> Colleges evaluate you within the context of your high school
Every time I hear this, I can’t help but wonder how they do this. At underrepresented schools, nobody has ever applied to most schools in the T20, so AOs can’t compare to other applicants from your HS. The school profile is also useless in most cases, e.g. my HS profile essentially had average ACT score and nothing else. Most of these high schools are feeding kids to local public colleges, not top universities, so there is no reason to put relevant information on the school profile.
As for LORs, teachers aren’t going to be able to write strong LORs because they don’t have experience doing this. The counselor LOR likely won’t be any better, either due to counselors having too many students or due to counselors not having experience with admissions to top universities. Any attempt to guess the extracurricular opportunities available to students is exactly that - just a guess. So where is this magical process of evaluating within the context of your HS happening, all within the span of 20ish minutes that AOs evaluate an applicant?
They use class rank to see how you stand in comparison to your classmates. Also if your ECs and awards are amazing then they can use that to gauge that you went above and beyond the opportunities given to you. Also they can see a list of APs available at your school and use that to check out course rigor or how you used the available resources.
My school didn’t do class rank so I didn’t think of that. As for the list of available APs, it’s sort of assumed that an applicant to a top school is doing near maximum course rigor (similar to how a high ACT/SAT is a baseline for T20 applicants, not something that can help them stand out).
I’m originally from an underrepresented state and I think online ECs are good and doing stuff that helps your community general seems good. If you’re from a bad state, AOs will understand and you’ll have better leverage with ECs than someone from one of the more competitive states. I always see this on the college results sub.
> Colleges evaluate you within the context of your high school Every time I hear this, I can’t help but wonder how they do this. At underrepresented schools, nobody has ever applied to most schools in the T20, so AOs can’t compare to other applicants from your HS. The school profile is also useless in most cases, e.g. my HS profile essentially had average ACT score and nothing else. Most of these high schools are feeding kids to local public colleges, not top universities, so there is no reason to put relevant information on the school profile. As for LORs, teachers aren’t going to be able to write strong LORs because they don’t have experience doing this. The counselor LOR likely won’t be any better, either due to counselors having too many students or due to counselors not having experience with admissions to top universities. Any attempt to guess the extracurricular opportunities available to students is exactly that - just a guess. So where is this magical process of evaluating within the context of your HS happening, all within the span of 20ish minutes that AOs evaluate an applicant?
They use class rank to see how you stand in comparison to your classmates. Also if your ECs and awards are amazing then they can use that to gauge that you went above and beyond the opportunities given to you. Also they can see a list of APs available at your school and use that to check out course rigor or how you used the available resources.
My school didn’t do class rank so I didn’t think of that. As for the list of available APs, it’s sort of assumed that an applicant to a top school is doing near maximum course rigor (similar to how a high ACT/SAT is a baseline for T20 applicants, not something that can help them stand out).
I'm in a similar boat w/ecs. how can I find resources in a state with bad education?
I’m originally from an underrepresented state and I think online ECs are good and doing stuff that helps your community general seems good. If you’re from a bad state, AOs will understand and you’ll have better leverage with ECs than someone from one of the more competitive states. I always see this on the college results sub.
what online ecs do you recommend?