Anonymous wrote:Everyone is trying to figure out how to game theory college admissions these days. Obviously, ED is a huge factor for top students and the schools that want them. This is where most decisions are made - for better or worse.

HYPSM do not participate in ED or SCEA for otherwise unhooked students. So those five schools are not part of any conversation when it comes to strategy for high performing students these days. Ignore them. Only throw an app their way in RD. If a top student, however, is interested in Chicago, Duke, Vanderbilt, Northwestern, Cornell, Rice, or Penn it really, really behooves them to apply ED to their chosen school. The RD acceptance rates at these schools is negligible. ED is typically the only way an otherwise unhooked student might gain acceptance to schools of that caliber. Otherwise, it's chaos, chance, and total unpredictability in the RD round for the very selective schools.

Anonymous wrote:OP here. Thanks to those who shared specific ED1 experiences and/or general thoughts on the ED1 process. It’s all quite reassuring.

DC’s stats seem in line with those accepted ED1 (SAT is 1560 and GPA is 3.98). Kid likes UChicago more than any other school, so it sounds like we could be cautiously optimistic about ED1.

Anonymous wrote:Everyone is trying to figure out how to game theory college admissions these days. Obviously, ED is a huge factor for top students and the schools that want them. This is where most decisions are made - for better or worse.

HYPSM do not participate in ED or SCEA for otherwise unhooked students. So those five schools are not part of any conversation when it comes to strategy for high performing students these days. Ignore them. Only throw an app their way in RD. If a top student, however, is interested in Chicago, Duke, Vanderbilt, Northwestern, Cornell, Rice, or Penn it really, really behooves them to apply ED to their chosen school. The RD acceptance rates at these schools is negligible. ED is typically the only way an otherwise unhooked student might gain acceptance to schools of that caliber. Otherwise, it's chaos, chance, and total unpredictability in the RD round for the very selective schools.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I think most kids who apply ED either genuinely like the school, or are not confident they can get into HPSM, Columbia, Duke, Yale, Caltech, or Penn. But regardless, you pretty much need to apply ED to give yourself a chance, otherwise you’re just giving them application money for nothing.

why is duke included here

Sigh. This is going to turn into the same thing as all other UChicago threads. Haters gonna hate

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I think most kids who apply ED either genuinely like the school, or are not confident they can get into HPSM, Columbia, Duke, Yale, Caltech, or Penn. But regardless, you pretty much need to apply ED to give yourself a chance, otherwise you’re just giving them application money for nothing.

why is duke included here

Anonymous wrote:I think most kids who apply ED either genuinely like the school, or are not confident they can get into HPSM, Columbia, Duke, Yale, Caltech, or Penn. But regardless, you pretty much need to apply ED to give yourself a chance, otherwise you’re just giving them application money for nothing.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Careful, there are a couple of anti-UChicago haters here.

They will claim that UChicago is barely a functional community college that uses mass marketing and hocus pocus to increase its selectivity and yield.

OP here. Fully aware of the above. I an just interested in first-hand experience in applying ED1 in recent years.

Excellent. You are probably aware that UChicago introduced a summer ED opportunity in the past few weeks. Basically, if one has taken any summer classes at UChicago, even online, they are eligible to apply ED on Sept. 1 and get a decision before October.

UChicago appeals to a very particular student. Rigorous, no-frills must be a hardcore academic. Since those high stat, high achieving students are what all the Ivy plus schools (Ivy plus MIT, Stanford, UChicago, Duke, CalTech) covet, to distinguish themselves they above all the other schools LOVE demonstrated interest through ED. Since they have EDI and EDII, they take the majority of their freshmen class from ED. It is not a large cohort who apply ED (exact and even guesstimate numbers are not really available.) From the interwebs, most likely 60% or greater are admitted in some form of ED.