They are not doing a deep dive analysis of what worked etc and correlating the results to past essays and the overall application. The problem is that each counselor has 20-40 kids applying, and it is not like a parent who knows intimately about what that particular child wrote to a specific college. These CC know in a rough way Penn likes x, y, z, so they get their students to write about these. Out of 20, 1 or 2 gets admitted. To get an idea they need to look at both applications that were rejected and applications that were accepted. If 40 kids applied to 15 colleges, that is 600 applications to do analysis of what worked. They are not doing that. They want you to believe that, though. |
agree most don't do this (I would ask your ocunselor to do it though - now with AI, its pretty easy). One of the things I found helpful was to sit with my kids and ask about kids in older grades from their private school that did get in (or didn't) to HYPSM/private T20. You can get valuable info that can help contextualize your Naviance or SCOIR. Often the teens know who has the (1) national awards; (2) "Tier 1" ECs; (3) outside of school projects/respectable internships; (4) niche academic area as evidenced by an independ research project with an in school advisor (these research kids often conduct assembly presentations about their final project at this high school or if published in Adroit or some other publication, the school newspaper reports on that achievement). Anyway, my point is that the high school itself is a good source for this information—who gets in from your school (to certain T20/HYPSM) and why. It ended up being true for my kid (who had national-level awards in a niche area; the kid was admitted to the exact same schools as a graduate the year above, who had very similar awards had been admitted - to the exclusion of certain other "higher stat" kids). |