word of caution for U Chicago applicants

Colleges and Universities A-Z University of Chicago ✅
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<p>so, to paraphrase this, one could say</p>

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<p>If your scores/stats are currently at the 25% range of the published information on enrolled students, the chance of you getting “ACCEPTED” is not 25%, but in reality, MUCH LOWER, as your scores are likely to represent something like 15% on the distribution among the ACCEPTED students (I am just picking 15% as an example being noticeable lower than 25%). </p>

<p>If your scores/stats are at 75% of the published stats on enrolled students, in reality among the “accepted” students, your scores are close to 50-60% mark. </p>

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<p>Actually this is worse than I thought… Especially given that Chicago yield is lower than its peers, I would surmise that the discrepancy between enrolled stats and accepted stats will be more pronounced for Chicago than its peers (by how much, I don’t know)</p>

<p>Further, putting this in the context of “unhooked” students whose stat must make up for the lower stats of those with hooks for the benefit of the school’s public “appearance”, their stats may have to be EVEN HIGHER than what I originally posited, which was the 75% marker. </p>

<p>Going back to the original intent of the controversial post I made, I advise all the prospective students to build your safety strategy very carefully. Do apply to Chicago even if your stats are not hitting these marks: there are always the exception cases - adcoms do endeavor to create a few of them so that they can keep up the “myth” of “holistic admission policy” and so that they can say in clean conscience how they “look beyond the numbers”. However, just as your parents should not build their retirement financial plan based on winning a lottery, you should not build your college admission strategy based on these exceptional cases. There are other wonderful colleges and universities that meet you needs and you have an excellent chance of getting in. If your enthusiasm for Chicago did not motivate you to do a proper research and evaluation of these schools, you will be left with very unsavory choices in case you don’t get accepted into U Chicago and THAT WILL BE SAD.</p>

<p>Good luck.</p>

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<p>yes, yes, yes, yes and yes… Repeat this 100 times.</p>

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<p>And please read Karabel’s book (“The Chosen”) if you want to understand why elite unis developed “holistic” admissions. Big hint: The approach was developed not for recognizing and rewarding applicants with non-traditional backgrounds. The approach was developed to justify admission of favored applicant groups. Historically, UofC was opposed to such holistic admissions evaluations, and focused on pure merit. That’s why a discussion like this is all the more curious. </p>

<p>To put it another way, if you come from the right background, your likelihood of admissions relative to published stats, if you are lower on the curve, is probably better at HYPs than at Chicago. Go figure.</p>

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<p>It’s not quite that extreme. I looked at the Amherst and Brown data again. Amherst is probably pretty similar to Chicago, given that it has a similar yield (38%, including ED, so that its RD yield is probably equal to or lower than Chicago’s yield on RD students). Amherst also makes things easy by providing somewhat more information than Brown.</p>

<p>The mid 50% range on each component of the SAT I at Amherst is exactly the same, both for enrolled students and for accepted students. For enrolled students, it’s 660-760. For accepted students, it’s 670-780. The median for each component is just below 710 for the enrolled class, and around 720 for the accepted group. For the ACT, the 25-75 range and median are 29-33 / 31 for the enrolled class, and 30-35 / 32 for the accepted group. This was for the class of 2012; they haven’t released 2013 yet.</p>

<p>Here’s a link to the Amherst data: <a href=“https://www.amherst.edu/media/view/79194/[/url]”>https://www.amherst.edu/media/view/79194/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>Brown, which has a yield above 50%, looks pretty similar. (Its yield includes ED students, but its RD yield is still above 40%, so significantly higher than Chicago’s.) It doesn’t give the precise ranges and medians for each group. Students with CR scores 750 or above represented just under 40% of the accepted students, and just over 32% of the enrolled students; the equivalent numbers for M scores are 45% and 40%. Those with CR scores under 700 were 33% of the accepted students and 40% of the enrolled students; those with M scores under 700 were 31% of accepted students and 37% of enrolled students. So it really looks like there is only about a 10 point difference between accepted and enrolled on each of the scores.</p>

<p>Anyway, my points are these: (1) Both I and hyeonjlee may have overstated the difference above. It’s there, but it’s not overwhelming, and it doesn’t look a lot different between two colleges with significantly different ratios of enrolled students to accepted students (i.e., yield). (Since Amherst and Brown both have ED at approximately the same level, their yields are directly comparable.) (2) Therefore, the “myth” of holistic admissions lives on, because it’s clear that at both these colleges lots of high-stat kids are being turned away while lower-stat kids are admitted, even though it’s also clear that high-stat kids have a better chance of being accepted.</p>

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<p>Hunt is right. I should have been more specific. I’m talking about Naviance stats for my son’s high school, a very large, very competitive school in the northeast. Our stats cover 5 years. The average stats of those accepted to UC are 4.56/1528 out of 1600/2250 out of 2400 RD and 4.47/1480 out of 1600/2197 out of 2400 EA. True, the lowest accepted GPA was 4.02, but I’m told this was four years ago. The last two years, the lowest accepted GPAs were 4.67 (2009) and 4.6 (2008). I know this because our school publishes individual year data in a book that shows each applicant’s stats along with the decision (no names, but it’s kind of easy to figure out some of the kids…). FWIW, in my observation of Naviance data for our HS, Chicago is less likely than H and P to admit outliers for athletic prowess. (for our school, Yale never seems to admit outliers.) So this is just local data.</p>

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<p>yes, and these kids with “right background” who are admitted with stats lower on the curve are not the URM etc. It’s the socio economical elites: the big donors, the sons/daughters of the king of Monaco and highly visible celebrities and politicians, etc. This goes to show you that these school’s goal in admission is to put together the right class for the schools, NOT the kids who are applying. Once you are IN, you benefit from all the connections these kids bring. </p>

<p>I was once advising one of my employees when she was applying to Wharton MBA program. Her father was a very prominent figure in the industry. When I was writing the rec letter as an alum and also a supervising exec for her, I made sure that I mentioned her father being the industry figure very clearly (in a natural way, if you know what I mean). The reason why I did that was because I knew Wharton would look at her as someone who could bring wonderful connections for her fellow students and to school. In short, she was an asset they would be interested in having as “ONE OF THEM”, even if her other qualifications might have been lacking. By the way, she got in.</p>

<p>The same thinking goes true for all elite university/college admission game. In HYP, the general consensus is, if you are an unhooked candidate, the “real” acceptance rate is less than half of the published acceptance rate. I believe in Chicago, it is much better than that since Chicago did not play this admission game as seriously as others do until lately. Even so, elite universities are elite universities. They did not end up there by playing pure meritocracy and charity for all the eager students.</p>

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<p>True, but worse than that. How do you suppose HYPS ends up with a class where 40% come from private schools? It is not that the academic qualification of that high a percentage of private school kids is better (even though prep school kids on average are better qualified than public school kids…). It is because HPYS gives a lot of weight to non-academic factors that are more common among prep school kids (obscure sports like squash, anyone?) - in order to maintain their culture of exclusiveness. </p>

<p>The ironic thing about HYPS admissions is that there are the recognized hooks (URM, legacy, recruited athlete, development prospect), but there is also the little discussed tip given to other groups. And all these preferences add up fast, to the point that at most elite colleges, non-hooked, non-tipped (or whatever you want to call them) applicants are competing for a pool of less than 1/2 of the admission slots. And you can easily imagine what this means for stats. </p>

<p>I have no idea how Chicago views the hook and tip process, if at all. I suspect Zimmer will move it more toward a traditional HYPS model, though, based on changes he’s made to personnel.</p>

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<p>The Naviance scores for S1 & S2’s high school are all over the map for the past 5 years. The lowest GPA was UW 3.4, lowest SAT 1280 . I know the 3.4, no hooks. Lowest HS GPA of anyone S1 knows, 2.9 (now a 4th year). Test scores and GPA are listed as considered at Chicago, not as important or very important, and I believe them (at least historically). What they do list as very important is often overlooked in the discussion about essays. They list strength of curriculum (available) and teacher recommendations equally with essays. EC’s come in as important. I doubt very many kids with low test scores or GPAs, however, write great essays, take the hardest courses available, and earn glowing teacher recommendations. </p>

<p>USC interestingly provides comparative data on applicants versus admitted versus entering students:
<a href=“http://www.usc.edu/admission/undergraduate/private/0910/FreshmanProfile2009.pdf[/url]”>http://www.usc.edu/admission/undergraduate/private/0910/FreshmanProfile2009.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>My guess is for many top schools the trends would be much the same. If so, chances of admission for those falling in the upper range of the mid 50 might be a little better than the overall admit rate might suggest. Even though the admit scores are higher than the enrolled, the numbers for for all applicants are significantly lower.</p>

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<p>Though I know the odds of winning a lottery is practically nil, I still occasionally buy a lottery ticket as a cheap entertainment: what I would do if I win $300M etc - it’s fun to play a fantasy game. But it would never occur to me to quit my day job. </p>

<p>There are stories of Johnny getting into Harvard without a hook and with 3.4/1950, and Marry into Princeton without a hook and with 3.3/1800. I am sure there are some Chicago versions of these inspirational stories too. As I mentioned earlier, adcoms do endeavor to create a few cases like this to ensure that there will a continuous flow of inspired applicants who will keep their application number up and acceptance rate low: no such clear example of beating all odds, and no customers (applicants). can you imagine anyone buying a lottery ticket if there has not been a winner in years?</p>

<p>Yet, in terms of realistic prospecting, just look at the big picture: the final distribution and spread of the stats. I reiterate this again: without a deliberate attempt on the part of the universities to select their students based on them as part of important criteria, there is NO way the numbers/stats fall the way they do!!! yes, if you write terrific essays, you will get admitted with 2200 over Bobby with mediocre essays and 2300. But, realize that you are already WITHIN/over the acceptable range, and in that case, the essay was looked upon as a deciding factor. However, if your stat is way below 50% marker and you have no hook, it’s getting to be really dicey and your essays may just not be enough to compensate for the critical deficiency in numbers. </p>

<p>The intent on my part to start this thread is NOT to argue that numbers only determine the admission outcome, or the adcoms rank order the candidates based on numbers and simply admit top X students. I was alarmed by some posts I have seen (by the prospective students) whose stats seem to fall below even the 25% of the ENROLLED students, which means that among the accepted students, they fall even further below, and yet these students naively believe that U Chicago’s pursuit for quirky students means they have a fair chance to get admitted if they just write one heck of an essay. Some of them even say,
“Oh, I hear that Chicago does not consider scores important, etc, etc, etc”. Well, news flash: the incoming students stat that truly reflect their (adcoms) actions say something entirely different from the adcoms’ “feel good encouragement” that so inspires all these students. </p>

<p>By all means, apply to chicago. You may just be the one winning the lottery. But don’t quit your day job, which is, in this case, equivalent to having a solid admission strategy with attractive options that are a very comfortable match for you. you can believe whatever you want to believe. Just make sure that you are not becoming a victim of your own wild optimism. Faith in humanity is a good thing: but, don’t you ever believe that universities’ mission is discover that hidden talent that happens to be you.</p>

<p>P.S. Just as a data point: last year, U Penn published the acceptance rate by the SAT score bracket. Their overall acceptance rate was about 17%. For kids with 2350-2400, the acceptance rate was something like 50%, and the acceptance rates steadily went up with each 50 point increment. Given that the 17% figure was an average, and the lower stats are usually coming from kids with hooks, I bet the acceptance rate of those without a hook and SAT below the median is low/mid single digit. Chicago may be a bit more forgiving with regard to SAT than U Penn, but given that their enrolled student SAT is actually HIGHER than that of U Penn, I doubt that Chicago is so much more “holistic and forgiving”.</p>

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<p>I agree with the foregoing post. But it’s worth pointing out that a hell of a lot more students are hooked at Penn than at Chicago. First of all, Penn has traditionally treated legacies as a big deal, and Chicago doesn’t even have a discernible policy on that, since it has probably become an issue only in the past couple of years. On top of that, Penn’s undergraduate student body is the size of Northwestern’s – twice what Chicago’s is now, and 4+ times what it was when the parents of today’s applicants were in college. And on top of THAT, Penn treats the children of its professional and graduate schools as legacies (and its professional schools, at least, are larger than Chicago’s, too).</p>

<p>Plus, Penn (along with all of the Ivies, but perhaps more seriously than many of them) does real athletic recruiting. It does political recruiting, too. No one was surprised when the ex-Mayor, future-Governor’s son was accepted there, and Penn makes certain to maintain its ties with all of the politicians who can affect it. (I’m not certain the local politicians even give Chicago that opportunity. I think their kids are at Northwestern or DePaul.)</p>

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<p>The former Dean of Admissions told me, and has stated in print, that he had managed over a period of years to dramatically reduce the consideration of test scores in admissions. He said if it were solely up to him he would have eliminated them entirely. If one searches the thread provided by the former UofC admissions counselor on this forum she says the same thing (over and over again). As I have said before, I have no idea if the new dean intends to continue this approach or not. I take them at their word.</p>

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<p>I do believe that Ted O’Neal was sincere when he said this. I do not believe that adcoms are consciously lying when they say they don’t consider SAT to be that important.</p>

<p>However, there is a whole ocean’s worth of research in the field of cognitive psychology and social psychology that demonstrates beyond a shadow of doubt how human mind, its belief, and attitudes are greatly influenced and impacted by all sorts of information while the person is NOT aware of this happening and often contrary to their STATED intention and belief.</p>

<p>In fact, every year, tens of million dollars are spent by the research scientists to study the effect of the way and order in which information and evidence is presented to the jury on the decision making processes among the jurors and the ultimate outcome (verdict). Trial lawyers hire consultants to strategize their handling of the witnesses, information, and evidence to have the maximum impact on the juror’s perception and attitudes. This body of research demonstrated over and over again the often stated judge’s instruction to “strike that comment” is mostly ineffective: it has always affected the juror’s perception aplenty.</p>

<p>So, I will believe it when they say they don’t consider SAT that important if they completely eliminate it from the data set the adcoms are considering. NOT EVEN OPTIONAL, BUT TOTAL ELIMINATION FROM THE DATA THEY SEE. Either this or, they should use a completely non ambiguous, automatic point system that says “10% weight for SAT and 40% weight for GPA, and 40% weight for essays, etc”. Then I know, indeed SAT was given a low weight. </p>

<p>Without any of the two drastic measures above, the SAT number is such a powerful and prominent data point, I just simply don’t believe that it does not affect the adcoms’ attitude toward a certain candidate even if they think they are not impacted and consciously believe otherwise. Just like the judge’s instruction to the jury to ignore certain statement is shown ineffective, Ted O’Neale can tell his adcom to ignore the SAT numbers, but as long as they are there on the paper, the adcoms perception and attitudes would be already powerfully affected. </p>

<p>More than anything else, the outcome (the actual score distribution of the enrolled students) powerfully tells all of us how important the scores were. As I mentioned earlier and endeavored to go in detail in another thread, STATISTICALLY, THERE IS NO WAY SAT SCORES FALL WHERE THEY DO UNLESS THEY WERE INDEED, INTENTIONALLY OR NOT, USED TO SELECT THE STUDENT AS ONE OF THE IMPORTANT CRITERIA. (I could provide the statistical analysis that supports this statement, but in the parents forum I have already gone through this “proving” exercise, and I won’t repeat it here).</p>

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<p>hyeonjlee,
you seem to be forgetting that historically and statistically, students who have hi GPA’s and have also taken full advantage of a rigorous college preparatory curriculum, will in all probability ALSO have high SAT scores. Nowhere does it say that the U of C admissions office does not consider the applicants transcript - to be very important. They have always emphasized they are looking for students who have a love of learning. So naturally, that would lead to the hi rate of acceptance of academically very smart , knowledgeable students who [ surprise, surprise]score well on tests. Chicago could very well become SAT optional, and I doubt it would have much of an impact on WHO they accept.</p>

<p>me thinks ye doth protest the importance of SAT scores too much.</p>

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<p>I repeat here the post I made in Parents Forum about the statistically unlikely distribution of the SAT scores if one is to truly believe that GPA and other things are so well correlated with SAT that SAT score just fell where they are when the adcoms were not paying particular attention to it. By the way, my statements are relevant to kids who have to get in based on their own merit without any hook - the kind of kids whose scores should be above median. In U Chicago and its peer schools, the median/mean scores are above 700 for each subject matter, so I am roughly using SAT 2100 as a marker. Here goes the little thesis on statistics.</p>

<p>By the way, I have no interest in advocating the importance of SAT. S1 is already in Chicago - the perfect school for him, and for S2, this is a kicker, SAT IS HIS ACHILLES HELL. If anything, I really, really, really would like to believe that SAT is not all that important, but a little statistician in me won’t let me fool myself into ignorant bliss because that bliss and an action that is consistent with that ignorant bliss will hurt his chances due to the absence of realistic strategy on his part in this admission game. </p>

<p>The thing that really annoys me is the more I learn about this whole college admission stuff, the more I realize how the universities and colleges are TOTALLY misleading naive candidates and their parents about the whole process, all because they want to maintain their public brand prestige that is largely dependent on a huge application number, extremely low acceptance rate, and voila, the “exclusive club-ness” prestige. This is a reason why Harvard, whose endowment exploded from under $10B during the 90’s to $36B just before the meltdown last year did NOT increase their undergrad size. Instead of providing their world class education to a few hundred or even thousand more kids with that kind of unheard of endowment explosion (4 fold increase to $36B), they spent the money like a drunken sailor to further enhance the prestige of luxury good education brand position for all sorts of things like buildings, ultra financial support for the few chosen ones and such. Why? Because they want to maintain their “exclusive club-ness” as part of the allure. Increasing the number of kids would mean cheapening that “exclusivity”, right? By the way, the HYP and such schools are all the same. Yale and Princeton saw similar growth in endowment, but none of them spent it to make their world class education available to more kids. I am not talking about increasing their student body by 10X. But, when their endowment grew by that large magnitude, don’t you think they could have admitted a few hundred more? On this ground, I give Chicago high compliments - they did increase the undergrad size over the years.</p>

<p>enjoy.</p>

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<p>I know you are VERY proud that your S is at Chicago, but as a newby chicago parent, you may want to tone it down a bit here trying to convince others of the merit of your own opinion…No one has the benefit of being a fly on the wall in the room where acceptance decisions are made, so to assume, based on your empirical analysis or opinions, that decisions MUST be a direct result of one factor that you are totally convinced is critical, despite what the adcoms who actually make the decision have said in the past, is a bit self righteous, don’t ya think?. Nuff said…</p>

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<p>Sorry, if I appear offputting. My intension was to caution the students to make sure that they have safe and sound admission strategy so that in case Chicago does not work out, they have good options that they have researched well and know that would work out in the end.</p>

<p>My son could have easily missed the boat. We were very reckless. If we did miss the boat with no other options left because of the wildly optimistic assessment, I would have wished that somebody kicked me hard to see a more realistic picture. </p>

<p>If any one of the kids who are applying this year got a little worried and started to research a few more options, then I believe I did my good deed of the month. Regarding my seemingly righteous air and attitudes toward the admission officers in elite universities, I don’t believe I need to do any defending - this has been analyzed and discussed over and over again and there are even books on this subject matter written by people who have years of experience in this field - some of whom actually worked as adcoms. I believe there was another poster on this thread who was referring to one such book that totally debunked all the public statements made by the elite universities.</p>

<p>No more post on my side on this thread.</p>

<p>Good luck to all of you.</p>

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<p>The post you reference is talking about the correlation of GPA to SAT. That is not what we are talking about here. GPA does not reflect the rigor of the course work, or the work performed in the courses as evaluated by teachers in their recommendations, or how ideas are handled in the essays, or the the passion shown in ECs. (This is why GPA is listed as only considered as well. :slight_smile: ) If a student is evaluated highly on all or most of those areas the likelihood of student not having high test scores as well would be quite small. Further, if a student, as rare as it is likely to occur, does rate highly on those elements and does have a somewhat low test score, it is likely not held against them, particularly if they have a knock it out of the park essay.</p>

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<p>hyeonjlee: Thanks, thanks, thanks! You wanted to caution students to make sure that they have a safe and sound admission strategy. I do not have a statistical background and cannot evaluate all your arguments, but I appreciate the food for thought that you have given me. I am convinced that students and parents will be more careful after having read your analysis. And …. UChicago does and always did ask applicants to send their official SAT scores. I checked the application instructions of 2 years ago when S applied (and was accepted). Why would they have asked for this information if they didn’t care?</p>

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<p>asked him for this information if they didn’t care? - To be able to raise a red flag when there would have been a serious discrepancy! In his case (like in many cases) there wasn’t, but what if there was? Would admissions still have ignored his SAT scores? I don’t think so.</p>

<p>(forgot to add these last sentences in my previous post)</p>

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<p>The bottom line is that the statistics speak for themselves. Obviously, someone with lower SATs or GPA has a statistically lower chance of being admitted to Chicago. My child had less than 1400 on her SATs and she and I were told by her on campus interviewer that this would hurt her and she was in fact deferred EA. After the deferral, she retook the SATs and got over 1400 and was admitted regular decision. So, I would have to say that to some extent, based on our experience, SATs did play a role. Her GPA was in the 3.5 range with some honors courses, but a serious EC which she has participated in at the U of C may have helped. Do I try to mislead people that they should not apply to more safeties or have false hope in gaining admission to that dream reach school? Absolutely not. We knew that U of C was a crapshoot, but obviously once in a while the dice role in your favor so give it a try to one or two of these type of schools. My child applied to two safeties(where she was admitted), two matches(where she was waitlisted and rejected) and two reaches ( where she was admitted and waitlisted). In her case she was admitted to one of her reachs(Chicago), it was her dream school, and she has thrived and excelled there.</p>