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    Thanks. They say the essay is critical to just get their attention.

    BTW, why is it HYPSM? No Columbia, or U of Penn? Are they much easier to get into?

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    Had a conversation with a friend about grades. Her daughter is 2 years ahead of DD and was saying so many kids had grades in the 98% average range. 5+. There is a retired math teacher from the school that lives on the street and he was telling me that because of the rigor, the highest averages were n the 85% range but because admittance to university in Canada were grade based, they had to raise them, to ensure their kids could get into competitive programs. I am just wondering if schools are doing grade inflation to get kids into competitive programs. Because it just seems a little crazy that so many kids are close to perfect average.

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    For high schools that the colleges know, grades are always taken in context of the school. Our kids high school didn't have ranks, but until recently did have grade distributions. Most years, only 2% achieved more than a 4.5 weighted GPA. The maximum possible GPA is 5.0, which requires having every class be an honors or AP class, and getting an A+ in that class.

    A 4.5 was achievable by taking all honors/AP classes and getting an A- in every class. There was a very high overlap overlap between getting into that top 2% and getting into a top 10 college. So students needed to be strong relative to others, but not perfect.

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    SATs, Once Hailed as Ivy League Equalizers, Fall From Favor
    By Janet Lorin
    Bloomberg
    February 17, 2021, 1:00 PM UTC
    * In a major shift, only 44% send in test scores this year
    * Wealthier students more likely to submit, disadvantaging poor

    **********************************************************

    One reason students from wealthier families may be more likely to submit scores is that they are more likely have good scores. Studies have found that student SAT scores are correlated with household income, although the correlation with parental educational attainment is higher.

    If the most selective schools are de-emphasizing intelligence in admissions, companies that want to hire smart graduates should pay less attention to the school attended. Financial firms have been known to ask interviewees what their SAT scores are.

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    Harvard: The percentage of students accepted early action from first-generation college backgrounds increased by nearly 7 percentage points — from 10.1 percent last year to 17 percent this admission’s cycle.

    And that is with a much greater application pool and less kids admitted. Therefore the application must be a marketing strategy unto itself now.

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    Asian-American Ivy League Applicants Can Trust Markets More Than Courts
    By STEVE H. HANKE & STEPHEN J. K. WALTERS
    National Review
    February 22, 2021

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    ...

    Though Princeton was victorious in its 2015 discrimination case, its Class of ’24 is 25 percent Asian-American, up from 14 percent a little over a decade ago — and it has moved ahead of Harvard to sixth in the world rankings. Whether because of competitive or legal pressure, Harvard’s admission rate of Asians has trended upward recently, and at a sharp pace. Some 25 percent of the class of 2023 is Asian-American; Yale’s Asian-American enrollment is up from 10 percent to 17 percent, and it is up from tenth a decade ago. Outside the Ivy League, at schools such as Duke, Rice, Carnegie-Mellon, and Georgia Tech, proportions of Asian-American students exceed 20 percent and have increased by at least five percentage points in the last decade. It is easy to think that other rivals will join right in.

    That’s the way markets work to penalize bias and reward virtue: Schools that become excessively devoted to identity politics and underweight merit will find their competition gaining on them. Rankings will shift and applicant enthusiasm and alumni support will wax or wane accordingly. In response, all are likely to do a better job shedding their biases — or those that do not will struggle until they see the error of their ways.

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    I am wondering what the total asian number is. Since DD's school is 80% chinese canadian, and one got into Harvard ED this year, plus how many get in from other CDN schools, mostly Chinese canadians, plus all the kids getting in from China and other asian countries. It has to be higher than 25%. I would guess that 75% of the kids from Toronto getting into US schools are chinese canadians.

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    And the weird thing is that Chinese schools are rising in world rankings, since China is heavily investing in research at the schools. So the top students are going to Chinese universities. The next tier are getting into top schools here.

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    College Admission Season Is Crazier Than Ever. That Could Change Who Gets In. By waiving SATs and ACTs, highly selective schools invited an unprecedented wave of applications, upending the traditional decision process
    By Melissa Korn and Douglas Belkin
    Wall Street Journal
    March 16, 2021 11:37 am ET
    full article

    Ivy League schools and a host of other highly selective institutions waived SAT and ACT requirements for the class of 2025, resulting in an unprecedented flood of applications and what may prove the most chaotic selection experiment in American higher education since the end of World War II.

    The question hanging over higher education this month is whether this influx will permanently change how colleges select students and, ultimately, the makeup of the student population.

    Interviews with college-admissions officials and public and private high-school counselors point to an epic effort behind the scenes to make tough judgment calls at the highest speed. Colleges send out the bulk of their decision notices in March and early April, but it won’t be widely known how the incoming freshman classes will look until late summer or early fall. Added to the uncertainty will be whether students who deferred enrollment during the last admissions cycle will decide to enter school this year.

    Harvard University received more than 57,000 freshman applications for next fall’s entering class, a 42% year-over-year jump. Yale, Columbia and Stanford universities were so overwhelmed they also pushed back the date to announce admission decisions. The University of Southern California’s applications pool beat the prior record by 7%. And New York University topped 100,000 applications, up 17% from last year.

    ...

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    Another interesting article, Bostonian. The removal of standardized tests as admissions criteria, has resulted in a 33%-42% increase in applications... evidently approximating the number of students who may now have hope of receiving an offer, but had no hope of receiving an offer if they had to provide a standardized test score with their application.

    As with most things in life, there is a mix of PROs and CONs, good and bad. In this circumstance, I believe the desired benefit should be: extending need-blind offers to students prepared for a rigorous curriculum, and who can recognize opportunities others may overlook (aka leadership - for example, forging their own path both on-campus and post-graduation) while screening out students gaming the system, and/or presenting falsified credentials, and/or lacking internal locus of control and sense of personal responsibility (who may not rise to the occasion, but rather expect courses to be made easier).

    A few POSITIVES of eliminating standardized test scores from admissions:
    - standardized tests can be gamed (as seen in the "Varsity Blues" college admissions scandal of 2019),
    - standardized tests can be re-taken by those who can afford the approximately $70 fee each time they sit for the exam,
    - admissions criteria are said to have a new emphasis on "intellectual curiosity" (although this may be difficult to define).

    Some NEGATIVES of eliminating standardized test scores from admissions:
    - standardized test scores are thought to be OBJECTIVE, and can be used to corroborate assigned grades. This can be especially helpful with teachers being evaluated and schools being rated/ranked based on assigning grades which show "equal outcomes" and no achievement gaps, performance gaps, or excellence gaps,
    - admissions criteria may now have an over-reliance on grades (which may not reflect actual learning, timeliness in completing & turning in assignments, or student productivity, due to grading practices designed to achieve "equal outcomes"),
    - admissions criteria are said to now give greater weight to teacher recommendations (which may be SUBJECTIVE, and open to influence),
    - admissions criteria are said to now judge candidates in the context of their environments (which MAY result in admitting students unprepared for coursework, for example if they had "...straight As in a middling high school...").

    Weighing the POSITIVES and NEGATIVES:
    Evaluating the benefits and downsides of the new policy of college admissions sans standardized test scores may be a case of wait-and-see, and time-will-tell...? It will be interesting to see whether the feeder schools to top colleges change a bit over the next few years.

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