides at the 11th hour and those passed muster, so this can’t be too significant. A standardized application with a limit of 5 schools gives students a strong incentive to apply to selective schools they’re actually interested in, which turns a 1-in-15 lottery into a 1-in-5 selection. Admission is largely based on grades, personal statements, and an interview, so it’s much easier to know where an applicant stands.
Not that there’s no randomness - my experience and my classmates’ included some very strange decisions - but in my experience UK applicants’ blood pressure was about 20 points lower through March.
Conditional offers, on the other hand, were the bane of every UK applicant’s existence. Every system has its flaws.
My recommendation to any super nervous students who can’t stay off the internet is to spend just a few minutes (don’t obsess over them) on some of the past results pages. They helped me to realize that I could compete and that I had a chance. They’ll give you a better idea of where you stand than any chance me thread, but they’re also pretty humbling and will make you not set your expectations too high. Obviously there’s no way to know for sure but comparing yourself to actual profiles of past accepted/waitlisted/rejected students will give you a clue as to where you stand.
There’s some utility (that’s been mentioned upthread). If the threads really bother you just ignore them (that’s what I do 90% of the time). If you respond, be nice because they’re really stressed out (even if your username claims you’re a snark).
@HydeSnark I can relate to the anxiety felt by the students. What bothers me is that well meaning parents may be giving false hope to any prospective applicants. Many years ago I had received multiple rejections from the Ivies. That was not fun. In the current hyper competitive admission environment, it is better to lower the applicant’s expectation than to have a glimmer of hope when there is none.
Another caveat here. Pronouncements about ED are based on only one year of experience (for which we have limited data – as others have already pointed out). It’s unclear whether (and to me, it seems unlikely that) last year’s experience will be typical. Basically, you have the school making guesses about how applicants will respond to a new range of options (how many needles in which haystacks) and applicants guessing about how the school will treat each group. Even last year, there seemed to be some midcourse reassessment (e.g. EA applicants who were deferred were subsequently allowed to switch to ED2 – was that a one-time deal or a limited time offer or will it become a norm?). And it’ll probably take a few years of readjustment on both sides for a stable set of expectations to emerge on both sides. It may also be the case that answers to the “how much does ED help?” question will vary depending on the applicant’s demographic. So someone extrapolating from their kid’s experience coming from a private school that routinely has multiple highly qualified applicants may see a pattern that wouldn’t affect an applicant coming from a school or place that has rarely sent kids to UofC.
FWIW, while I agree with 85bears that no one posting here can accurately chance an applicant, my worst case scenario isn’t encouraging false hope, it’s discouraging applicants who might get in to opt out of the process rather than risk rejection. As I’ve said recently in one of there threads, everyone’s a long shot. That’s the nature of highly selective admissions these days.
OP- parents can’t answer chance me threads with a high degree of confidence. But in fact the postings almost always include a cautionary statement about just that. My opinion is that these postings are another data point. You wouldn’t make your decision based solely on a response to a chance me post, not matter how informative or well meaning the response is. But you might pick up a nugget or two that could help.
We veterans of the UChicago board tend to get blasé about some of these postings because, in part, they become repetitive. To a brand new poster though it’s all new, maybe a little fresh, and, one can hope, informative.
Excuse me. I am special and I want others to tell me I am. OK? Like my Facebook and Instagram posts, I judge my self worth on “how many likes I get on social media” and “You will surely get in” CC comments. That way when I get rejected, I can say "Well, everybody at CC thought (even if everybody didn’t) I was a shoo in, but this university did not take me. This whole admission process is a bunch of huey. That will make me feel good and allow me to move on.
Now come on, give me some false hope. I am an unhooked white applicant with 1120 SAT and my biggest EC is watching Game of thrones on TV.
Tell me that if I focus on my essays and show my passion for “The life of the mind” I have an even chance at UChicago. Come on now. Say it. I live for it. I already know that when I apply, I will almost make it, since they will surely place me on a wait list. I can then brag to all my friends, that I am even more special and smart, because they agonized over my application and reluctantly placed me on a wait list at such an elite school. Whoa, I knew I was good, but to get on a wait list at a top ten school. Now that is something!!
I will obviously not tell them that I was one of 4,000 on the list. In fact that is my application strategy. Spend my parents resources to apply to every top ten school, get wait listed at a bunch of them, brag about it at my high school and then go to a cheaper state school with my ego intact and brag about it there as well on how I got put on a wait list at Harvard and Penn.
I’m having a little trouble identifying the object of @pupflier 's satire. Is it the poor underqualified kid who never had a chance of admittance to an elite school but who manages to salvage some shred of his/her amour propre out of these validating crumbs dispensed from the cc board? Or is it the people on the board who dispense the crumbs? Or is it the elite schools themselves for being, well, just too damn tough for that kind of kid to get in to?
In any event my advice to that kid would be to pick up his game a bit and prove those elites mistaken by excelling at the state U. There’s a really good case to be made for avoiding the elites, even if you’re a stellar academically ambitious kid. Malcolm Gladwell among others has made that case. I would add this: in my year of grad school at the U of C a large majority of the talented students in my program were graduates of state schools or not very prestigious lac’s. People with the right stuff in them can be found everywhere. Sometimes the kids at lesser-prestige schools are hungrier or have something to prove. That’s where the winnowing begins.