Yes — if it's taken somewhere specific. One of our students loved tinkering with cars. He didn't join a club about it; he used his side job at an auto shop to start teaching underprivileged kids mechanical work, then partnered with the shop to make it an official summer class. Four of his students got real jobs. That became the backbone of his application, and he turned down Georgia Tech and Carnegie Mellon for a full ride at Purdue.
Read the full answer →By looking for people outside the family who can vouch for it, and for numbers that would be awkward to invent. Anyone can write "founded a nonprofit" or "built an app" on an application, so those phrases stopped carrying weight on their own. What still carries weight is an outside partner, users or participants who aren't friends and relatives, a countable outcome, and a teacher or mentor who names the project in a recommendation letter.
Read the full answer →By treating the sport as the central thesis of the application rather than one line on the activities list, and by getting the test score finished before recruiting conversations get serious. A coach advocating for a recruit still needs that recruit to be academically clearable, so the score is what turns interest into an offer. Ryder finished his ACT at a 33 in the fall of junior year and is committed to Johns Hopkins.
Read the full answer →At the selective end, yes. Harvard announced a return to required testing in April 2024, following Yale, Dartmouth, Brown, MIT, Georgetown, and UT Austin, and the rest of the market has been following the same direction since. The schools' stated reason is that a test score is the one credential that reads the same coming out of any high school, which is why it helps identify strong students at under-resourced ones. If your student is applying anywhere selective, plan on submitting a score.
Read the full answer →For most juniors, the ACT, and it isn't close on a per-hour basis. A GPA is the product of four years and can only be nudged in any single semester. An ACT score can move several points in two or three months at roughly an hour a day, it can offset an uneven transcript, and it's the number that unlocks merit money. Grades still have to clear the bar. They just rarely deserve the marginal hour once they do.
Read the full answer →Four things, and they aren't weighted equally. A unique mechanism, meaning one specific pursuit taken further than peers take it. Foundational grades that clear the bar rather than lead the class. Essays that read like a person instead of a résumé. And a test score, which is the fastest of the four to move. The first is what separates similar applicants; the other three are what get a student into the pile where that separation happens.
Read the full answer →For one of our students, it looked like this: ACT prep in September of junior year, a 24 to a 33 in ten weeks during football season, and then a recruiting picture that changed overnight — college coaches showing up with real interest, offers from multiple top academic schools including the University of Chicago, and a commitment to play football and baseball at Johns Hopkins. The score came first, and the recruiting followed it.
Read the full answer →They get the most valuable thing in the admissions calendar: junior spring and summer with nothing to cram. One of our students finished at a 34 in December of junior year, then spent the freed-up months turning his chess hobby into a channel with 25,000+ followers. That project became the spine of his application. He was admitted to Dartmouth and Columbia, offered a full ride at Emory, and chose Dartmouth.
Read the full answer →It's the one thing about a student that a reader couldn't find in the next thousand applications. Not a well-rounded profile and not a longer activity list, but a single specific pursuit taken further than peers take it. An admissions officer choosing 2,000 files out of 50,000 is looking for the applications that are different in a nameable way, and a unique mechanism is what makes an application interesting enough to finish reading.
Read the full answer →Avoid the lesson learned from playing a sport, the pet that died, the service trip abroad, struggling to fit in, and what a hard class taught them. Also avoid restating the activities list in paragraph form, since the reader already has that page. These topics fail because thousands of applicants pick them every year, so the essay stops being about your student and becomes a category the reader has already read forty times that week.
Read the full answer →Because at selective schools the academic stats are the filter, not the decision. Thousands of applicants clear the same bar, so the transcript and the test score get a student considered rather than admitted. What separates the accepted pile from the rejected one is whether the application shows a specific person doing something specific. I had perfect grades and a 36 on the ACT and was rejected everywhere I applied early action, for exactly that reason.
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