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I'm starting with the third most active thread over the weekend because the first two were ones that I've already discussed. This thread was titled, "UVA ED on Friday at 5 pm" and posted in the "College and University Discussion". As I have written in the past few blog posts, we are now in the college admissions season and there will be several threads of this nature. This thread was about the University of Virginia's early decision admissions decisions. As frequent readers of this blog will have read many times, early decision is a type of admissions that limits students to one application and requires a commitment to attend the school if they are accepted. Because colleges know that applicants are serious and almost certain to attend if accepted, early decision is often a student's best chance of being admitted to their preferred college or university. The original poster of this thread posted early in the week saying that the University of Virginia would be releasing its results on Friday at 5 p.m. Even before the results were released, a collection of statistics about early decision applications was provided. If there is one thing the DCUM college admissions fantasy league participants love, it's stats. As such, posters quickly obsessed over this data. Moreover, it was notable that at this point in the thread, most of the posters didn't appear to have kids who were current applicants. Rather, the thread was full of posters who, for whatever reason, are simply interested in college applications statistics. Just after 5:00 p.m., posters who did have children applying began posting their results. Almost immediately, the thread devolved into a debate about football because one of the applicants who was accepted was a football player. One poster was particularly upset that a "football player" had taken a coveted UVA spot from another student who might have gotten in on academic merit. Another unwelcome aspect of threads of this sort is the influx, or at least the suspected influx, of trolls. There always seem to be posts claiming that a student was accepted with very low stats and other posts claiming a student with extremely high qualifications was rejected. Such results do seem to have some regularity due to the coin-toss nature of admissions, so these could be legitimate posts. However, many posters are certain such posters are trolls. Frankly, I don't care enough at this point to check. Moreover, maybe I am just in a bad mood or something this morning, but far too many of the posters in this thread seemed overly invested in their kids' colleges. Posters referred to colleges as "our" school and talked about how "we" will be doing such and such in college. When a parent of a student who was rejected wrote, "We are moving on to the next school with our head held high!" a poster responded saying, "Unless you and your child share a head, you should probably dial it back...". After this, the thread deteriorated even more and I gave up reading it. While there were posts about students being accepted and others rejected, that was not always a clear focus of the discussion. What is clear is that almost everyone believes that they were discriminated against for one reason or another.