It’s Time for Overheard in Committee

We Admit It! Committee is off and rolling.  We’ve reviewed some great applications, had some wonderfully thoughtful discussions and eaten our way through some fruit snacks, cookies, cupcakes, M&Ms (given the ampersand in the name it’s always a go to for the W&M team that brought you the ampersandbox), Pop Tarts and animal crackers.  But we digress (as we always do when we look at the snack cart).  This blog is all about those wonderfully thoughtful discussions.  So let us get right to it with the first Overheard in Committee blog of the 2015 Regular Decision deliberations.

Overheard in Committee: But man. Compare her SAT to the school’s average. It’s impressive.

We were reviewing the application of a student whose SAT score was okay (within our middle 50% range but on the lower end), but it certainly wasn’t as competitive as many other students we had already discussed.  As we do with every application, we put the information we glean from an application into context.  Most high school profiles will provide information on the school’s average SAT and ACT scores.  This can help us get a sense of what the college-going culture is like at that school, and what if any preparation or guidance may (or may not) be available to students when it comes to standardized testing.  When we combined that information (the fact that her score was nearly 400 points above her school’s average) with some other contextual information (first-generation college student status in this particular case) we were better able to evaluate her standardized testing results.

As we’ve mentioned numerous times, in various blogs, context is critical to the work that we do.  No applicant is merely a transcript, a test score and a resume.  Their background and life experiences help to shape that transcript, test score and resume.  And it’s those backgrounds and life experiences that really impact the class we are trying to build.  We know that standardized testing in particular is an angst-y part of the college application process.  And while SAT and ACT scores can make you a more or less competitive applicant (just like any other component of the application), they are reviewed in context, not as stand-alone numbers.

So after 1.5 days away from Committee (thanks to Snow-mageddon here in Southeast Virginia) we need to get back to it.  Stay tuned.  More peeks behind the curtain to come.

Wendy Livingston ’03, M.Ed. ‘09
Associate Dean of Admission

Categories: Admission, Faculty & Staff Blogs Tags: ,
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