It reminds me of something I heard on NPR in the fall. There was a famous liberal arts college who was going over the applications as a committee. They totally dismissed the application of kid who had started with APs in their freshman year, and went for a kid who had tried three different religions because they thought that kid was more interesting and open to new ideas.
I think we'd need to know a lot more about the entire applications and the discussion that happened among the admissions committee before we cast judgement.
A UCLA admissions officer was asked about a student who took 10 AP classes:
http://www.layouth.com/how-colleges-pick-who-gets-in/How colleges pick who gets in
...
L.A. Youth: What if one school offers fewer APs than another.
Pimentel: There’s another level to that. Let’s say a student goes to a school that offers 20 Advanced Placement courses but when they apply to college they’ve only taken one. That may not look too good to the admissions people. The person reading the application will wonder, “Is there a reason why?” That’s why the essay is very important. Maybe they are working 20 hours a week. Maybe they have to help pay bills in the house because somebody lost their job or mom or dad don’t make enough money. It could be that the student has done a lot of leadership in their school, in their community, with these responsibilities. So it’s the whole package we want to know. The student who has 10 AP classes, let’s say they haven’t done anything extracurricular. And they don’t have anything else to say in their personal statement: there are no family responsibilities, there’s no real reason why they’re not a well-rounded student. We may not take that student. And we may take the kid with only the one AP, it just depends on the situation.
I think most people underestimate the power of the personal statement. We want to get to know you, and we want to know the accomplishments that you’ve had so far and if there are challenges, what are the challenges and how have you dealt with them? The biggest mistake that students will make with the personal statement is they talk about other people or they talk about the problem. They may have an unfortunate family situation where things are not that great at home. But they fixate on only talking about that and they never say, “But despite this, this is what I’ve done to still do well in school.”
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Her answer does not make much sense to me. Someone who does well on 10 AP exams IS a well-rounded student. Not enough weight is being given to academic achievement IMO.
