Reader Question: Will One Bad Semester Kill Me?

Reader and high school senior Gigi has submitted a college admissions question likely shared by many students in her position:

during my senior year in high school (last year), my parents decided that they wanna move to bakersfield, [California]... and that decision pretty much just ruined my senior year in high school... my grades dropped... my GPA was, i think, about 2.0... or even lower... not sure...

i was a complete stranger in a new school, with no friends whatsoever... it really affected my life and grades...

i'm wondering if i'm even eligible for college...

Terrific question, Gigi.

Remember that college admissions committees are not full of robots. They are real people who genuinely want to work with you to help you succeed. Since you had a tough senior year in high school, that is something you will want to address in your personal statement. Talk about the difficulties associated with moving to a new place, and then explain that you feel that you are ready to return to your academics and excel again. If you discuss your situation exactly as you have in your letter, the admissions officers will understand.

Remember that it's not about making excuses or casting blame, but rather persuading the admissions officers to believe that one semester or one year of grades does not accurately reflect your abilities as a student. Then, tell your story and why you believe you're ready to overcome the difficulties you had.

If you are not able to get accepted by any of your preferred California state colleges, remember that community college is always a viable option. If you finish two years, and do reasonably well, you could transfer to a California State University without having to take the SAT or ACT. You could also look into some of the admissions programs offered by the Universities of California (UCs) including the Transfer Admissions Guarantees of UCs Davis, Irvine, Riverside, San Diego, Santa Barbara, and Santa Cruz, or the similar Transfer Alliance Program of UCLA. Each offer either guaranteed admission or priority consideration if you transfer from a participating community college. Many other states have similar transfer programs as well.

Best of all, you'll save money (community colleges are way cheaper than universities) and in the end, it won't be any different than if you had gotten into your college of choice in the first place. Your diploma will say only the school you transferred to.

The most important thing is to stay calm and keep perspective. Just because you had one less-than-stellar year does not mean your opportunities are lost forever. I would recommend calling a few local community colleges to ask about their transfer programs. They will be able to make some recommendations for what you should look into initially.

Good luck!

http://acceptedtocollege.com/blog/

Is My SAT Score "Good?"

When it comes to SAT scores, “good” and “bad” are relative terms, depending on where you’re applying.

There are lots of places where you can see the SAT norms for all schools on your current roster. The College View site is one of them. Click on the “Name” tab and type in a college that interests you. Then hit “Search.” Choose the college’s name on the list on the next screen. (Depending on the school you pick, it could be the only name on that list.)

You’ll see a tab that says, “Admissions.” There you’ll find test score ranges (the middle 50 percent) and you can see where (or if) your 630 falls within that range. For instance, if you look up “University of Hartford,” you’ll know that their middle range for math is 480 - 590. So your 630 would be considered a very good score there. On the other hand, if you look up Duke University, you’ll find a median range of 680 - 790. So your 630 is not a “good” score by Duke standards.

Most colleges put more weight on test scores than their admission officials are willing to admit. However, don’t assess your admission chances strictly by the numbers. If your test results are below a college median, ask yourself if you have other traits that will be attractive to that school (e.g., Are you a recruited athlete? An underrepresented minority? Do you come from a disadvantaged or very unusual background? Do you have any unique talents?) If you answered “No” to all these questions with test results at the low end of the range as well, then your admission odds may not be so hot . But if you responded affirmatively, you may still be in the running, even when your SAT scores aren’t especially “good.”

--Post taken from College Confidential

Quintessential Questions: Wake Forest’s Admission Director Gives Insight into the Interview Process

During the winter months in the Admissions Office, Fridays are dedicated to “Committee.” We gather with stacks of applications, discuss them, argue about them, eat lunch over them, plead for them, and then eventually vote as to whether or not they should be offered invitations to join our academic community.

Summer Fridays are different. With the incoming class already set and next year’s applications yet to arrive (except for the most zealous of the early decision) we have time to plan, to look ahead and to discuss the activity which consumes the bulk of our summer days—interviewing. We share insights, interview questions that have proven effective and yes, I admit, stories that are shared with us by interviewees about alien abductions the ability to communicate with animals, or details of the plot of the Transformer movie.

Since the decision to make SAT scores optional at Wake Forest, we have strongly encouraged our applicants to interview with us, either on campus, via webcam through Skype or if all else fails, through an on-line interview format. The interviews have proven invaluable as we evaluate applicants and have sometimes been so revealing that we have questioned how we ever made admissions decisions before the interview!

It’s important to note that the Admissions Officers who conduct interviews are not all the same. Some of us are fresh from the commencement line while others have just sent our own children away to college. We are musicians, historians, science geeks and bibliophiles. Some of us are the first in our families to have graduated from college. Others have descended from generations of academics. Black, White, Hispanic, Asian, our faces resemble those of the community around us. It is our happy task to spend thirty minutes with prospective students and in that time to draw from them information to help us decide whether or no they are a “fit” for our institution.

Do we have a common set of questions that can be rehearsed and prepared for? No. Do we often delve into areas of current events, high school classes, reading, or extra-curricular talents? Yes. Are there expected responses that we hope each question will elicit? Absolutely not. We like to be surprised. What we hope for most of all with the interview is insight into who the applicant really is at age 17, what ideas interest her, what experiences have shaped him, what are her hopes for the future and his concerns about the present. How open is her mind, how curious is his spirit? Is there kindness and humanity somewhere in there?

We seek a class of debaters and dancers, African drummers, mathematicians, zoologists and poets. The questions that we ask of our prospective students are thus broad and provocative. “Who are you?” asked with a warm smile is often how I begin my interview. ‘How do you hope your college years will be different from high school?” “What’s the best class you’ve ever taken?” “If you had a ‘do over button’ when would you have used it?”” Do you think your life will be easier than your parents’?” “Tell me about a book that everyone should read.” “If you had a day all to yourself, how would you spend it?” “Where do you get your news and what news has been most concerning to you of late?” Depending on the student the conversation can drift into European politics, techno music, sustainability, or conflicted teenage vampires. I love the drift. Just in case I have missed something critical I always conclude with, “Is there something which you hoped I would ask you that I have not?” Well, yes, there was the alien abduction.

We are admissions officers because we love college , we love college aged people and we love conversation. We don’t expect interviewees to be professional conversationalists, or mini-50 year olds, we want to talk with fresh, edgy, interesting teenagers. Theirs is the energy that makes a college campus a crucible of ideas. Come as you are to the interview and be ready to share. That’s how the match is made.


By Martha Allman

Applications to Colleges Are Breaking Records

Applications to selective colleges and universities are reaching new heights this year, promising another season of high rejection rates and dashed hopes for many more students.

Harvard said Wednesday that it had received a record number of applicants — 27,278 — for its next freshman class, a 19 percent increase over last year. Other campuses reporting double-digit increases included theUniversity of Chicago (18 percent), Amherst College (17 percent), Northwestern University (14 percent) and Dartmouth (10 percent).

Officials said the trend was a result of demographics, aggressive recruiting, the ease of online applications and more students applying to ever more colleges as a safety net. The swelling population of 18-year-olds is not supposed to peak until 2009, when the largest group of high school seniors in the nation’s history, 3.2 million, are to graduate. The rise in applications at three universities — Harvard, Princeton and the University of Virginia — came about as they ended early admissions policies, which had allowed students to receive decisions by mid-December, months ahead of others. The universities said early admissions benefited more affluent and sophisticated students and required students to commit without being able to compare financial aid offerings from various colleges.

The application figures suggested that the end of early admissions did not hurt. Princeton received a record 20,118 applicants, up 6 percent. The University of Virginia received 18,776 applications, a 4 percent increase. Like other campuses, Virginia said its final count was likely to increase slightly, because applications were still trickling in.

Scott White, the director of guidance at Montclair High School in New Jersey, said the school’s college counselors found students tenser than ever.

“There is a pure level of panic and frenzy like they’ve never seen before,” Mr. White said Wednesday. “There are some people who say that with some schools having ended early admissions, the frenzy must be subsiding. I don’t think that’s so.”

Even at colleges, there was surprise over the surges, in part because they followed strong gains in previous years.

“These are amazing numbers,” said William R. Fitzsimmons, dean of admissions and financial aid at Harvard, speaking of his university’s flood of applications.

He said Harvard’s announcement in December that it was sharply increasing financial aid even for families earning up to $180,000 probably spurred applications, but, he said, the rise was visible even before that.

He said that the elimination of early admissions encouraged more interest, too, and that joint information sessions by Harvard, Princeton and the University of Virginia drew “astonishing crowds. ”

The reasons for the swelling numbers — not all colleges have reported yet — go beyond the growth in the college age population and the preoccupation with name-brand schools. Recruiting by elite colleges among low- and middle-income students and in new regions are bringing in more applications.

California, for example, has become a bigger source of applicants for Cornell since the upstate New York university created a West Coast regional office in Los Angeles several years ago.

“Ten years ago, California was not among our top eight feeder states,” said Doris Davis, an associate provost at Cornell. “Now it is among our top five.” Cornell applications rose 8 percent.

At the University of Chicago, international applicants grew 23 percent, to 1,826, and early admissions applicants rose 46 percent, to 4,430, Theodore A. O’Neill, dean of admissions, said.

Janet Rapelye, dean of admission at Princeton, attributed some growth to outreach “to more students from many backgrounds, including lower socioeconomic backgrounds.”

Some of the application increases undoubtedly come, too, from students applying to ever more colleges, in hopes of increasing their chances.

“There was a time when kids applied to three or four schools, then to six or seven schools, and now, 10 or more is not uncommon,” said John Maguire, a higher education consultant.

Mary Beth Fry, director of college counseling at the Savannah Country Day School, a private school in Savannah, Ga., said she had held the average number of college applications at her school to five last year, but expected the number to climb this year because students were so nervous.

Michael E. Mills, associate provost at Northwestern University in Illinois, said the 14 percent growth this year had sent the number of applications to more than 25,000. To help it winnow the field, he said, it hired a new admissions dean, Christopher Watson, from Princeton, who was accustomed to rejecting many good applicants.

“We anticipated having to go down the path of having to make more difficult choices,” Mr. Mills said, adding that Mr. Watson helped with “making very fine distinctions among very similar applicants.”

By KAREN W. ARENSON

Stanford Rejects SAT Score Choice

January 07, 2009 02:36 PM ET

Stanford has rejected the College Board's new Score Choice program, which would allow students to pick which SAT scores to send to colleges, the Stanford Daily reports. Stanford said it will not participate in the program and will continue to consider all of an applicant's SAT scores.

"We want to discourage students from taking the SAT more than once or twice and believe that programs like Score Choice encourage applicants with resources to take the SAT excessively to improve their scores," the admissions director said.

SAT Scores Drop, Gaps Grow

August 26, 2009

Average SAT scores dropped slightly for those who graduated from high school this year, as many more students and a more diverse group of students than in the past took the exam. While College Board materials stressed those increases in participation, the data released also included news that may concern many educators: gaps in scores -- both by race and ethnicity, and by family wealth -- grew this year.

College Board officials generally play down (and did again so this year) slight variations in average scores, saying that movement of a point or so doesn't mean much. But this year's averages -- 501 for critical reading, 515 for mathematics and 493 for writing -- continue a period of small declines or stagnant scores.

SAT Averages, 2005-9

	Critical Reading	Mathematics	Writing
2005	508	520	n/a
2006	503	518	497
2007	502	515	494
2008	502	515	494
2009	501	515	493

Data on the breakdowns by race and ethnicity show a widening gap between Asian American test takers and other groups. Adding all three portions of the SAT, Asian Americans gained 13 points, while American Indians gained 2 points and all others lost. Last year, Asian Americans led only with the mathematics average, but this year their average score overtook that of white students on writing, too.

These ethnic gaps are crucial for both educational reasons and political ones. Many of the growing number of colleges that are going SAT-optional have expressed discomfort with tests on which there are such stark -- and growing -- differences in averages by race and ethnicity.

SAT Scores by Race and Ethnicity, 2009

Group	Critical Reading Score	1-Year Change, Reading	Math Score	1-Year Change, Math	Writing Score	1-Year Change, Writing	Total 1-Year Change
American Indian	486	+1	493	+2	469	-1	+2
Asian American	516	+3	587	+6	520	+4	+13
Black	429	-1	426	+0	421	-3	-4

[Click to view full table]

The growing gaps are even more visible when examined by income level. As in past years, there is a fairly direct pattern: the more money a student's family earns, the higher the SAT scores. But this year's figures show not only the gap, but its growth. The following table shows that for those at the low end of the income scale, SAT gains this year were quite modest. For those from wealthy families, the gains were significant.

SAT Scores by Family Income, 2009

Income Level	Critical Reading Score	1-Year Change, Reading	Math Score	1-Year Change, Math	Writing Score	1-Year Change, Writing	Total 1-Year Change
0-$20,000	434	+0	457	+1	430	+0	+1
$20,000-$40,000	462	+0	475	+2	453	+0	+2
$40,000-$60,000	488	+0	497	+1	476	-1	+0

[Click to view full table]

Laurence Bunin, senior vice president of the SAT Program at the College Board, said that this year's totals continued a gradual trend in which slightly more students are taking the SAT only once. While College Board officials say that it is understandable that many students may want to take the test twice, they say that they discourage taking the test more than that. (Critics of the College Board say that its recent shift to allowing students to select the scores to send to colleges, possibly hiding the number of times that they took the SAT, sends the opposite message.)

In 2009, 48.2 percent of students took the SAT only once, up from 46.5 three years earlier. Bunin said he did not have data to distinguish between those who took the SAT twice (within what the College Board recommends) and three or more times.

— Scott Jaschik