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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]It's not about how useful it is - it's about bad faith. The schools don't share the questions in advance, so you why would you share them? It is undermining their process. [/quote]

This isn't a quiz you can get a leg up on by studying for; they're asking for accurate answers to questions about you and your family. And I would like to think / hope that if you're lying through your teeth about that stuff based on what you think they want to hear, they would catch on.

Also I have yet to see a question in any interview that wasn't fairly obvious, nor have I ever seen a question that's exclusive to one school. The only one I can recall from any interview that I was a little unprepared for the first time I heard it was "what are you able to do for the school," but even in that case, I think my initial instinct - talk up volunteering etc - was probably the best approach, since I'm not in a position to offer them a donation on the scale they would care about.

That, incidentally, is a good example of why it's worth discussing this stuff openly - the reason that question caught me off guard was that I'd only been in NYC a few months at that point and hadn't been marinading in this stuff for years like many private school applicants. The people who benefit *least* from others posting about their admissions interviews - and are probably therefore the most annoyed about other people doing it - are the people who have admissions consultants and preschool directors and all that crap and already know most of what they're going to be asked; sharing information freely and openly levels the playing field, it reduces the advantage those people can get from connections and expertise.

Which goes back to my original point of getting schools to admit more families that I would get along with, which in my case means - among other things - working professionals who can afford full tuition but for whom it's a significant expense. There are always going to be a certain number of extremely wealthy donor families, because they're needed to make the math work, and a certain number of families receiving heavy financial aid, because that's limited by what the school can afford, but I believe that the wealth distribution of everyone in between those two extremes - non-plutocrats paying full tuition - can be nudged in my preferred direction by being open and friendly about the process and reducing the advantage that, say, families making $1M/year have over families making $500k/year.[/quote]

Where do you guys go to school now and what was that process like for you? How many kids do you have and do they all go to the same place? [/quote]

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