Good news: Some colleges (Boston College, Brown, Catholic, and a bunch more) do indeed superscore (combine a student’s highest scores on) the ACT. [College Admissions Partners]
Baddish news: Princeton fraternities are as awful as you would probably expect. [IvyGate]
Medium news: 1 in 3 of you will switch colleges. And there’s a podcast about it. [The Choice]
A panel of admissions nabobs from Wesleyan, Penn, Marquette, Princeton, Bryn Mawr, Grinnell, UVM, and Williams appeared last week in a movie-length Internet broadcast, via WSJ and Unigo, worth watching in its entirety. (Part I, however, is missing.) Highlights include stuff about the “backyard” advantage of local applicants, renegotiating aid offers, whether admissions officers look at Facebook pages (yes, of reported cyberbullies), resumes (they “hate” them), preparing for admissions as early as middle school (“I don’t want a seventh or eighth grader to think, ‘this is what they want,’ and have it drive the next six years”), and humor on the essay (redacted: “If you’re funny, be funny. If you’re not funny, don’t try it. Be very authentic.”)
Oh, yeah, and if you strangle your personality and stomp on your passions so you can become some sanitized (and probably inaccurate) image of the perfect applicant, says one dean:
“That’s going to lead you down a bad path. Because you’re going to get to an institution that isn’t…the right place for you.”
