How come on their website and pamphlets they say that they have a range of admitted students from 21-36. Isnt a score of a 21 ACT to low for such a premier institution. Can someone enlighten me on why University of Chicago has this cut off and not other top 20 colleges
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That probably means one of three things:
- The kid with the 21 submitted a far stronger SAT score;
- The student admitted with a 21 was a black-native american kid who grew up in post-2003 Iraq, helped form the country's transitional government (and then entered middle school), started an international NGO, maintained a 4.0 GPA through high school with about 15 AP classes, and applied EA to boot; or
- The student in question is a member of the admissions dean's close family.
This is one data point that can be skewed by a single outlier. It’s better to look at the school’s 25-75 midrange than the lowest and highest values.
https://collegeadmissions.uchicago.edu/page/profile-class-2018
The 25%-75% range is 32-35. There are going to be very, very few admitted students with below even a 30 on the ACT. That being said, the fact that some people do get in shows that it’s still possible.
What it means is that Chicago is using its website to attract the highest number of applications possible by giving the impression that no ACT score is too low to preclude applying to Chicago.
Most colleges don’t tell you what their absolutely lowest ACT or SAT score is, because that’s not very useful information. Most colleges tell you their 75th percentile - 25th percentile range. At relatively small colleges that 25th percentile number can be pretty misleading; at a medium-size college like Chicago, the 25th percentile is probably just about the floor on normal admissions. The kid who was admitted with a score more than 10 points lower than the 25th percentile was obviously an outlier whose other qualities made admitting him or her worthwhile. Maybe publicizing his admission without giving the details encourages other admirable outliers to apply. Maybe all it does is encourage people to a apply whom it will be easy to reject, but whose application will help bring Chicago’s admission rate down to HYPS levels. Either way, UChicago wins.
Development candidate?
A massive hook of some kind.
The development office is fundraising. So a development candidate is one who’s relative, usually mom or dad, has given a lot of money.
I think all of the above are possibilities. I also found that stat interesting. UChicago also reports the range for SAT too and it also goes pretty low. The best thing to do is to go to CDS and see the % that the college accepts from the ranges. You will see that something like 86% comes from the high end- 700-800 SAT score.
UChicago also does outreach to inner city Chicago kids and this may factor into it as well.
My D loves, loves UChicago but it’s a long shot.
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UChicago has Div III sports, including football. Likely, the people with those low scores are athletes or have some other talent hook (artist, etc)
In all likelihood, the one kid with a 21 either meets one of the descriptions I detailed above, or has several hooks. Div III sports mean less pull for the coaches with admissions than at, say, Stanford.
Way to say football players are dumb…^^
On average, recruited athletes spend more time on their sport and less on their academics than “purely academic” admits. There are certainly athletes with 2400’s and 4.0’s, but not very many.
Saying the students who are admitted with low grades/scores are generally athletes isn’t the same thing as saying that athletes are dumb. It’s a recognition that in some athletes’ cases, college admissions will be significantly less “meritocratic” than they would be for the population as a whole (and the process isn’t particularly meritocratic even for the general populace).
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On the contrary, most recruited athletes are admitted based entirely on stringent meritocratic principles. It’s just that what constitutes “merit” for them may be different than for others of their classmates.
Recruited athletes are recruited because they are the best people available at their sports who are also both capable of doing the academic work at Chicago (or whichever other school is doing the recruiting) and interested in going there. While there may be a little subjectivity in determining whom is best at a particular sport, that analysis tends to be much more precise and rigorous than any protocol used to analyze what kind of student a candidate will be. Also, because it’s a disaster for the coach as well as the admissions department if a recruited athlete fails academically, they are very careful not to admit athletes who are not able to succeed as students, taking into account the demands and distractions of playing a sport at the college level, even in Division III.
Standardized test scores and highly un-standardized high school grades give the appearance of objectivity and precision, but they are very imprecise ways to measure academic merit. Athletic merit is determined based on a wealth of data, including extensive performance records at different levels of competition.
My daughter applied to University of Chicago because of the wide range of ACT scores and the fact her hook is being a nationally ranked thespian. Every student is a piece to a puzzle in the admissions game and it is finding the right fit. If they were all the same, there would be no diversity in the incoming class of any school. I applaud their efforts to get all kinds of students to apply.
The only reason you think that’s unusual is that you aren’t used to looking at other school’s maxes and mins, just the 25th and 75th percentile.
Princeton admitted .3% of people who applied with between 1500-1690 (out of 2400) on their SAT, and 2.1% of people who applied with between 1700-1890. So a few people got in with unusually low scores. Source: https://admission.princeton.edu/applyingforadmission/admission-statistics
Harvard’s freshman survey found a few outliers with <1400 (out of 2400) and a few more with <1800. Source: https://collegeadmissions.uchicago.edu/page/profile-class-2019
I’d wager UChicago’s minimum of a 21/1120 (out of 1600) is actually very high compared to almost every other school.
Being s nationally ranked thespian isn’t a hook. It is a very strong EC, and certainly may improve her chances of admission, but doesn’t get you into that pile with recruited athletes, legacies, and URMs. Really famous people like Emma Watson & Chelsea Clinton would probably also be considered hooked. But hook has a pretty specific meaning in college admissions, and unless a coach gets to ease a certain number of students through admissions, an EC like that isn’t a hook.
Chicsgo does like high scores, too.