Reply to Top 10 Universities - Holistic Admissions Fact or Fiction

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Holistic is used to describe the process because a school will get many applications were kids have essentially identical test scores and GPAs. They can't take all of them, so short of pinning names to a wall and throwing a dart, they will then look at other things. 
Maybe they wound up with a bunch of kids who did Model UN in last years acceptance pool. So maybe this year they will instead opt for the kid that did debate. This doesn't mean "Model UN = bad" or "debate = good" it just means they have a really strong applicant pool and from year to year they will try to get a good mix of good students that all have great test scores and high GPAs.
This is what they mean when they say "holistic."[/quote]

The scatter grams tell a different story.  Not all admitted students have essentially identical test scores and GPAs.  And, BTW, how do you even begin to compare GPA across different schools?[/quote]

The top colleges can compare GPAs across different schools very well, thank you. They all have their own weighting systems. The top colleges take a kid's transcript apart and reweight all the classes, so that AP Environmental Sciences, say, is given a lower weight than AP Calc BC.

Contrary to what you say, the scattergrams DO tell a story where ALMOST ALL of the kids have near-perfect SATs and GPAs along the 2 axes. You're right, there are always a handful of outliers. But it's not like the outliers have SATs of 1500. No, at the very top schools, the outliers have SATs of 2000.  Very occasionally you will see the extremely rare 1800, but you can be pretty sure that kid had a compelling personal history.

1st PP is right, the colleges are building classes. They don't want a class of just math geeks (my own kid, so no dissing the math geeks here) or a class of just English Lit geeks. Also, they don't want a class of 100% legacy WASP preppies, or any other ethnic group for that matter. You're working yourself up needlessly if you're getting paranoid about conspiracy theories.[/quote]

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