He's all-Ivy -- accepted to all 8 Ivy League colleges...

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:All fighting over the token.

Are you jealous because no one is fighting over your kid?

Exactly!

No, I am jealous because my kid isn't black. Therefore, she applied to not a single Ivy, despite having higher SATs than this kid, plus other stuff that wouldn't matter, because she's white. Why bother applying?

I'm white and I don't have a bit of trouble with black kids getting in with lower SAT scores. Admissions offices consider the whole package. SAT scores are only one piece of the information they receive.

SAT scores under predict the performance of black kids by quite a bit. On average, black kids do better in college than their SAT scores would suggest. That may occur for a couple of reasons:

1) Black kids on the whole are less prepared for the SAT.

2) They face psychological barriers when taking it. Expectations matter a tremendous amount. When a person is told that members of her demographic group do well on a test, they do better. When a person is told that members of his/her demographic group does poorly, they do worse. It's called stereotype threat. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereotype_threat

3) The test is biased against black kids.
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/06/21/sat

Because there is evidence that the test and testing situation are biased and the test scores for black kids underpredict their performance, lessening the emphasis on SAT scores for black kids is completely fair. Score ranges are flexible for all sorts of groups, including legacies and children of very important people and celebrities and student athletes. Why aren't you railing against the admissions advantage those groups have?

BTW, even if that kid isn't more qualified than your snowflake, he is a more interesting student to have on campus. He has an interesting story (child of immigrant parents from Ghana). Your snowflake sounds like a dime-a-dozen bright kid from a high SES group in an overrepresented area of the county. It always helps to have something that makes you stand out.

That's completely backwards actually. Blacks get worse grades in college than their sat score would predict. Most studies have not found any significant bias in tests, and even the few that claim to only find a small amount on the verbal section
, and none on the math. Indeed, the gap on the math section is larger than the gap on the verbal section.

With regards to amount of prep, there have been multiple studies that show that blacks actually engage in more test prep than other groups. One quote: "Black non-Hispanic students are more likely to participate in test prep, and there are also significant interaction effects of race and grade level on prep, with black 11th graders having the highest predicted probability of prep."

No idea if the quality of the prepping was taken into account, but most studies show that prepping has fairly modest impact on average; about 50 points or so.

Cites or it didn't happen.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Great. But none of his ECs really stands out. His SATs aren't unusual for black kids at the Ivy League either. His class rank is excellent, but if anything a little low for an Ivy.

In fact, he seems unusual in that he is a throwback to the old days when colleges were looking for the "well-rounded" candidate as supposed to the new focus on "passion."

Not true at all. These scores are very high for black kids, even at an Ivy. From an article in the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education:

"If we raise the top-scoring threshold to students scoring 750 or above on both the math and verbal SAT — a level equal to the mean score of students entering the nation’s most selective colleges such as Harvard, Princeton, and CalTech — we find that in the entire country 244 blacks scored 750 or above on the math SAT and 363 black students scored 750 or above on the verbal portion of the test."

While I'm sure there's a good bit of overlap, there's probably ~200-250 AA kids with scores above 1500, and how many of them are coming from a public school with 30% farms?

From another article in JBHE it says that only 72 blacks acored above 1500 in 2003 on the SAT I Math and Verbal (combined) test. Combine that with the excellent grades, AP scores etc, and this kid had to be one of the top AA candidates in the entire US. Not surprising he got in everywhere.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:All fighting over the token.

Are you jealous because no one is fighting over your kid?

Exactly!

No, I am jealous because my kid isn't black. Therefore, she applied to not a single Ivy, despite having higher SATs than this kid, plus other stuff that wouldn't matter, because she's white. Why bother applying?

I'm white and I don't have a bit of trouble with black kids getting in with lower SAT scores. Admissions offices consider the whole package. SAT scores are only one piece of the information they receive.

SAT scores under predict the performance of black kids by quite a bit. On average, black kids do better in college than their SAT scores would suggest. That may occur for a couple of reasons:

1) Black kids on the whole are less prepared for the SAT.

2) They face psychological barriers when taking it. Expectations matter a tremendous amount. When a person is told that members of her demographic group do well on a test, they do better. When a person is told that members of his/her demographic group does poorly, they do worse. It's called stereotype threat. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereotype_threat

3) The test is biased against black kids.
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/06/21/sat

Because there is evidence that the test and testing situation are biased and the test scores for black kids underpredict their performance, lessening the emphasis on SAT scores for black kids is completely fair. Score ranges are flexible for all sorts of groups, including legacies and children of very important people and celebrities and student athletes. Why aren't you railing against the admissions advantage those groups have?

BTW, even if that kid isn't more qualified than your snowflake, he is a more interesting student to have on campus. He has an interesting story (child of immigrant parents from Ghana). Your snowflake sounds like a dime-a-dozen bright kid from a high SES group in an overrepresented area of the county. It always helps to have something that makes you stand out.

That's completely backwards actually. Blacks get worse grades in college than their sat score would predict. Most studies have not found any significant bias in tests, and even the few that claim to only find a small amount on the verbal section
, and none on the math. Indeed, the gap on the math section is larger than the gap on the verbal section.

With regards to amount of prep, there have been multiple studies that show that blacks actually engage in more test prep than other groups. One quote: "Black non-Hispanic students are more likely to participate in test prep, and there are also significant interaction effects of race and grade level on prep, with black 11th graders having the highest predicted probability of prep."

No idea if the quality of the prepping was taken into account, but most studies show that prepping has fairly modest impact on average; about 50 points or so.

Cites or it didn't happen.

I cited three articles in a followup post.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Why would you apply to all 8?

Why not? maybe he wanted to see how many he can get into or he may have been unsure which one was best for him.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:That's ok - he's 17 and has something to brag about!

Well done to him.

+1

[Anonymous]

Why would you apply to all 8?

Simple. He preferred the Ivy league and the New England region. He is not interested in the SEC, ACC or Little Three!!

[Anonymous]

Why would you apply to all 8?

I prefer the Ivy League and I understand it's very difficult to get into. Some folk prefer Sorbonne; Oxford and Cambridge; McGill and Toronto (TO), I am American, I prefer the Ivy League!