Anyone here work in college admissions, particularly at a selective school? My daughter is a junior in high school, and let me just say – we need a desperate gimmick to get her into a top school. She’s a good student with a full plate of extracurriculars and all that, but clearly we need a gimmick to push her over the top. I’m thinking that if she can make a working nuclear reactor out of soda crackers, she might have a 50-50 chance of getting into one of the lesser Ivies.
But I just don’t want to do something that somebody else has done, you know what I mean?
It’s really late for a gimmick. The kid that makes a working nuclear reactor out of soda crackers doesn’t get in because of the nuclear reactor: he gets in because he was the sort of person who dedicated himself for years to a single academic pursuit: he had the intellect, the motivation, and the passion to do that. Doesn’t he sound like someone you’d want to have a beer with so that he could tell you about it? Selective colleges want people you’d want to have a beer with.
What are her test scores? Is she a “top 10%” good student or a “top 5 in the class” good student?
If she’s interested in science or engineering, she could try entering a prestigious science fair competition. I recommend reading Science Fair Season, by Judy Dutton. It’s not a “how to” book, but it’s got fascinating stories about how various students researched their topics. A number of them entered prestigious universities.
Also, I used to work in the admissions office of a selective college, although not an Ivy. I can’t emphasize this enough: make sure she proofreads her application.
I don’t want to give the impression that I’m looking for advice here on how to get my kid into a good college. The purpose of this thread is entirely frivolous. I want to be amused by the crazy and desperate things people do to get into school. I have had hints of things – for example, the parent at an Ivy League information session who asked if the admissions essay could be in the form of a poem (to which the admissions officer really should have replied, “Yes, but only in dirty limericks.”) But I want more, more, more!
I don’t have any firsthand knowledge, but I recently read the novel Admission, which is fictional but was written by a former reader for Princeton’s admissions office, so I figure there’s at least a few grains of truth in the story. There wasn’t anything particuarly outrageous, but I did like her description of a table in the office’s kitchen that was practically groaning under the weight of all the cookies, brownies, and organic vegan health bars that parents of applicants sent in as “gifts.”
Well one kid in my high school graduating class arranged for three previous generations of his family to have attended Dartmouth, while another arranged for his father to be president of the alumni association at Yale. Each got in to their respective schools, although the second kid didn’t get in early decision. (Although the dean of admissions called his father to let him know that fact. And that second kid was photographed mooning the camera while standing on FDR’s tomb.)
In my first year of grad school, someone flew in with his kid from somewhere (I want to say China, but I’m not sure) on the first day of semester, walked into the dean of mathematics’ office, and expected to be able to write a cheque and get the kid enrolled on the spot.
Ok, not quite a “stunt to get in”. More like a “funny story based on a complete misunderstanding of how the process works”.
My university is public and far from exclusive, but according to the guys in admissions they do routinely get baked good and baskets from people. They have also been offered monetary bribes. Two specific groups are most common for this: families where the kid was a borderline passing C in high school with low SAT and ACT scores and foreign applicants who assume this is how things are done.
One high school student wrote an OpEd in the Wall Street Journal complaining about not getting into several Ivy League schools, even though she had a
4.5 GPA, an SAT score of 2120 and had been a US Senate page. Basically, the most competitive colleges are really difficult to get into.
Kids these days are just a lot smarter. For example, when I was of applying age, it was not possible to get better than a 4.0 GPA, and nobody in my high school had one. It was not possible to get more than 1600 on the SAT and only a couple of students in my high school claimed to have one. It wasn’t until I got to college in Southern California and found out that better than 4.0 GPA was possible and some of my classmates had them. They were hardly as bright as the 3.3s from my high school.
That’s tongue in cheek, right? Because the SATs have changed their scoring for at least a few years, so that the highest score possible is 2400 and not 1600.
As to the weighted GPAs, I think that is stupid, but the idea is that getting an A in an AP, IB or Honors class should count more than getting an A in basic English class.
My dislike is that not all schools have AP/IB or Honors classes, not all schools weight honors classes differently (if they don’t have AP or IB), and therefore, students in those schools, who may be as capable as those that took the AP and IB, have no way to prove it in the admissions process because they never even had the chance to take those classes. They can and do, of course, prove it once they get in.
A bit I suppose. At my high school, a 4.0 was possible, but I would not be surprised if no person had one in my class. And we had some wicked smart people. I met a few people in college as smart as the smartest people in my high school, but they weren’t smarter. My cohort from both hs and college had members that went to Harvard Law just before Obama and did just as well.
Rank remains a pretty good indicator of ability/work ethic. And once you’re in the ballpark–if you’ve got the basic grades and test scores to even have a chance–then they are looking at your application as a whole, which includes counselor’s reports about what courses are offered and how your course selection compares to a typical student at your school. If an admissions officer sees that a kid has an SAT of 2200, a couple 800s on SAT IIs, and is second in their class, they are going to take the time to notice if that 3.8 is on a weighted scale or not.
I don’t have the article handy, but I’ve read of firms that advise parents (always overseas) to donate millions of dollars to particular universities, under the hopes that will give their kids a free ticket.