Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:So how does the admissions team organize the applications for review. Are all the applicants sorted first by which high school attend so that that group of applicants are considered together (assuming that the college doesn't intend to take too may students from the same high school)?

Yes

This is concerning because it allows the schools to potentially push one kid over the other.

I suspect (have no proof) that the counselor letters provide all of the behind the scenes data, even for privates that don’t list a GPA or class rank. How else can colleges know who has the highest rigor, etc? Our school profile provides very little useful information. It has to come from somewhere!

Of course it comes from that letter! It’s not innocuous.

Even if there is no ranking, they have to check whether or not the student is “one of the most exceptional they’ve ever seen in the school” or ranks somewhere else. There also our quartiles for them to check, even if no ranking exists.

All of the info you describe is in the profile sent by the high school to the college. It takes all of a few seconds for a reader to figure how estimated rank and how rigorous the academic load

Anonymous wrote:^^Well, many on here are paying THOUSANDS of dollars to basically have someone else write their kids’ essays. Where is the detector for that?

Actually, they don’t. A good coach makes suggestions and helps the candidate to review their options about what to write on. They don’t write the essays. Their time is too valuable for that

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:So how does the admissions team organize the applications for review. Are all the applicants sorted first by which high school attend so that that group of applicants are considered together (assuming that the college doesn't intend to take too may students from the same high school)?

Yes

This is concerning because it allows the schools to potentially push one kid over the other.

I suspect (have no proof) that the counselor letters provide all of the behind the scenes data, even for privates that don’t list a GPA or class rank. How else can colleges know who has the highest rigor, etc? Our school profile provides very little useful information. It has to come from somewhere!

This sounds like Potomac.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:So how does the admissions team organize the applications for review. Are all the applicants sorted first by which high school attend so that that group of applicants are considered together (assuming that the college doesn't intend to take too may students from the same high school)?

Yes

This is concerning because it allows the schools to potentially push one kid over the other.

I suspect (have no proof) that the counselor letters provide all of the behind the scenes data, even for privates that don’t list a GPA or class rank. How else can colleges know who has the highest rigor, etc? Our school profile provides very little useful information. It has to come from somewhere!

Of course it comes from that letter! It’s not innocuous.

Even if there is no ranking, they have to check whether or not the student is “one of the most exceptional they’ve ever seen in the school” or ranks somewhere else. There also our quartiles for them to check, even if no ranking exists.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Could you tell this year which applicants were AA or Hispanic?

Np.

Yes bc they write about it in diversity essay or in extracurriculars (black student association; students of color conference) and often mentioned as an aside in the LOR.

Troll alert. This is absolute BS. Our HS is 85% black and there is no black student association. Also, there is no point in a an "aside" mentioning what is 85% likely to be the fact.

You should ask the person writing the LOR to mention it. Our high school college counselor said she does this. Don’t assume readers and AO know your school is 85% black, don’t assume people will know anything about you.

💯

My kid bonded with a teacher about her mixed race identity. Teacher loved helping “pull” this out of her in writing/ class/ curriculum.
Said it was a great pleasure to watch student’s racial identity develop before her eyes and she wanted to write about it in LOR….
Can’t hurt.

IMO it’s kids like this who end up as surprise admits to highly selective schools. Those LOR are important.

No one is surprised when a talented urm kid is admitted to a highly selective school.

Mixed race could be anything…not black/white

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:So how does the admissions team organize the applications for review. Are all the applicants sorted first by which high school attend so that that group of applicants are considered together (assuming that the college doesn't intend to take too may students from the same high school)?

Yes

This is concerning because it allows the schools to potentially push one kid over the other.

This often happens at private schools, especially during ED.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:So how does the admissions team organize the applications for review. Are all the applicants sorted first by which high school attend so that that group of applicants are considered together (assuming that the college doesn't intend to take too may students from the same high school)?

Yes

This is concerning because it allows the schools to potentially push one kid over the other.

I suspect (have no proof) that the counselor letters provide all of the behind the scenes data, even for privates that don’t list a GPA or class rank. How else can colleges know who has the highest rigor, etc? Our school profile provides very little useful information. It has to come from somewhere!

So everyone is simply taking an anonymous poster's word for all of this? No proof, evidence, citations? How incredibly stupid.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:So how does the admissions team organize the applications for review. Are all the applicants sorted first by which high school attend so that that group of applicants are considered together (assuming that the college doesn't intend to take too may students from the same high school)?

Yes

This is concerning because it allows the schools to potentially push one kid over the other.

Anonymous wrote:The OP said the SAT score is considered in the context of your schools’ scores. Is that on the score report? I don’t think I’ve seen that. My kid goes to a test in magnet so it seems somewhat unfair.

The average SAT scores are usually included on the school profile. I know Blair magnet includes the scores on the profile, which is separate from the general profile for the non-magnet students.

My understanding is that at least Dartmouth and Yale (and probably other highly selective schools) use AI to sort applicants into different piles--e.g., Pile #1 (exceptionally strong), Pile #2 (strong), and Pile #3 (unlikely to admit). Apparently, this helps them get through the applications faster. They claim that they still read entire applications in each pile, so that a student with a lower GPA in Pile #3 might get bumped into the admit pile if there's an adequate explanation of past performance or something exceptional in another part of the application. Still, I get the sense that AOs spend much less time with the Pile #3 applications than the other piles. My loose understanding is that such pile sorting is based on each school's own (unpublished) calculus of mostly quantifiable metrics like GPA, class rigor, and test scores.

^^Well, many on here are paying THOUSANDS of dollars to basically have someone else write their kids’ essays. Where is the detector for that?

Anonymous wrote:

Neo wrote:Nowadays, majority are using AI-Based Plagiarism & AI Content Detection to screen the essays.

Dartmouth said it’s like a calculator now. The pretty much expect most everyone is now. The screening isn’t accurate either—lots of false positives. How about them apples? Your kid spends 6 months perfecting his essay and it gets erroneously dinged.

And even if colleges prohibit essays whose provenance is generative AI, nabbing a student for robotic plagiarism is an imprecise science. The company behind ChatGPT shut down its own tool for detecting text generated by AI in July, citing a high rate of human-derived text that the application flagged as written by AI. One scholar in a Wired article noted that even a 1% rate of false-positives is inexcusable, because for every 1,000 essays, that’s 10 students who could be accused of an academic theft they didn’t commit.

JR Gonzalez, chief technology officer for the Los Angeles County Office of Education, noted that no AI detection tool is 100% accurate. And AI itself can occasionally produce wrong information.

Neo wrote:Nowadays, majority are using AI-Based Plagiarism & AI Content Detection to screen the essays.

Dartmouth said it’s like a calculator now. The pretty much expect most everyone is now. The screening isn’t accurate either—lots of false positives. How about them apples? Your kid spends 6 months perfecting his essay and it gets erroneously dinged.

The OP said the SAT score is considered in the context of your schools’ scores. Is that on the score report? I don’t think I’ve seen that. My kid goes to a test in magnet so it seems somewhat unfair.