I’m not sure, I just think that it’s overall quite likely. Admissions is probabilistic, in that you never know who you’re admitting given so little information, so you just want to admit those applicants who seem most likely to be successful students. It’s understood that not everyone who lacks a high school diploma with a bunch of A’s on it is going to be unsuccessful, nor is everyone with such credentials going to do well.
But suppose you were getting many more applications than you had time to read thoroughly, and further that reading and evaluating applications is a utterly miserable task. You’d probably come up with a way to weed out all those applications that are very unlikely to be worthwhile without really reading them. If you had to come up with a criteria for weeding people out, given high school GPAs, SAT scores, essays, cover letters, etc. what would you do?
Well, you can’t quickly process essays or letters. What you can do is put all the GPA scores and all the SAT scores on a spreadsheet, weight them however you like, and slash however many off the bottom so that you end up with a manageable number of applications and then read those. Most people with a just a GED or a bad GPA or a low SAT score are going to end up by the wayside. It’s a stupid, prejudicial way to handle any one application, but it makes sense as a way to deal with thousands.
This isn’t how everyone does it. But this is how a lot of places do it. And the more applications a school gets, the more likely it’ll employ such a method. And good schools get a lot of applications.
I’m not sure, I just think that it’s overall quite likely. Admissions is probabilistic, in that you never know who you’re admitting given so little information, so you just want to admit those applicants who seem most likely to be successful students. It’s understood that not everyone who lacks a high school diploma with a bunch of A’s on it is going to be unsuccessful, nor is everyone with such credentials going to do well.
But suppose you were getting many more applications than you had time to read thoroughly, and further that reading and evaluating applications is a utterly miserable task. You’d probably come up with a way to weed out all those applications that are very unlikely to be worthwhile without really reading them. If you had to come up with a criteria for weeding people out, given high school GPAs, SAT scores, essays, cover letters, etc. what would you do?
Well, you can’t quickly process essays or letters. What you can do is put all the GPA scores and all the SAT scores on a spreadsheet, weight them however you like, and slash however many off the bottom so that you end up with a manageable number of applications and then read those. Most people with a just a GED or a bad GPA or a low SAT score are going to end up by the wayside. It’s a stupid, prejudicial way to handle any one application, but it makes sense as a way to deal with thousands.
This isn’t how everyone does it. But this is how a lot of places do it. And the more applications a school gets, the more likely it’ll employ such a method. And good schools get a lot of applications.