I ran across this post at MedSchoolRocks. The post is a general introduction to the MCATs and is very helpful. The site, too, is a good introduction to the process of applying to med school. It’s worth a look.
Mark Montgomery
Montgomery Educational Consulting
Graduate School Admissions Advice
Technorati Tags: MCAT, medical school, admission
The July/August issue of the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine contains an article about Karl Furstenberg. The retiring Dean of Admissions at Dartmouth. It’s an interesting look at his 17 years of experience as the gatekeeper of one of the nation’s top undergraduate schools.
[Full disclosure: I’m an alumnus. My classmate, Maria Laskaris, has taken over from Furstenberg as the new Dean of Admissions. And Jacques Steinberg, member of the Class of ’88 and author of The Gatekeepers (which is an insider’s view of the admissions process at Wesleyan) wrote this interview with Furstenberg.]
During his tenure, Furstenberg saw applications to Dartmouth rise by 80%: from 7,900 to over 14,000. Steinberg asked him how his staff has grown in that time to meet the challenges of such a huge increase in applications.
The staff is virtually the same size today as it was 17 years ago. Which is kind of staggering. We’ve made up for that with the use of technology and the inclusion of faculty and alumni who work in partnership with us to recruit students. What has changed over time is the speed with which we have to read. As much as we try to make it personal, to read 14,000 applications–with 15 admissions officers–is a challenge. We try to be as thoughtful and fair-minded as we can be.
Two points here. First is about the use of technology. Numbers matter. Test scores. GPA. Class rank. Dartmouth crunches these numbers through an algorithm to see whether your application passes muster. If the resulting number is not high enough, your application won’t be read very thoroughly, if at all. If you’re a legacy, an athlete, or a minority, you might get passed through if your scores are lower than the usual cut-off, but no guarantee of that, either. While the numbers may not tell the admissions officers the whole story. In this very “deep pool,” your scores must begin to pull you from those depths so you can rise to the surface.
Second, with so many applications, the admissions officers get pretty bored reading them. Another essay about grandparents and another prep school kid. Another who swears Dartmouth is her first choice. The all look the same. Unless your application really sings. It has to hook the officer. It has to ignite some interest in you as a person. The essay must be original. Something has to get the officer to wake up from his stupor and say, “hey, this kid is interesting and unusual…let’s give him another look.”
The competition for Ivy League admission is fierce. The pool, indeed, is very deep. And what with the Common Application, demographic bubbles, and savvy college counselors, the pool will only get deeper.
Mark Montgomery
Montgomery Educational Consulting
Dartmouth Alumnus
This week’s Carnival of Education is a cavalcade of information about the Edusphere. You can find it here, hosted by the Education Wonks.
My favorite articles for this week include:
Alan Gottlieb’s post on helicopter parents (Alan is a fellow Denverite and mover and shaker at the Rose Foundation and the editor of Head First Colorado).
A post by My Wealth Builder about the colleges that put students into hock the most (can you believe that University of Massachusetts at Amherst is in the top 5? A public institution? And my wife’s alma mater? Wow.)
A post by one of my favorite bloggers, Matthew K. Tabor, about edublogging in general.
Check out the Carnival. It’s a whee of a time.
Mark Montgomery
Montgomery Educational Consulting
EduBlogger
Jay Mathews of the Washington Post has an article today about the College Board’s audit of AP courses across the nation. You can find the article here.
The article focuses on the fact that some veteran AP teachers’ syllabi have been rejected by the College Board, despite these teachers’ stellar success in preparing their students to ace the exams. In some cases, even teachers who have been tapped by the College Board to train new AP teachers were told their courses were inadequate.
The article makes good copy, and points out to glitches in the College Board’s audit. But the audit makes sense, from two perspectives.
First, the rapid expansion of the AP program across the country has led to uneven delivery of those courses. Part of the problem is that some AP teachers simply do not have the content background to successfully prepare students for the rigors of the AP exam. A course can be labeled “AP”, but that does not mean that the quality is necessarily going to be excellent.
Therefore parents and students should be advised to dig beneath the label. Ask teachers and administrators about the teacher’s track record in helping students get passing grades on the exams.
What’s the pass rate? What percentage of the students get a 5, or a 4, as opposed to a mere 3 (the passing threshold)? What specialized training has the teacher received from the College Board?
Second, colleges have been worried about the AP program digging into their budgets. As more students take the AP exams and pass, more students are receiving college credit and advanced standing at colleges and universities. While admissions offices are eager to have more AP students in their matriculating classes, department chairs may feel a pinch as few students enroll in their entry level courses. And college professors are skeptical that high school teachers can do as well as they can (after all, those professors have doctorates and fancy titles–never mind that they have never–ever–taken a course in pedagogy or instructional methodology).
So the AP audit engineered by the College Board is meant to prove to the skeptics that the AP courses really are quality, college-level courses.
And that’s where the glitches reported by Jay Mathews today come into play: the professors don’t know about a particular teacher’s pass rate, or the fact that they have been tapped by the College Board to train other teachers. All they see is the syllabus. So goofy outcomes are likely.
Some AP teachers complain that their college professor auditors are not only ignorant of the teaching records of the people they are auditing but are alarmingly inconsistent in their judgments. Patrick Welsh, an AP English teacher at T.C. Williams who has been recruited many times by the College Board to grade AP exams, called it a “bureaucratic mess.” He said he and three other teachers submitted identical syllabuses for an AP English Literature course they are teaching this year. One syllabus was accepted. The other three, including his, were rejected. When three teachers in Fairfax submitted the same syllabus, one was accepted, one rejected with three suggested revisions and one rejected with eight suggested revisions.
My take is that AP courses, when taught by well-trained, content-oriented teachers, can be much better than introductory college courses taught by inexperienced college professors with a bevy of graduate student assistants. Though my colleagues in the professoriate would call me a traitor, I have found that some high school teachers are more knowledgeable about a broader range of content than their peers in academia. And they are often much better teachers.
Add to these observations that high school teachers may see their students every day for an entire year, while college instructors may see their students (all 200 or 300 of them in an introductory course) once or twice a week for a mere 15 weeks.
I think the AP audit is a good thing. Of course it is leading to some anomalous results–which the College Board and the affected teacher are swift to correct. Generally, however, it will lead to better uniformity in the way these courses are delivered from school to school, and it will do a lot to calm the skeptics that a 5 on the AP exam is an indication that the student really has learned something.
An article the other day on MSNBC asked the above question.
The answer? Hard to know. Depends on how Congress reforms the industry through oversight and legislation.
Here’s an excerpt:
Congress is also proposing significant changes in the way the $85 billion market for student loans is subsidized and guaranteed. The House and Senate have enacted separate bills with some common ground, but it remains to be seen just how the final law will impact the cost of a student loan.
Both bills would ease the burden on student by placing limits monthly payments based on income; once out of school, graduates would have to pay no more than 15 percent of their income each month. All debt would be canceled after 25 years. And more loans would be “forgiven†for graduates who take public-service jobs like teachers, nurses, police and firefighters.
The bills also both call for cutbacks in subsidies for lenders that participate in government-backed loan programs. By shaving roughly a half-percentage point from those subsidies, Congress is hoping save as much as $19 billion a year. The government would also require lenders to cover more of the losses from defaulted loans — the House and Senate bills differ on just how much more.
At issue is how and where those savings are diverted. The House bill would slash the rate on need-based loans in half — from the current 6.8 percent to 3.4 percent — and provide additional money for so-called Pell grants, a program that currently pays up to $4,010 a year in direct aid to low-income students. The Senate bill doesn’t include a rate cut, but is more generous with increases in Pell grants.
No matter what Congress does, three things will remain constant:
Mark Montgomery
Montgomery Educational Consulting
Technorati Tags:
financial aid, student loans, educational consultant, MSNBC
Del.icio.us Tags:
financial aid, student loans, educational consultant, MSNBC
The headline of an MSNBC article last week screams, “Typo On Your College Application May Get You In.” The insinuation is that if you make some mistakes on the application you look more human and less like an automaton.
But the real point of this article is on the essay: demonstrating some humility, a bit of human frailty, or a dose of self-awareness is likely to lead to a more informative essay than one that shouts out your accomplishments, your invincibility, and your ability to overcome anything life might throw at you.
Super-heroes are out. Real people are in.
Literally.
Here’s an excerpt from the article:
In an age when applicants all seem to have volunteered, played sports and traveled abroad, colleges are wary of slick packaging. They’re drawn to high grades and test scores, of course, but also to humility and to students who really got something out of their experiences, not just those trying to impress colleges with their resume.
The trend seemingly should make life easier for students — by reducing the pressure to puff up their credentials. But that’s not always the case.
For some students, the challenge of presenting themselves as full, flawed people cuts against everything else they’ve been told about applying to college — to show off as much as possible.
My advice to students is to not pretend. To be themselves. Not to be afraid to demonstrate their humanity.
I also make clear that the essay is theirs: I won’t write it for them. Of course I provide pointers and ideas for restructuring, and clarifying points. But I try not to put ideas into their heads or words into their mouths. As a professor, I taught college students for years how to write term papers, how to construct an elegant paragraph, how to develop the trickle of an idea into a gushing torrent of insight. It’s something that I enjoy, and frankly I’m pretty good at it.
My aim is to guide from the side, provide counsel, and set the course. The navigation of the essay is up to the student.
Mark Montgomery
Montgomery Educational Consulting
“Mapping College Journeys”
Technorati Tags:
college admission, college essay, MSNBC, authenticity, writing, educational consultant
Del.icio.us Tags:
college admission, college essay, MSNBC, authenticity, writing, educational consultant
The College Board reports that 2007 average scores on the SAT I exams dipped slightly, bringing them to the lowest level in 13 years. That’s the bad news.
The good news is that a large part of the reason for this decline is the increase in the number of test takers, including some students who never considered themselves college-bound.
Here’s an excerpt from the New York Times article explaining what happened:
The declines for the class of 2007 were not caused by a single factor, College Board officials said. But the increase in the number of traditionally underrepresented minority and low-income students taking the test played a role, they said. So did a new requirement in Maine that all high school seniors take the exam, including those who would not in the past have viewed themselves as college bound.
Gaston Caperton, the president of the College Board, said in a news conference, “The larger the population you get that takes the exam, it obviously knocks down the scores.â€
Wayne Camara, vice president for research and analysis at the College Board, described the declines from 2006 to 2007 as statistically insignificant.
The officials trumpeted the size of the group that took the SAT — nearly 1.5 million seniors — and the expanded diversity of the test-takers. Hispanic, black and Asian-American students accounted for 39 percent of the seniors who took the test, representing the largest proportion of minority test-takers since the SAT was introduced in 1926. In all, 35 percent of those taking the exam would be the first in their family to attend college.
So that’s the good news.
The bad news is that with more students taking the SAT, the tougher the competition will be for those kids in the middle of the pack to land spots in some colleges. With the number of admissions slots relatively finite, a greater number of applicants means greater competition for those slots.
The fact that more kids are taking the SAT won’t affect the competition at the higher end of the scale at the more selective colleges. But the further down the selectivity curve, the greater the competition for college admission may become.
So demographics and a greater emphasis on creating a college-going culture in many public schools may put actually be bad news for some kids.
Mark Montgomery
Montgomery Educational Consulting
Technorati Tags:
college admission, SAT, College Board, educational consultant
Del.icio.us Tags:
college admission, SAT, College Board, educational consultant
The Today Show reported last April that college admissions offices are rejecting applications in record numbers. The piece does a good job of demonstrating how a colleges, students, and demographic changes are combining to create a “perfect storm” for high school seniors.
Need help navigating in a storm? Consider hiring an expert to help.
Mark Montgomery
Montgomery Educational Consulting
Technorati Tags:
college admission, educational consultant, rejection letters, Today Show
Del.icio.us Tags:
college admission, educational consultant, rejection letters, Today Show
I found this great video today. It’s well-done and right on target.
One tip I’d add is, “don’t do this all by yourself.” Whether it’s your family, parents, teachers–and even friends–you cannot ever get enough help.
Mark Montgomery
Montgomery Educational Consultant and Professional Helper
Last night I was researching colleges for one of my clients and had a look at High Point University in High Point, NC. I previously knew nothing about.
The website is impressive. It was clearly constructed by masters of marketing and public relations. The president, Nido Qubein, is a fantastic businessman and public speaker, and he clearly is a motivator and visionary. And undoubtedly his leadership is having an impact: new classroom buildings, new schools, new residence halls, and impeccable grounds.
But what struck me most is that this university has learned that marketing and PR make a huge difference. The school has a “Director of Wow.” I’m not kidding. This person’s job is to make everyone on campus feel great, take pride in the school and its people, and generally make people happy. (Perhaps he worked for Disney World before coming to HPU?).
This link will take you to a page of videos produced by the university. The first one, “Prepare to be WOWed,” is a good example of masterful marketing. It’s professional, the messages are clear, and the viewer comes away with a feeling that High Point is perhaps the most wonderful college on earth.
Have a look.
Impressive, right?
But think about it. Just because a college is great at marketing does not mean it is a great college. The video says almost nothing about academics, about professional placement, about the kind of kids who go there, about its athletics, extracurriculars, learning centers, or just about anything really useful for a college-bound student to know.
The video sells a feeling. A sentiment. An idea that you will be loved. That you will be nurtured. That you will be pampered, even.
While it’s true that every college does have a personality, and in a sense, each is trying to sell that “feeling” of love for one’s school, this glitzy marketing video–and other techniques used on the website–do not convince me that High Point University will be a good fit for every student. Nor does it convince me that there is substance underneath the veneer of good feelings.
To be clear, I’m not knocking HPU. I’m still learning about it, and it may be a great place for certain kinds of students who want a certain kind of educational atmosphere and educational programming.
And I’m not even knocking the fact that colleges and universities are becoming better at marketing themselves. They are taking lessons from Nido Qubein and other masterful marketers as they sell their services. And why not? Like any other business or service provider, institutions of higher ed need to convince consumers that they are worthy of your educational dollar.
But caveat emptor: buyer beware. videos like this–and many others that colleges are now creating to help sell their services–should be viewed with caution and a dose of skepticism. Don’t be snowed by the glitz and glamour. Remind yourself that they are selling, and that you must do some due diligence before letting yourself be hooked. Dig beneath the marketing veneer.
For example, what are faculty saying about the quality of education at HPU? What do they say about the quality of the students, the learning atmosphere, the value of the education that is provided? What do the data tell us?
In order to decide whether the school is right for a particular student, we need to look beyond the feel-good videos. We need to dig into the data, talk to students (ones that are not managed by the admissions office!), and to faculty. This sort of research takes time and effort, but it’s well worth it if you plan to invest tens of thousands (or hundreds of thousands) of dollars into an institution.
Fortunately there are professionals out there who can help you find the right fit.
Mark Montgomery
Montgomery Educational Consultant and Healthy Skeptic
Technorati Tags:
educational consulting, college admission, marketing, Nido Qubein, High Point University
Del.icio.us Tags:
educational consulting, college admission, marketing, Nido Qubein, High Point University
