Fluffy Credits, or how do I get my kid into the top 10 percent?

A friend and parent of a high-school freshman recently wrote:

Q.  I have a question for you regarding high school academics and the college search. We were having dinner with friends last night (one kid @ McGill, one on his way to Johns Hopkins, and one in high school) and mentioned that G. is taking health and PE this summer in order to get them out of the way. They told us that some uber-reaching students will actually hold off on taking health until senior year because they’re trying to game the system a bit and make sure that they don’t have any “fluffy credits” on their transcripts when they’re applying to colleges.

Have you heard of this and what do you think about it?

A.  Heh. Fluffy credits. What a great term.

I’m a bit agog at the thought of seniors taking 9th grade health, but I’m sure it happens. This is all to do with weighted course credits, as in when Honors and AP courses earn five points for an A on a four point scale.

A student earning straight As through high school, and taking a larger number of  non-weighted classes, such as arts electives, PE, band, etc., can end up with a lower weighted GPA than a student who maxed-out the weighted classes. That straight-A student will have earned an unweighted 4.0 GPA, but here’s the reason those uber-reaching students are putting off [non-weighted] health until senior year:  class rank is based upon the weighted GPA.

First, though, more about the GPAs. You’ve likely seen  @UVADeanJ’s tweets during reading season–she and her colleagues across the country run into true weirdness, like an applicant with a 12.31 GPA.

This is why the school profile is so important for the colleges–they get the context of the GPA  and how each school weights grades (or not) from the profile. I’ve been told by a reliable source that UVa recalculates all of the GPAs for its applicants, to build comparables (and that a local high school math teacher has the part-time job to help with this).

“Albemarle shouldn’t rank students,” August 28, 2013, Charlottesville Daily Progress. Click to enlarge.

Whether that’s true or not, many colleges look for where that student’s GPA stands in comparison to his or her peers:  the class rank.

Why the class rank matters. A top class rank is crucial for those uber-reaching students you mentioned, the ones trying to get into very selective schools. At UVA, for example, 93 percent of the incoming class was in the top 10 percent of their high school class, and 98 percent were in the top 25 percent (or quartile).

See Frederick Smyth’s recent letter to the editor encouraging Albemarle schools to stop reporting class ranks because of the import colleges place on this arbitrary cut-off.

“Rankings are crude attempts to simplify complex academic records and often create impressions of meaningful differences between students when none exist.”

. . .

“Being in the top 10 percent is no guarantee of admission… but a lesser label, such as being in the second-highest 10 percent, nearly guarantees rejection.”

Most high schools don’t publicize a class rank of graduating seniors, as in listing the students in order by GPA. Instead, they determine where the GPA cut-off is for the top 10 percent (or decile), the top quarter (or quartile), the top half, etc. Which of those categories the student meets does get reported to colleges, at least in our school system.

Here’s what our counselor told us during Mod Squad Pete’s junior year:  you cannot tell ahead of time where the top 10 percent GPA cutoff will be for any given class, because that will be computed only at the very end of the senior year.

What she could tell us was where the top decile and quartile cutoffs were for the previous year’s class and, if Pete had been part of that class, where his GPA would have positioned him. (This also provided some much-needed incentive to maintain his senior year grades.)

Here, from our high school’s website,  are screenshots from the school’s profile, from three different years. A weighted 4.50 GPA sounds really good, but in 2010 a student with that GPA would not have made the top decile. In 2008 a weighted GPA of 4.010 made the top quartile, but not in the other two example years.

That’s a long-winded explanation of fluffy credits and why some students put them off until senior year. I’ll get to what I think of all this next time around. Thanks for the great question!

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No more “Topic of Choice” in Common App essay prompts

Mod Squad Mia, glad she doesn’t have to write essays.

The Common App Board updated their essay questions for the 2013 application season and–in the most significant change–removed the wild card, “topic of your choice.”

Your choice must be one of the following:

• Some students have a background or story that is so central to their identity that they believe their application would be incomplete without it. If this sounds like you, then please share your story.
• Recount an incident or time when you experienced failure. How did it affect you, and what lessons did you learn?
  
• Reflect on a time when you challenged a belief or idea.  What prompted you to act? Would you make the same decision again?
• Describe a place or environment where you are perfectly content. What do you do or experience there, and why is it meaningful to you?
• Discuss an accomplishment or event, formal or informal, that marked your transition from childhood to adulthood within your culture, community or family?

The other significant change for this year’s applicants: essays must be within 250 to 650 words. No less, no more. For any newbies, previous prompts suggested a length of 500 words, but since the process involved uploading Word documents, the application accepted any length. Application readers may have been perturbed by over-long essays, but that’s another matter.

The announcement from the Common App folks suggests that this year, rather than uploading a document, an applicant will paste the essay text into a word-count-restricting interface.

When writing about deadlines recently, I corresponded with a number of independent college counselors. Almost all of them strongly recommended that seniors complete their essays before school starts.

That gives Mod Squad Julie and her classmates about four more weeks.

Last I checked, Julie had drafts in-progress for most of the supplementary essays, but not for the main Common App prompt. She wasn’t wild about any of the options, so she checked to see which one M.S. Pete chose a couple of years ago… Of course:  topic of your choice.

Essay-writing resources up next. Which prompt would you choose?

Related articles

• Essay prompts for college applications
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How to deal with college application deadlines, part three: 7 Tools

In February I wrote, How do you handle deadlines?, outlining our household strategies, and asked for other suggestions. A number of people responded, leading to this series of three posts:

1. How to deal with college application deadlines, part one:  9 Tips.
2. How to deal with college application deadlines, part two:  Professional Advice.
3. And now, tools to try for yourself.

I don’t believe one system will work for everyone — my methods of tracking work flow and deadlines might drive someone else nuts.

Here are a number of options for students and families to consider, including various checklists, spreadsheets, calendar suggestions, and apps. Maybe one of these will work well for you.

College Admission worksheet.

1. Application Deadline Organizer. Robin Mamlet and Christine Vandevelde, authors of College Admission: From application to acceptance, step by step, provide a number of spreadsheets in their book and, downloadable versions, on their website. Before building your own spreadsheet to track college application deadlines, take a look at this.

2.  Five Organizational Apps.  DIY College Prep provided 5 Free Organization & Planning Tools for Students. I’ve listed them below, see DIY College Prep for the links.

Is disorganization your downfall? Has an assignment deadline ever slipped your mind due to messy personal files? If so, you probably realize that you’ll save yourself unnecessary time and grief by figuring out how to get those files in order. Fortunately, some nifty free tools on the web can help you become a better-organized student.

• Time and Date
• Soshiku
• Ta-Da Lists
• Toodledo
• Remember the Milk

3.  College Application Checklist. DIY College Rankings offers a spreadsheet and checklist in 5 Ways to Get Smart About Filling Out College Applications

Applying to college is all about organization. Colleges will have different deadlines, use different forms, and require different essays and you need to be able to keep track of it all. The College Application Checklist is a comprehensive check list for all the steps involved in the college application process. Use it as the basis for organizing the process. (Sign up for the DIY update in the box on the left and get a spreadsheet to help track your college applications.)

4.  College App Wizard. Lynell Engelmyer and Kelly Herrington built an app to manage the requirements from each college:

Because we know how much teens and parents struggle with college applications, all of the pieces that must be in place and the multitude of deadlines, we created a web-based software tool that allows students to enter the colleges to which they’ll apply, answer a few short questions, and then receive a list of all of the requirements for that college. The list is sortable and comes with text message and/or email reminders and the ability for parents/mentors to view the students progress.
Custom tasks, like scholarship deadlines and more can be added. We welcome any feedback you may have.

CollegeBoard application checklist.

5.  CollegeBoard Checklist for each College. The College Board website, Big Future, offers a checklist to print and use for each college application.

6.  Build in a calendar buffer. Cal Newport, via Study Hacks, suggests, Controlling your schedule with deadline buffers.

Any serious deadline should not exist on your calendar just as a note on a single day. It should instead be an event that spans the entire week preceding the actual deadline. (In Google Calendar, I do this by making it an “all day” event that lasts the full duration; e.g., as in the screenshot at the top of this post.)

The motivation behind this hack is to eliminate the possibility for pile-ups to happen without your knowledge. If you buffer each deadline with a week-long event, any overlap will become immediately apparent.

7.  College Essay Organizer. Daniel Stern and Scott Farber created an essay manager to help the student track down all his or her required essays and to coordinate the number of essays a student has to write. The essay questions are free, an Essay Road Map with a personalized writing plan costs $24.

We all know that writing your college essays is incredibly challenging. But what most people don’t realize, until it’s too late, is that simply finding and organizing your questions is often just as difficult — and equally important.

Essay QuickFinder organizes all your School App and Common App supplement questions in one place. It doesn’t replace the Common App … but it finally makes sense of it.

Let me know, in comments, if any of these work for you — or if there are others you would recommend.

Even the best tools still require a highly motivated student to use them. And/or strong nudges.

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College rejection letters, how colleges boost their rankings, and funny math.

Via sunnyydoodles.tumblr.com; outdated since Stanford charged $90 in 2012.

Only a few more days and college admission departments will send a boat load of letters (or push email “send” buttons) to reject millions of applicants.

Colleges will accept a few, too, but the real news to be trumpeted across the land in early April will be how many students they rejected.

From last year see, Ivy League colleges post record low acceptance rates, via Money.cnn.com:

Your odds of getting into some of the nation’s most prestigious colleges are shrinking.

The country’s eight Ivy League institutions finished sending out their admission decisions to applicants late Thursday. And many of the elite schools — including Harvard, Princeton, Dartmouth and Cornell — are reporting that they accepted record low percentages of applicants for the upcoming school year.

As colleges send out more rejections they can also reduce their selectivity rates — the percentage of applications accepted out of those received — and help boost their rankings in US News & World Report and other popular  lists.

The story that doesn’t often make the front pages in admission season, though, is what goes into the calculations of the acceptance rates. The Common App has made it much easier to apply to more colleges, as long as Mom and Dad are willing to pay the application fees (up to $90 or more, each). Just because an elite school — say, Harvard with 34,302 applicants in 2012 or UC-Berkeley with 61,702 — receives more and more applicants each year, does that mean they receive proportionately more that are qualified?

Valerie Strauss wrote in the Washington Post last year, in Some 2012 college admissions rates hit new lows:

More kids who don’t have a prayer of getting into some of these schools apply anyway, but schools still get to brag that they have a record number of applications. As a result, some admissions counselors note that the percentage of kids who have a real shot at getting into some of these schools doesn’t go up much — if at all — from year to year.

Yet the reduction in acceptance rates remains the juicier story — and the story that helps support the narrative that students (and their parents) need to do anything to get into college, no matter the cost, retention rates, graduation rates, resulting debt load, or the job outlook.

Here are a couple more perspectives on the acceptance rate math. I’m quoting a paragraph or two, but the essays aren’t that long and — if you like this sort of thing — interesting.

Kevin Carey, in Stalking the True College Acceptance Rate for The Chronicle of Higher Education, wrote about the fifteen minutes it might take to screen applications into piles for Yes, No, and Maybe.

There are inevitably a lot of easy “No” decisions, because a substantial number of students treat elite college applications like a $90 lottery ticket. Such unqualified applicants don’t change the odds of qualified students being accepted. There could be 10,000 “No’s”, 100,000, it doesn’t matter. It only matters how many “Yes” and “Maybe” applicants apply (and how many legacies, athletes, Hollywood ingenues, and senator’s sons…).

. . .

From the student’s perspective, there’s no difference between applying to five elite colleges and being accepted at one and applying to 10 elite colleges and being accepted at one. You can only go to one. But the student who applies to 10 colleges drives institutional acceptance rates down, even though he or she doesn’t change the number that actually matters: the total ratio of high-quality applicants (not applications) to high-quality spots.

In another piece, from 2010, Carey cited Chad Aldeman, who suggests in The Quick and The Ed that we Switch College Admissions to a Single Lottery:

Now consider for a second that you are a high school junior and you see these rates. It’s becoming easier than ever to apply for multiple schools, so what is your rational course of action?

You’re going to apply for tons of schools, thinking that at least one will let you in. And the next year, when the acceptance rates go even lower (they’ve been falling for years), students will apply to even more schools. The chances of any one student getting into any one school will become smaller and smaller, even as the number of spaces at those schools keeps pace with demographic changes. The spaces themselves are not becoming more scarce; it’s the admissions craze that’s making them look that way.

Back to the 2010 article by Kevin Carey, for The Chronicle of Higher Education. He outlined the math in Real College-Acceptance Rates are Higher Than You Think, then put the acceptance rates into perspective with his last paragraph:

And of course it’s always worth noting that the vast majority of college students don’t go to a selective college at all and they’re the ones we should be worrying about.

More on that — in this week’s news — to come.

Related articles

• And the letters are gone!
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Q&A: Does a college look at what type of diploma my student earned?

January and February are prime time for high school guidance counselors, parents, and students to meet and discuss course selections for registration. A number of friends wrote with questions about courses and choices. Here’s one.

Q.  Do you know if universities pay attention to whether a high school student is going for the regular Virginia diploma vs. the advanced one? Would having almost all, but not quite all, of the required credits for the advanced diploma be sufficient?

For non-Virginia readers:  rising 9th graders are asked to select which diploma they hope to achieve. The advanced diploma requires four years of Math, Lab Science, History/Social Science (rather than three), and three years of a Foreign Language (rather than two). There are other smaller differences (and you can read all about them here if you wish; heaven help you), but those are the key factors.

A.  The short answer:  I doubt they pay specific attention to whether or not the student hit every target on the Advanced Studies diploma, but they probably pay close attention to whether or not the student hit every target on their own list — which, for selective schools, will be very similar to the Advanced Studies list.

For the second question, about having almost all of the requirements — that would likely not be sufficient for a super-selective school, but would be sufficient for other schools. That’s where the standard disclaimer, “it depends,” comes into play. A student who did not get accepted to a school that only takes 15% of applicants could be a star at a school that accepts 45%.

Now, a few thoughts and questions for you as further information (which may or may not be useful).

1.  Does your high school include which type of diploma the student achieved — or attempted — on their HS transcript? Our high school’s transcript changes in response to changes in policy, so it has the potential to be different for almost every graduating class.

Western’s profile is online in the Counseling Dept. files.

Mod Squad Pete’s and M.S. Julie’s transcripts have a note at the top that says, “Student has completed the Early College Scholar Program agreement.” I think that refers to their signing off with the guidance counselor that they were going after the Advanced Diploma.

Also, find your school profile. This accompanies the student’s transcript when it’s sent to colleges. I would assume it is similar to our HS profile, which provides the context for the student’s experience, listing the grading scale, size of school, National Merit and SAT results for the school, class ranks, AP Exam results, and graduation requirements (both standard and advanced). You should be able to pull a copy of this from your school’s website. Your HS counselors should be able to give you a copy of a sample transcript. Admission staff certainly looks at each student within the context of his or her own school and how the course list compares to courses taken by other students in the school.

This is all so you can see, ahead of time, exactly how the colleges would see the information you’re asking about.

2.  Next, look at colleges to which your daughter may wish to apply. Every college must make reams of admission data public when they submit it to the government. Many, many websites provide that data in easily-searchable formats for students and parents to see. (This is also the source for the college guidebooks.) One of my favorites is CollegeData (owned by a bank, but offering an excellent format of search results) but there are loads to choose from.

Take UVa for example. They specify the courses they look for on the HS transcript, as in how many math, science, English, foreign language, etc. You can see that here, broken down by “required” and “recommended.” They also publish the priority of student data — which is most important to them and which is less so — lower on that same page. See Selection of Students and Factors: top on UVa’s list is rigor of HS record.

***

Now, a question for readers of this blog:  Do students in others states have to choose a type of diploma or state a college-oriented goal in some way? Please let me know in comments.

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College Moving-In Week: the packing list.

Mod Squad Pete is five days away from moving into his dorm and — no surprises here — still working on his shopping list.

Bed, Bath & Beyond offers an online catalog…

He started early with a laptop purchase in June. We decided against purchasing the full dorm-room bedding set offered by his college (and I wrote about that here), but it took until yesterday for us to get to the store to buy sheets (and mattress pad, foam layer, duvet, duvet cover, etc.). Today he’s out with Mod Squad Dad picking up a refrigerator.

While I sought out lists and advice online (see What to Pack When Heading to College by Kelci Lynn Lucier, who also writes at College Parent Handbook), Pete said he had a mental list. I let that go until a week ago when we returned from family road trips and looked at the calendar.

Then Pete looked online for help and typed up a page full of items. He didn’t organize his list into categories, but Bed, Bath & Beyond offers this breakdown:

…or a simple check list.

• Sleep
• Organize
• Wash
• Eat
• Study
• Relax

Last night Pete started looking through his closet, thinking about what clothes to bring and what to leave. We’ve read college student advice against taking an entire wardrobe, so he’s leaning toward taking the variety he wants, but just enough for about three weeks or so, guessing at how often he’ll do laundry. Since it will still be warm here for a few more months, he doesn’t need sweaters or jackets or many jeans and chinos, for that matter. He’ll take a navy blazer and a tie, but no suit.

From Ms. Lucier, cited above:

Call me old-fashioned, but here’s the deal: Your student should be able to fit everything they need in your car. Yes, your car. (Exception: If your student is moving into an apartment and you need to furnish the place, you can break this rule.) Your student can get by with much less than they might think, and too many students bring too much stuff at the beginning of their first year in school.

Pete also has the advantage of parents living nearby. If he needs any particular item, one of us could drop it off.

[I won’t go into detail here about the potential disadvantages of parents living nearby. Pete knows we will not be dropping by unannounced nor uninvited.]

Pete has coordinated large-ticket items with his roommate:  Pete’s bringing the fridge and microwave, his roommate is bringing the printer and a TV. They have not discussed color schemes — one more thing I think might be different when M.S. Julie starts packing in a couple of years. Yet, to turn the stereotype on its head, Pete has the greater need for a shoe organizer.

Oh, yes, this week is all about focusing on the details and putting off thinking about that bigger picture:  he’s leaving home.

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Graduation: And just like that — high school is over.

A couple of nights ago, while many HS seniors were gathering for the Valediction ceremony, a few seniors were on the soccer field, their team competing in the state tournament. After a stellar season, they lost that game. A friend, and mother to one of those seniors, posted a status update yesterday:

And just like that — after 13 years we’re done with soccer. Kind of stunned.

My immediate thought was, the same with school. Wow. Just like that, Mod Squad Pete is done with K-12. I am truly stunned.

Countdown to graduation.

For all intents and purposes, many of the high school seniors were done after the AP exams took place during the first two weeks of May (May 7-18th in 2012). In our school division, if the student has an A for the year in a course and is a student in good standing (no outstanding fines, library books, detentions, etc.), he or she doesn’t need to take the final exam. If seniors do need to take any exams, theirs were scheduled during the week of May 21. (Other classes take exams here next week with the last day of school on June 8th.)

Grad rehearsal took place May 22nd. Pete and a few classmates were scheduled to perform at Valediction; they had a couple of rehearsals as well.

So the past couple of weeks have included some lovely, lazy times for Pete — only interrupted by a few working shifts and the occasional prod from me for him to do something productive. [Sorry, Pete!]

It’s really here.

Valediction — this was our first year to attend — is an award announcement ceremony for the seniors and their families. The student performances included a jazz ensemble and three vocalists, and a local radio sportscaster spoke. The emphasis of the evening was to pay attention to the awards and scholarships earned by the graduating seniors.

As the seniors proceeded into the auditorium, wearing cap and gown, Mod Squad Dad turned to me and said, “It’s just dawning on me; they’re really graduating.” Cue the waterworks.

This was also our first year to attend graduation. I knew the division Superintendent and the School Board would attend; I didn’t realize the County Board of Supervisors would attend as well. Most touching to me:  after the dignitaries and school administrators proceeded to the dais, the high school teachers paraded in and lined both sides of the aisle for the students’ procession. Around 250 seniors then walked through the smiling, cheering gauntlet of teachers they’d worked with for four years, many stopping for hugs and photos along the way. More waterworks for me.

The personal path.

Over the past year I’ve tried to share many of our tasks, questions, and worries, along with a few triumphs. I’ve often reported on higher ed news, sometimes putting it into the context of our family’s process. I’ve had some fun at Pete’s and my own expense.

And upon occasion, I’ve attempted to write about how I feel about what’s been going on. I remember writing this post, about the first day of senior year. High school graduation is one of those milestone days for us and, I suspect, most families.

Bear with me as I focus on that personal aspect. We are so incredibly proud of Pete — of the relationships he has developed with friends, teachers, administrators, employers; of the curiosity he has maintained in the classroom; of the musical creativity he has pursued; of his perserverence through tough course schedules and crazy college application deadlines; of the good humor and positive attitude he carries with him almost all of the time; and all of that and more that he contributes to the joy of this family.

Thank you, Pete, for allowing me to write about our work together this past year. And thank you for the life and love you bring to us daily. We wish you all the best going forward.

Good luck to you, your friends, and your classmates:  the WAHS class of 2012.

 

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3 Things High School Seniors Need To Do Right Now.

December 2011. Calendar by Mod Squad Emma.

Believe it or not, the important December countdown for most high school seniors is not:  “how many days til Christmas.” Most U.S. colleges set the regular admissions deadline for January 1. Eleven days away.

For any senior, like Mod Squad Pete, who just happens to not be done yet with college applications, here are the three things he or she should be doing right now…

1.  Finish the darn thing(s). Pete might have been 98% done on his regular admissions since before Thanksgiving. Each one has just one or two little things that still need doing. Get it over with already. (And yes, Pete, I’m talking to you.)

If there are questions stopping you, tune into the live chat the NYT‘s The Choice is hosting tonight, Wednesday, and Thursday. Here are the details:

The first night’s chat will take place tonight, on The New York Times’s main Facebook page: facebook.com/nytimes. The two chats thereafter will be staged at The Choice blog’s Facebook page: facebook.com/nytimesthechoice. All of the exchanges will be from 8 p.m. to 9 p.m. Eastern time, and the counselors will answer questions in real time.

By the way, if you or your senior has all applications done, great! Skip ahead to task number 2. If you or your senior received acceptance via an Early Decision program, congratulations!! No more college applications! Skip ahead to task number 2.

2.  Sign up for the student and parent PINs for FAFSA. The first step in applying for financial aid is to apply for a PIN. Do that here. The steps are clear:

The PIN Application Process consists of 3 steps:
Step 1: Enter Personal Information
Step 2: Submit Your PIN Application
Step 3: Receive Your PIN

The online application goes live January 1, 2012, but the FAFSA on the web worksheet is available now.

3.  Take a deep breath and relax. 2011 may have been a big year with junior-year courses, SATs, college visits, becoming a senior, and writing applications, but just wait. The new year will bring the final semester of high school (requiring stick-to-it attention through the AP exams and finals), additional deadlines for financial aid and any scholarships (requiring more collaboration between student and parent), the emotional experience of receiving regular admissions results (some of us have had a glimpse of that with early admissions results), and making a commitment to one college.

Oh, right:  that’s just the first five months.

As always, good luck to all with those applications!

Related articles

• Wednesday Weekly Reader: 13 Key Items to Know About Financial Aid. (drstrangecollege.wordpress.com)
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Waiting for Admissions News: Are we there yet?

Admissions building, Tufts. Image via Wikipedia

Now is the season of winter admissions results. Blog posts and tweets from admissions departments loom like the colored smoke above the Vatican: What does this mean? How does this affect his chances?

See CollegeSolved’s blog, How Much Admissions Transparency is Too Much?

“Mr. Einstein! Mr. Einstein! Tufts has already admitted thirty-three students!” shouted a nervous ED applicant. “No, that’s not right. They haven’t released their decisions yet,” responded a confident and seasoned counselor. True enough, Tufts has not yet notified early decision applicants of their decisions But my anxious senior was, nonetheless, moved to near-panic status after reading this.

The New York Times blog on college admissions, The Choice, provided Field Notes From This Year’s Application Season:

While our survey was unscientific, it brought into focus some themes, including increased applicant interest in public colleges – both in and out of state – and an apparent rise in the number of students who have been filing applications early this year, sometimes at the prodding of the colleges themselves.

From the same post, in a report from a counselor…

Mr. Evans of Penn Charter reported that the heightened early application activity had increased the need for “expectation management” and counseling regarding how to navigate the complex web of restrictions surrounding early applications for those filing a mix of early decision, early action and rolling applications.

In December the emails began to arrive. One of Mod Squad Pete’s classmates heard in early December. News of more emails trickled in.

Pete sent three early admission applications, one to each of the holy trinity of college categories: reach, fit, safe. Luck of the calendar dictated that the reach response would arrive first, in December. The other two, not til January.

The email will offer one of three responses:  acceptance, deferral, or thanks but no thanks. Spring decision emails may offer a wait list.

StudentAdvisor provides advice on whether to share your results: Posting Your College Acceptances on Facebook? Some Do’s and Don’ts.

Once upon a time, when students received the big envelope from their dream college, they called their friends. Now, students rely on social networks to break the news. All of a sudden, your feeds are flooding with acceptance posts. Not only does social media make it faster to share good news, it makes it easier to act in ways you wouldn’t in “real-life.”

Here are some of the stories we hear:

• A student receiving news while in class, walks out of the classroom without a word to the teacher. He got in to his Early Decision choice, just needed to leave the room before he screamed. After he found a teacher in the hall to hug, he returned to the classroom of seniors to report his result (to their cheers).
• A parent reads an admissions blog and knows the significance of the email’s confusingly vague subject line and must wait. The student has to read far into the email to understand he got in.
• Another parent cries the day after her child’s rejection.
• Meanwhile, the parent of an underclassman asks cheerfully, ‘How’s that college thing going?”
• Another parent of an underclassman asks, “So where is Pete applying?”
• A parent of a senior shares her daughter’s acceptance and scholarship offer: “It’s fun to start hearing the good news.”

From the College Solution, Lynn O’Shaughnessy reminds us, “Only 2% of schools reject more than 75% of applicants.”

Related articles

• How to Apply to College… and When. (drstrangecollege.wordpress.com)
• College Admissions Secrets. (drstrangecollege.wordpress.com)
• ‘Gotta love rolling admissions’ (costofcollege.wordpress.com)

The 6 Worst College Application Mistakes

Here’s a timely article from College Advisor, on the The 6 Worst College Application Mistakes. Some students are still working on Early Action applications, some may have started their Regular Admission apps, but all might take a look at these as a quick reminder. Here’s one mistake you never think you would make, but how many of us have ever sent off an email to the wrong addressee?

1. Misspelling your own name..

Make sure that your name is spelled correctly on all your applications and official documents Simple typos and misspellings – Daneil versus Daniel, Cathy versus Kathy, or Smith versus Smiht – can cause colleges to think that two different people exist. Problems can also arise when you alternate between your full name and nickname. As a result, they will have a harder time completing your files. Incomplete files don’t get read. So triple check even the basic information – name, address, social security number and birth date. In the same vein, make sure that your email address is correct and while we are at it – appropriate.

Good luck to all the seniors!