kitchen table math, the sequel: the college admissions process

Saturday, October 8, 2011

the college admissions process

Do you ever get the feeling that there's something going on that we don't know about?
Timothy Fenwick, Jr. in Diner

1 comment:

ChemProf said...

Here are a couple of useful resources.

You can find college profiles at about.com. A few are here:
http://collegeapps.about.com/od/collegeprofiles/p/Caltech_Profile.htm
http://collegeapps.about.com/od/collegeprofiles/p/oberlin.htm

Look in particular at the 75/25 percentile SAT scores. You see that, sure enough, CalTech has higher math scores than reading or writing (in fact, the top 25% at least of the class has 800 math SATs), but that most of their students are over 700 in all three. At Oberlin, on the other hand, the critical reading score at 75% is only 740, and the 25% math SAT is 630. So it makes sense that they'd be interested in C -- his reading score is high for Oberlin and the math is only a little low. His scores might not be high enough for merit aid, though, depending on his GPA.

Another resource, also from Oberlin, is this blog by one of their admissions people. This article is on how they recalculate GPA, but there are other discussions there as well. This is for public consumption, of course, but might still be interesting.
http://blogs.oberlin.edu/applying/selection_process/whats_in_a_gpa.shtml