Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Ivy League Admissions.

The FBI merely stumbled upon this racket run by one individual. There are surely more of them out there. We have seen numerous reports of SAT tests being leaked from China and South Korea the day before the exams in the USA and that several coaching centers used those to provide unfair advantage to their clients. So, it is not really hard for a proxy test taker who is paid thousands of dollars to also get a hold of such resources.

Obviously, I am assuming that the college board itself is innocent until proven guilty. I was hoping that one of the recent lawsuits against them by a high schooler will reveal how their internal auditing worked, but, that lawsuit seems to have been dropped.

Kid in DD's school got accepted at Harvard and apparently a few other top. Not that he isn't smart, but it was a surprising moment. And the rumor is that they got a consultant. But I looked at his linkedin page. Said he did a research project at Stanford for the first 8 months of 2018 (we are in toronto), and also did a research project at U of t on the impact of the new Nafta during the same period. Started a company to design business cards (though no website) said he started and is president of a business club (since I am on the parent funding group) which is basically he tried to start an investment club and asked us for 5K since they wanted to learn to trade with real money. I said no. So there is no business club. He is a strong debater but we have had stronger ones in the past couple years and they got waitlisted at top schools, since debate does not seem to be enough, even if you are on the national team. I question the veracity of those research projects and I wonder how much do they check when they have 50,000 applications to get through.

Sorry, Wren, but this kind of thing shouldn’t be a surprising moment to anyone going through the process. It is very discouraging and can be divisive. Competition like that can really change people. We always tried to assume the best and believe that the kids like you describe had unseen gifts or achievements of which we were unaware. But the cheating that plagues schools like ours easily lends itself to “embellishments” on applications- we saw it on a small scale at awards ceremonies and honor society induction-type things (where it was often brazenly public), but know it is common on college apps. And no one checks, not the school counselors, advisors, or the college admission people. There were some very good schools our DD crossed off her list because of the classmates she saw admitted and/or matriculating there.

My advice is to be supportive and continually remind your kid of their strengths, values, and the goal(s) they are working towards, and forget about the kid two seats down from them. It can be very, very difficult.

The majority of what one gets out of college at an accredited four-year institution is what one puts into it, and the experiences one seeks out. Not the name of the school, the quality of instruction, or the networking (with the exception of first-generation college students). Not to say there is absolutely no value to name/elite schools, but the incremental benefit for a young person from an educated, professional, financially-stable family may or may not justify the stress, diversion of energy away from true interests to resume-padders, and sometimes blurring of one's true identify--not to mention the assumption of massive amounts of student loan debt.

Had brunch with mother and DD's school president, who got into Stanford. She is in the class with the kid who embellished and across the class, there was shock that he got in. And it appears that some kids have been caught embellishing. So it is like tax audit, some get caught some don't.

Somebody could take it upon themselves to report it to Harvard; they can and do rescind offers of admission for such things.

I disagree. The quality of instruction is enormously important.

I went to a small liberal arts college. The expectations were high and the instructors were generally excellent. I don't recall taking a single multiple choice test there. Compare to a nearby state U where we could take classes. Classes were often huge, interaction with instructors was therefore minimal, and MC tests were the norm. Expectations were lower. Papers that got As at the big state U would have got Ds at my college.

I agree that the physics or chem departments at a big university have a lot to offer and have high standards. But the same isn't true of all the departments. The reality is that a lecture with 200 or 500 students is very different from one with 20. A handful of the savvy state U students used to come to my college to take lower level science classes because our "giant" lecture classes had 40-50 students, compared to 500+ where they were. They got more attention at my little college. Full stop.

The thing about little undergrad-focused colleges is that the emphasis is on teaching, not research. So these colleges put a greater priority on the former, while the big research universities have a very, very high priority on research.

Now: I also understand that standards have fallen at many colleges since I graduated in the late 80s. My own alma mater has something like two dozen "studies" majors (up from a handful in my time) and has eased the science requirements while also providing easier options. I also know that the costs of many private colleges are over $70,000 a year and rising. I'm not sure that's worth it. I also know that you can go to a community college and have small classes with terrific instruction for about 1/100th to 1/50th of the price.

But my point still stands: the quality of instruction is very important, as is class size. I teach myself a lot of things, but I learn a lot faster from a good instructor. Nothing compares to learning from someone who really knows the subject, and who knows 1) what to emphasize now based on what's coming later, and 2) how to put an idea in the context of the larger field. Poor instruction can impoverish a student by forcing him to waste time and by not illuminating the important ideas.

It's a complex problem that's made more complex by inequality in our society and by the US competitive ethos (as opposed to a community ethos).

For an edge in Ivy League admissions, grab an oar and row
By Sophie Alexander, Ben Steverman
The Washington Post
March 31, 2019
Accessed from The Chicago Tribune, April 1, 2019

Recent online articles continue to tout the importance of extra-curricular sports activities to help one gain admission to elite and Ivy League colleges, "a system that favors athletes in college admissions". This article focuses on rowing crew (possibly not coincidentally, a sport mentioned in the recent college admissions scandal), and shares that "college rowing coaches recruit heavily from abroad..."
Meanwhile this college consulting service boasts

Val, perhaps I am overstating the point a bit. Of course, there are differences between good and bad instruction. Otherwise, we wouldn't need teachers of any kind. But my (possibly exaggerated) point is simply that beyond a minimum level of instructional quality, much of the difference in educational outcomes is reflective of the extracurricular resources of the individual student (prior learning, family resources, experiences, study skills, motivation, etc.). For most of the respectable range of four-year colleges, it seems to me that the effort, expense, and anxiety invested by a middle-class-plus family into attempting to move their child's college admissions up a tier is disproportionate to the educational gains resulting.

I think that you want a balanced study body with a variety of activities. And Harvard alumni that give generously love going to the Harvard/Yale football game. There is a dinner the night before the game for alumni that give more than 10K that year. You want a student paper, a dance team. CA schools like tennis and water polo scholarships. No one wants to go to a school that has 100% of the kids with perfect math SATs. Without being politically correct, there is a high number of Asian ethnicity that have great math and science scores that play piano or violin. I say that because DD's school has about 60% of the student body is like that. Her school is about 85% east asian, 5% ethnic Indian and rest ethnic European. About 70% of the parents want their kids to go to US schools. Girls that play hockey tend to get recruited easily. A school with HG kids in accelerated math and science, and a girl playing hockey can pretty much count on getting recruited to an Ivy school. Obviously she has pretty good scores if she is at the school, but that counts big. Because the envelope of kids that have perfect math SATs is so big, how do you choose?