In December 2021, when Rachel Lee opened her acceptance letter to Harvard University through an online portal, she was greeted with "Congratulation!" in bold text.
Along with the joy, she immediately wondered, "Why me?" and why she stood out from thousands of applicants.
It wasn't until she stepped onto the Harvard campus in Boston, a freshman year of college, that she found the answer to her question.
This is made possible by the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) bill. Beginning in 2015, some universities, such as Harvard, Yale, Pennsylvania, and Stanford, opened their admissions profiles to students as required by the Act.
First-year students can apply to the University Admissions Office to view the admissions file at that time, which will record how the admissions officer evaluates them and marks them.
For a long time, the admissions process at American universities has been shrouded in layers of mystery, and this initiative has opened up a corner for everyone.
The "black box" behind admissions
It is worth pointing out that each university gives students different dimensions and criteria.
Taking Harvard as an example, we can see in detail the scoring dimensions of Harvard from the article by Khoi Nguyen, another Harvard student.
Harvard evaluates applicants based on four criteria: academic, extracurricular, athletic, personal (traits), each of which is scored on a scale of 1 to 6. A score of 1 is the best and a score of 6 is the worst.
Let's talk about them one by one.
Academic: It measures academic strength by assessing an applicant's grades, difficulty in taking classes, and standardized test scores.
Khoi Nguyen said he took 14 AP courses outside of school and earned a 5.086 that exceeded the highest GPA allowed by his county. Even so, Nguyen said he was ranked third in his high school class.
In addition, because he couldn't get a score on the SAT, he scored 35 on the ACT after discovering that he was better suited for the ACT.
Finally, in the academic column, Khoi Nguyen received 2+.
Focus: Good grades are the basic threshold for entering Harvard.
Extracurricular: In this column, admissions officers are interested in the student's dedication and leadership to the event and how these experiences have shaped you.
A score of 1 usually indicates that the applicant has national or other truly unusual achievements, and 2 indicates that the applicant has made significant contributions to the high school in one or more areas, such as serving as class president or receiving recognition and awards for extracurricular achievements in the local community.
Khoi Nguyen also did a great job in this part, and was also on television and seen by Harvard admissions officers. In the end, Khoi Nguyen scored two points.
Pictured here is an event done by Khoi Nguyen, who said Harvard wants people who want to change the world.
Athletic: As the name suggests, this column examines the applicant's athletic achievements. A score of 1 is often reserved for Olympic athletes, and a score of 2 indicates a strong contribution to the varsity athletic team in high school.
The sports section is very interesting, and other universities don't list sports separately for scoring, such as Yale, which classifies sports as extracurricular activities.
Danu, a student, said Harvard's admissions file is filled with all sorts of hard-to-decipher symbols.
Many Harvard students complained on the Internet that they knew almost nothing about sports, thinking that they would get the lowest score, but they didn't expect Harvard to show mercy and give themselves a middle score.
Khoi Nguyen said he wasn't a sports star and he scored 4 points in the end.
Personal Evaluation: In this section, admissions officers will look at the student's qualities, personality, etc., and essays, letters of recommendation, and interviews are all important criteria for scoring.
In this column, Khoi Nguyen got 2 points.
Khoi Nguyen said that his dissertation wrote about how his mother's indomitable spirit influenced and shaped him.
In the end, all the scores were added up, and Khoi Nguyen said he scored 2 points and was accepted to Harvard in the EA round.
YouTube blogger College Lead is a homeschooler, and four years ago, she shared her Harvard admissions profile, which attracted a lot of onlookers and was well worth a look.
In fact, on YouTube and Reddit, there are many students who go ashore to "show up" and talk about their admission experience, which will give us some reference and grasp more or less than "blind people touching elephants" in dark rooms.
Yale, Stanford... We're different
Just last month, Yale junior Brian Zhang "revealed" his admissions file to the public.
Brian Zhang said that on the admissions file, he can not only see his specific score, but he can also see in detail how admissions officers evaluate him.
"I was in tears when I read Essay 1," said one admissions officer, of Brian Zhang's essay.
As Brian Zhang continued to read, he found more comments that touched him as well:
"He was very nice to his mother"; He does seem to have a good heart"; One of the brightest, most sincere, and happiest students ever"; I have no doubt that Brian will push his Yale classmates to stand up for justice"; I am left with a convincing impression that this student will make a significant contribution to the undergraduate community"; The GPA is excellent, especially since he's in such a difficult environment. ”
Brian Zhang has an overall rating of 2++. (Yale is scored on a scale of 1 to 4, with 1 being the highest grade and the plus sign being extra points.) ）
Although Brian Zhang did not show us the specific score of Yale, we can get an idea of the approximate grading dimensions of Yale from the sharing of other students.
Specifically, the first page of the Yale profile records a student's gender, major, class rank, class size, GPA, curriculum (e.g., IB or A-level), four-year college enrollment at the student's high school, and the percentage of students who have free or reduced lunches.
According to Yale student Molly, Yale usually has two "scorers", who will score from extracurricular activities, letters of recommendation from two teachers, letters of recommendation from counselors, essays, alumni interviews, and other dimensions.
As an art student, Molly shared her admission file with everyone on YouTube, and it can be said that she shared it in great detail.
Some students said that Yale values letters of recommendation more than many other universities, so it is especially important to be knocked on the door of Yale and be highly praised by the teachers who are on the school.
Let's take a look at Stanford.
There are five dimensions to Stanford's scoring: test scores (SAT/ACT, language scores, etc.), high school grades, external support (in this case, letters of recommendation), extracurricular activities, and personal traits (usually self-presentation/intellectual vitality, which are also examined in the essay dimension). ）
A Stanford student showed how the judges had given him, on a scale of 1-6, with 1 being the best.
Penn's scoring dimensions are divided into four areas (see the figure below for details). Among them, the first dimension, Match and Alignment, is more interesting, which basically refers to the fit between the student and Penn.
We can see that the admissions "rules" of every American university are different. This is easy to understand, because each university has a different culture and educational philosophy, so the students they want to recruit will also have different inclinations.
The enlightenment to us is that students should fully do the school's research before applying for the school, know themselves and know the other, in order to have a target, otherwise, if they participate in the "involution" on the wrong road, there is a high probability that they will "empty the bamboo basket." ”
Just like the Shanghai student who participated in our live broadcast a few days ago, he learned through research that over the years, Brown University has only tended to recruit children from first-tier cities in Beijing and Shanghai in Chinese mainland. In the Early Wheel, the boy was admitted to Brown. The boy said that college applications were worse than information.
"Ambiguous" American universities
But not every university has made the "black box" public.
For example, at Columbia, according to Jessica Marinaccio, director of undergraduate admissions at Columbia, "we remove these grading forms before students enroll so that students can start over when they start college." ”
Other well-known universities, such as MIT and Princeton, also do not disclose the file database to students, the latter citing that "this is the applicant's highly sensitive data", that is, the non-disclosure is to protect the privacy of students.
But this may be just a one-sided rhetoric for universities.
In an article titled "Princeton University Is Trying to Prevent Its Admissions Records from Being Made Public," the author exposes the secret of Princeton's reluctance to make the "black box" public.
"Because these admissions data have the potential to expose the less politically correct admissions tendencies of the Ivy League, such as prioritizing the children of alumni and celebrities. ”
All in all, each university's attitude towards the openness of archival databases, and the extent to which they are open, is different.
Today, on Reddit, on YouTube, and on many Buzzfeed articles, you can see students recording and sharing first-person perspectives.
Although college applications are very personal things, and the successful application experience of others may not be fully applicable to oneself, if you compare the U.S. application to the process of landing in a vast lake, these records and sharing will be like duckweed in the wind and waves.
Duckweed won't let us go straight to the other side, but it will give us guidance.
ref：
1、Students, administrators weigh merits of viewing admissions files
2、College admissions file can be accessed to find out how your university rated youege Admissions and FERPA Requests
4、Want to see your admissions records at Columbia? Sorry!
5、 The how and why behind requesting access to your Penn admissions file
6、I looked at my admissions file, here’s what I saw
7、I reviewed my Yale admissions file to see what the Ivy League school really thought about my application. What I learned surprised me.
8、https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1xHR-r9GiPM
9、https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxqucFKHdQw
10、Princeton is scrambling to block its admissions records from being released
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